Fusion Tipster

Oracle MBX 2018 recap

Posted on April 23, 2018 Updated on April 23, 2018

Last week I attended Oracle’s MBX (Modern Business Experience) conference held near the O2 in London. Here’s what I learnt:

General

It was busy. Really busy. I’ve also been to the MBX in each of the last 3 or 4 years and this was – by far – the biggest event. I think it even took the organisers by surprise how many people were there as the registration was super-lengthy and there weren’t many lunches left. Busy conferences can only be a good sign.

Thomas Kurian Keynote

Thomas Kurian shared some big customer success stories in his keynote:

ERP:

• PWC are running globally on a single ERP Cloud instance
• Dropbox put 5 million AR transactions a day into ERP Cloud
• Orange are running globally on a single ERP Cloud instance

HCM:

• Sainsbury’s have 160,000 employees live, and now rolling out payroll
• Macy’s are live with Payroll for 180,000 payees
• Engie are live with core plus Learning, Performance, Rewards for 150,000 employees

He also shared this very crammed logo slide:

Ray Wang Keynote

I’ve followed Ray on Twitter for a long time and I was looking forward to seeing him speak for the first time. It was a real exercise in concentration. Not only does he never stop moving, energetically pacing from one extreme of the stage to the other:

but he speaks so quickly, and shares his ideas so fast that it’s hard to keep up. You don’t get time for the first nugget of info to sink in before he’s half way through the next one.

Great fun though!

Gretchen Alarcon HCM Keynote

I always enjoy listening to Gretchen speak as she always manages to anchor whatever functionality she’s discussing with real-life use cases.

Gretchen shared that chatbots are coming to HCM later this year. Recruitment first – which we’d previously heard – but also to Core HR. She also explained that although HCM Cloud has had predictive algorithms for many years these will be on the increase with the next uses being succession planning and spotting anomalies in employee expenses, pay, timesheets etc.

She also said that the $6Bn+ a year that Oracle spends on R&D means that they have 40,000 developers. That’s a staggering amount of people.

HCM Panel Session

Finally, I attended an HCM Cloud panel session. Andy Campbell hosted a chat with Sainsbury’s, Morgan Stanley and Co-op about their successful HCM Cloud rollouts.