UKOUG Partner of the Year Award 2011, and the Rittman Mead Customer Advisory Board 2011
If you follow this blog and the various events we speak at, you might end up thinking that we spend most of our time going to conferences and testing out new Oracle BI products. In fact, of course, most of our time is spent on customer projects and over the past few years, we've delivered projects around the world from the smallest PoC through to multi-year, multi-country projects for some of the largest organizations in the world. I was particularly pleased therefore with a couple of things that happened last month that allowed us to spend a bit of time thinking about our customers and clients.
First off, we were very proud to receive the UKOUG Business Intelligence Partner of the Year 2011 Gold award, our third win in this category in four years. We were particularly grateful to receive this award as it was voted on by UKOUG members based on some case studies we submitted, and as the UK is our original, home market it's great to receive this recognition. Thanks again to everyone who voted for us, and we will strive to live up to your high expectations over the next twelve months.
On the same day as the UKOUG award, we also held a customer appreciation meal before our first ever Customer Advisory Board meeting, up at Horsley Park in Surrey, UK. The idea behind the CAB meeting was to invite some of our best customers and partners up for a day of discussions and workshops, to explain where we thought the Oracle BI industry was going, and also to get feedback from our clients on our plans for products and services in 2012. We were joined by twenty delegates from across our UK client base, along with Frank Buytendijk, who you'll probably know from Oracle/Hyperion and his work prior to that with Gartner.
The discussions over the day went from a briefing on what's new from Oracle Openworld (including a very interesting talk around Exalytics), a session led by Frank talking about more abstract elements of BI and performance management, and then sessions from Mike Vickers and Jon Mead on our delivery methodology and what we've got planned for 2012. Thanks again to everyone who came along, and we're thinking about running similar events in the US and India for our clients over there, later in 2012.
I know it sounds corny some times, but its true that it's our customers that make this all worthwhile. Thanks again to everyone for your support, and we're looking forward to working with you all next year.