Thank you Tom and Peter.
As Tom and Peter said, this is our 12th
year as an organization, our 24th North American conference. However
we also run European and Asian conferences, and when we add those in, this is
the 30th independent conference held by the Oracle Applications
Users Group. That’s another landmark
for the OAUG, and I would like to thank all of our members, the SIGs, the GEOs,
our presenters, exhibitors, sponsors and vendors for their years of
participation and loyalty to our independent organisation.
And of course I would like to thank all
of you for being here in San Diego
with us. I think that we should all be proud that despite the recent tragedy of
September 11th and the postponement of our conference, an impressive
number of our members made the extra effort to rearrange their busy schedules
to make it here today. We’re getting
back to normal, and this will truly be business as usual for the OAUG with
another, great independent conference.
I am also very proud to be serving as
President of the OAUG for the third year, and grateful for the support and
confidence that OAUG members have shown in me. We are all volunteers in our
OAUG activities, and while that sometimes provides an additional workload to an
already busy schedule, it is a great honour, and a great satisfaction, to be
part of such a vibrant organisation as the OAUG. That’s why for our Board
election this year we have 32 candidates for the 9 board places that are up for
re election. All of the candidates are excellent, and I would encourage anyone
who has not yet done so to register their vote by the end of this week when
voting closes. Make your contribution to the future direction of YOUR Users
Group by helping to select our Board.
In the Fall we also honour a very
special volunteer, one who through their efforts has made a special
contribution to the OAUG for the benefit of its members, and has been nominated
and selected to be OAUG’s Member of the Year.
This year’s recipient of Member of the
year is Ann Ristau.
Anne has been working with Oracle
Databases as a programmer and analyst
since 1982. In 1989 the company for
which Anne worked purchased Oracle
Financials, and they went live on release
6! In 1990 she joined OAUG and
became a Board Member, serving in a
number of capacities. Anne is
an accomplished instructor for Oracle
Applications, and author of training courses. Currently, Anne is an independent
consultant specialising in customisations. I won’t tell Larry if you don’t Ann!
Anne has always been active in the
OAUG, but this award particularly reflects the efforts that she has made over
the last year to provide training tracks at our conferences. Anne wants to
share this award with all of the trainers who JUMPED at the opportunity to help
the OAUG fill the void when Oracle Education were no longer able to provide
training sessions, especially Melanie Bock and Maggie Coleman.
In Fall 2000 Maggie, Melanie and Anne
decided they knew enough people to provide the training to fill that void. Did
they ever...OAUG has gone from 2 education tracks to 4, plus a hands on
training area, and many others have joined them in providing training to all
our conference attendees.
Please join me in congratulating Anne Ristau, OAUG’s member of the year for 2001.
So we have just honoured the OAUG’ s
member of the year.
But what is the OAUG?
The OAUG is real users finding real
solutions, together.
The OAUG is independence.
Because the OAUG is independent from Oracle, members receive truly valuable
insight, education and support from their peers. Many of you are here seeking to hear from your fellow users on
whether now is the time to move to Release 11i –To hear from someone else in a
similar situation to you. You will ask, “Is it stable? How tough was the
upgrade? What are the real life business benefits that other users are seeing?”
And because the people giving you the answers to your questions are OAUG
volunteers who have given up their time to contribute to our user community you
can have confidence in the objectiveness of the answer that you receive.
The OAUG is education.
OAUG provides users with real world
advice and education on how to use Oracle Applications to successfully run their
businesses.
This education is valuable because the
person from whom you are learning has already gone through it, in a real life
business situation. They have made some mistakes probably – and you can benefit
from them. Those are mistakes that you no longer have to go through.
The OAUG is support.
There is an enormous amount of
knowledge and experience in the OAUG membership – and those members are happy
to support one another by sharing that knowledge, and by helping each other to
succeed. OAUG support comes from real life users just like you who have figured
out how to solve problems
The OAUG is your advocate.
The OAUG is continually working with,
and sometimes challenging, Oracle to make the company listen to the needs of
its customers and provide better service and support.
This year we have been pushing for an
extension of the de-support date for 10.7. The OAUG supported a petition from
OAUG members, and Oracle saw the value in the extension and gave users on 10.7
more time to complete their transition to Release 11i.
This year has also seen us encourage
Oracle to open its standards so that the other vendors with whom you all work
can better integrate with the Oracle Applications.
How do you take advantage of all of
this? Well, we are all at the conference so the conference is a good place to
start.
We have 250 sessions where you can hear
how others have successfully dealt with the business issues that you are
dealing with today.
We have over a hundred exhibitors in
our exhibit hall. They are offering complementary products, education, and
consulting services to support you in your use of Oracle Applications. Go and
see them, they will be able to support a need that your company has.
Once again we have our hands on demo
area where you can play around with the latest Oracle releases. Our thanks to
Boss Corporation, Project Partners, Top Team and Cinap for their support in
providing this valuable resource.
We also have an excellent training
track at the conference where you can receive training in the use of the
applications. I would like to thank our members who are providing that service
to all of us, including Apps Shop, Boss Corporation, DARC, Solbourne and Sun
MicroSystems. There are others listed in your programme, and our thanks go to
all of them. Get along there and take advantage of learning from some of the
best in the business.
I would also like to thank our other
sponsors, Compaq, Clear Orbit, Dun & Bradstreet and 170 Systems for their
support of the conference and the OAUG.
