Objectives:

The APOUC Leaders meeting was organized in Shanghai at the Langham Xintiandi from May 16 to May 18 to share best practices and experiences among the user groups and to also provide them the latest updates on Oracle technologies and products.

Attendance:

This was the largest APOUC Leaders meeting so far. We had 26 user group leaders, comprising of 14 Oracle user group leaders, 10 Java user group leaders and 2 MySQL user group leaders, from several countries in the region - Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Taiwan and Singapore. The User Groups in JAPAC region represent over 100,000 active users from Oracle’s customers and partners. We also had 30 participants (speakers, liaisons, user group relationship managers) from Oracle LoB’s - Customer Care, Support, Development, Sales Consulting, Oracle University, Developer Programs, Field Marketing, the User Group Relationship team of Global Customer programs (Mary Lou Dopart, Nagaraj Paduvare, Jim Jiang and Kim Salter) and Oracle Shanghai MD, Bing Said.

Welcome Reception:

A welcome reception was organized at the Langham Xintiandi on May 16 in the evening from 6 PM to 7:30 PM. It was well attended by most of the user group and Oracle invitees.

Keynote/ Introductions:

The meeting opened on May 17 with a welcome by Mary Lou Dopart, Global Lead for User Groups Strategy followed by JAPAC Marketing update from Peck Hoon Wee, Oracle VP of Marketing- JAPAC. The introductions were done by all the attendees with an introductory slide whose format made it fun to share!

Breakout Sessions:

For the first time, we had breakout rooms – 1 for the Java sessions and 1 for the Oracle Technology and Application sessions at the APOUC meeting. On May 17, there were 10 sessions presented by Oracle in these breakout rooms covering Oracle Database, My Oracle Support, Fusion Applications, EBS, PeopleSoft, JDE, Java SE, Java EE 7, JDK and ADF.

Common Sessions: 

An interactive session on ‘Hardware and Software – Engineered Systems Are Important’ was presented by Chris Chelliah, Oracle VP, Exadata and Strategic Solutions on May 17.  On May 18, there was a very interesting session on sharing of best practices by leaders from several user groups including All India Oracle User Group, All China Oracle User Group, Australia Oracle User Group, Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG), India OAUG, OAUG Japan, Oracle Development Tools User Group (ODTUG), Quest ANZ and Asia, and Java User Groups of Chennai (India), Queensland (Australia) and Korea. This was followed by a Java Strategy session by Naveen Asrani, Director Java Product Management, APAC and an interactive panel discussion comprising of Java user group leaders and Oracle speakers.

Bambi Price, APOUC Spokesperson and ODTUG Board member briefly highlighted the work done by the IOUC Committees. Mary Lou Dopart then spoke on Oracle’s promotion of ‘User Group – Are you a member yet’ supplemented by Nagaraj Paduvare on the various projects and initiatives taken by Oracle to support User Group activities in the region and globally.

We also had Oracle presentations on Fusion Middleware, Virtualization and MySQL on May 18.

Conclusion and Next Steps: 

• All 26 user group leaders have a login on www.IOUC.org. They need to ensure that the group and leader details posted on the site are accurate.
• A survey is in place to collect their feedback about the meeting. The initial feedback received has been very positive.
• The presentations have all been uploaded on IOUC.org. It is expected that the leaders will share this information with their user group members.

For more information, please contact nagaraj.paduvare@oracle.com