Last week (1st-2nd February), we attended Oracle Modern Business Experience, a two-day event held at ExCeL in London. It was a mix of exhibition, seminars and networking, with keynote speeches from business, science and technology leaders. The event was aimed at both customers and partners with the purpose of showing businesses ways to accelerate their transformation and growth.
It was the first major event since Oracle’s acquisition of NetSuite at the end of last year. The main theme of the conference was how cloud architecture (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS) is shaping the modern business environment and how digital disruption is an unavoidable consideration for any modern business that aspires to grow.
There were inspiring and thought-provoking keynotes from leading industry thinkers, including: Safra Cruz, Oracle’s CEO; Professor Brian Cox OBE, CERN physicist and broadcaster; Dragon’s Den entrepreneur, Deborah Meaden; and Richard Noble OBE, entrepreneur and previously the land speed record-holder.
There was something for everyone, with role-based breakout sessions covering customer experience, finance, marketing, HR, supply chain, technology leadership and the public sector.
A particularly interesting session was the one run by Roddy Martin, VP Supply Chain Transformation Thought Leadership and Supply Chain Cloud Product Marketing at Oracle. In this session, Roddy outlined how analytics are shaping supply chain management and how companies are using big data to achieve previously unattainable results in logistics optimisation. At Balloon One, we are keen to see how these techniques can feed into the NetSuite platform to enable SMEs to achieve similar results.
As always, Zach Nelson, former CEO of NetSuite and now VP of ERP and Cloud Strategy at Oracle, captivated the audience as he showed how the benefits of cloud technology are still being discovered. It is widely accepted that Oracle will represent a considerable enabling force in NetSuite’s future expansion. And we are excited to see where the leading cloud ERP platform will go in the coming years.