And of course there are great
opportunities for networking with your fellow users. At the sessions, at the
events, at lunch, whenever you are surrounded by real users who can share their
real solutions with you. Say hello, share your knowledge, and make contacts for
the future that can help you for years to come. My company DHL the air courier
express company, has made many valuable contacts through the OAUG that help us
to gain the most benefit that we can from our use of Oracle Applications.
Its not just here at the conference
either.
Web site
The OAUG web site (www.oaug.org) is a great information
resource for what is happening with Oracle Applications and with the OAUG. It
features the latest news, a conference paper database, members contact
information and much more.
Publications
You can also read all about it in our publications, OAUG Forum and OAUG Insight
provided to all our member contacts.
E-News
We also have OAUG
E-News, an e-mail newsletter with all the latest information about Oracle
Applications and the OAUG. OAUG E-News
comes out two times each month – you can check how to subscribe at the OAUG web
site.
Listserver
And we run OAUGnet,
a listserver dedicated to providing a forum for everyone in the Oracle
Applications field to exchange views and seek resolution for the business
issues that they face in their implementation of Oracle Applications.
Other
The OAUG community does other things too. We are an
independent, not for profit organisation, that thrives through the enthusiasm,
dedication and generosity of the many volunteers that contribute so much to our
community. Through them we are able to carry out many of the activities that we
all jointly benefit from, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank
all of them:
Through the enthusiasm and effort of these volunteers, the OAUG community continues to grow, representing over 2000 member companies this year. And it continues to be an independent organisation, self-funding, through membership dues and conference revenues, run by our members, for our members, who are predominantly licensed users of the applications.
For those organisations here who are
not yet members, I encourage all of you to join the OAUG community and share in
the experience. Visit the membership booth to get details
And now I would like to deal with
OAUG’s relationship with Oracle, and how that has changed over the last 18
months. As many of you are aware Oracle changed their approach to conferences
in the last year. They launched their own applications conferences with the
objective of reaching a wider audience than the OAUG conferences have typically
reached, focused as we are on existing users sharing their real life solutions.
Initially they asked the OAUG to fold
our conferences into the Oracle managed conference, a suggestion that with the
input of our members through a survey, we declined.
We have spent a considerable amount of
time and effort with Oracle over the last 18 months trying to come to a
satisfactory resolution to this situation. As part of those efforts in the
middle of this year we held another survey of our membership to determine the
future of our conferences as well as our relationship with Oracle, and to
ensure that the Board continued to act in line with the desires of the OAUG
membership. For those of you who are not familiar with the results of that
survey I’ll provide a brief overview.
First, a large majority of our members
responded to the survey. Such high levels of participation show how important
these topics are to each of us, and I appreciate the commitment that this
represents.
There are two key messages that the
survey gave us:
Ninety-Two percent of you voted to
maintain at least one independent and education-focused OAUG conference.
Sixty-seven percent of you wanted us to
investigate how we could work with Oracle to provide support for their
conferences.
Additionally, in spite of Oracle’s
announcement earlier this year that they are unable to support the OAUG
conferences, most of you wrote in that you want Oracle to return to OAUG
conferences.
The OAUG board of directors has taken
these results as a mandate. So what are we doing about it?
You said you want to maintain
independent conferences.
This week’s conference is completely
independent. What does that mean for you? It means the focus is on education,
and users sharing their knowledge with other users. In May 2002, we will be
hosting another independent conference in Toronto. Because of our independence,
you receive truly valuable insight, education and support, as well as objective
advocacy to Oracle on the issues that concern you.
You also voted for us to work with
Oracle. As a result, the board of directors and Oracle have been discussing
opportunities for us to work together for the benefit of our members and their
customers.
-
Currently,
the OAUG is assisting Oracle with the selection of the user paper track for
their applications conferences, comprising 20% of the total content. Selection
for Europe is already complete. Selection for the North American conference is
underway. Other conference collaboration opportunities are being positively
discussed.
-
Oracle
has agreed to provide contact opportunities to the OAUG for their new and
existing customers to help promote OAUG membership
-
Oracle
has also shown its willingness to respond to OAUG concerns by the extension the
desupport date for version 10.7 of their applications.
You also said via the survey that you
want Oracle to return to our independent conferences. You want the opportunity to
hear from the people who develop the software you use to run your business, and
have the opportunity to express your needs directly to them.
Last Wednesday evening Oracle called me
to suggest that as a show of goodwill they would like to send their VP of
Applications Technology, Cliff Godwin, to our conference. Cliff has been
extremely well received by our conference attendees over the years, and I am
pleased to be able to announce that he will be here tomorrow at 10:00 in this
room to provide insight into Release 11i. We appreciate this gesture from
Oracle and hope that it represents a sign of a new partnership between our
organisations, and we hope to see it extended to participation in future OAUG
conferences, including Toronto.
We see these developments as a positive
sign that we can make a new beginning, and hope and believe that more
collaboration will come in the future, for the benefit of both OAUG members,
Oracle’s customers, and Oracle itself.
Oracle and the OAUG are now moving
forward on improving the relationship and collaboration. In doing so the OAUG
will continue to remain true to its principles:
We will continue to focus on education
– real users and real solutions
We will continue to maintain our
independence, and our role of independent advocacy. That means that we will
continue to call Oracle on the issues that concern their users.
On November 8th AMR research
said
“A software company with the size and
stature of Oracle needs to have a vibrant, objective, and collaborative users
group. It’s a win-win for Oracle and its users”
We believe that is truly in the best
interests of both the users, and of Oracle, and we will continue to work on
your behalf to that end.
Thank you and have a great conference.