Consulting with the Oracle

Ronan Miles reports on the recent activities of the UK Oracle User Group

Miles: This year UKOUG has focused on partner needs

This year the UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG) has focused on resellers. We have recently conducted the annual 2009 Oracle Customer Survey, which helps highlight and feedback issues concerning Oracle's products and services.

We have also established a partner forum which gives partner members – from ISVs, VARs and SIs to consultancies – the opportunity to meet three times a year to network and share ideas on how membership supports their business.

One of the biggest opportunities and challenges that we will face moving into 2010 will be the inclusion of Sun within the UKOUG remit. Not only will this bring a huge online community based around Java, but will also bring us members who work with ‘real things’ rather than intangible software.

Owning hardware has a completely different life cycle to owning software and there will be new needs and demands for us to support.

We are also designing the next series of conferences for 2010 along with a raft of new investments which we hope will help our members to interact better as a community.

For example, we are creating a prototype for the online delivery of our well-established SIG events, which we aim to roll out for 2010, allowing our members to participate even if they are unable to attend in person.

We are on LinkedIn and Twitter channels, with another new web offering to be launched early in 2010.

This year saw Europe’s largest ever series of independent Oracle-related events. Reviewing feedback from our members on how best to serve their growing needs, we decided to replace our generalist annual conference with a series of specialist events focusing on key product streams.

A series of region specific conferences were held in Ireland and Scotland, as well as community specific events for PeopleSoft, Hyperion and Siebel.

All of these were received well. As a result, we are continuing the UKOUG Conference Series format in 2010. Also, look out for announcements by UKOUG and Oracle later this year about the publication of the 2009 Oracle Customer Survey results.

UKOUG was established as an independent, not-for-profit membership organisation to support Oracle users and partners more than 25 years ago. It boasts around 15,000 members and promotes various events around Oracle user networking, sharing knowledge, and interacting with key opinion formers and industry leaders.

Ronan Miles is chairman of the UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG)