UKOUG Tech & EBS Conference Roundup
Well it's been a couple of weeks now since the event, but the end of November saw much of the UK Oracle community head up to Birmingham for the annual UKOUG Conference & Exhibition. Due to the number of acquisitions Oracle have made over the past few years, this conference is actually focused on E-Business Suite and Technology (with areas such as Hyperion, Siebel and Peoplesoft having their own conferences earlier in the year), but Birmingham remains the "main" UKOUG confence. This year we were lucky enough to have Vikki Lira and OTN join us, together with a large number of Oracle ACEs and Oracle ACE Director, and thank to Debra Lilly for organizing the ACE Program meal at Shimla Pinks just down the road from the ICC.
The Birmingham UKOUG conference is different to the other conferences that we attend, in that for the UK part of Rittman Mead it's our "home" conference, and so we have a booth in the main exhibition hall. As such, we don't get to go to as many conference sessions as we would like, but it's a great opportunity to meet customers and friends, share a few Rittman Mead beers, and also speak to people about helping them with projects in the New Year.
Of course the main topic of conversation for the week was the weather, with many potential delegates from the North (particularly Scotland) getting snowed-in an unable to make the event. The event itself though went off very well, with some great innovations this year including the OTN Lounge, and a set of awards for the best speakers and best abstracts, awarded as you can see in the photo by Lisa Dobson and Debra Lilly (UKOUG Directors) and sponsored by OTN.
Luckily we were able to get all of our team there, and over the three days we delivered a number of conference sessions on OBIEE 11g, business intelligence project management, and Oracle data warehousing. Here's links to our conference presentations if you were unable to make it.
- OBIEE 11g Data Modeling Best Practices and New Features (Mark Rittman)
- OBIEE 11g Architecture New Features and Best Practices (Mark Rittman)
- Getting Real : An Introduction to Oracle Real-Time Data Warehousing (Peter Scott)
- How to Run a BI Project (Jon Mead)
So the next conference you'll be able to meet us will be the Rocky Mountains Oracle User Group event in Denver in February 2011, followed-on by the next round of our OBIEE 11g Training Days event. More news on that, on Monday.