The end of the World as we know it!

I read with regret that World Software had been unceremoniously extricated from Collaborate 2017. If you are looking for information on the direction of World Software, or an exploration on how your peers continue to run their businesses on World Software, indeed, if you are looking to COLLABORATE with your fellow World Software users, you are directed to attend the significantly smaller InFocus conference later in the year. This relegation to the “child’s table” of conferences comes tinged when irony. When InFocus was first launched, World Software was excluded from participation. Now it is the last refuge of a World Software user.

Why was this decision made? I can only speculate. Certainly participation by World Software customers has been on a downward trajectory for years. However, clearly Oracle’s decision to treat World Software with benign neglect has contributed to the decline in conference attendance. After 10 years of collecting significant maintenance dollars from World customers, Oracle appears to have put the software out to pasture. Sadly, unless you are interested in migrating to EnterpriseOne, Oracle has little to say to World users. The momentum that had been generated with the A9.x releases of World has been squandered, leaving the user community in a quandary.

And what of Quest’s role in the ostracizing of World Software from Collaborate? On the one hand it seems like a reasonable response to changing software user demographics; attendance by World users at Collaborate has been declining. However, this move by Quest to drop World from the Collaborate program seems more like unconditional surrender to me. Quest, who is supposed to represent the interest of the ENTIRE Oracle community, has taken the easy way out of a difficult situation. Instead of advocating for the World community’s rightful participation in Oracle’s premier user-driven conference, Quest has chosen to carry Oracle’s water by acquiescing to Oracle’s desire to focus all World customers on migration to EnterpriseOne. By limiting World’s sessions at Collaborate to migration topics Quest has abdicated their responsibility to World users.

With the retirement of John Schiff from the JDE World team, Collaborate 2017 was shaping up as a critical opportunity to gauge Oracle’s intentions regarding World Software, and to receive that guidance from Oracle directly. Quest’s short-sighted decision has eliminated that option for World users. While it is true that this decision itself provides a form of guidance regarding the future of World Software, Quest’s unilateral decision has superimposed their judgment in place of the transparent vendor-user interaction Collaborate is rightly famous for. This is a truly sad turn of events.

Thank you for your response to my post, Dale. Unfortunately, I believe you missed my point. The mere presence of 59 Collaborate sessions that have self-reported as "World" sessions does not mean there is meaningful World content at Collaborate. Did you even take the time to scan the titles of any of these 59 sessions? 20% of them were SIG or User Group sessions open to all JDE. Another 12% are all EOne migration topics. The remaining topics are generic in nature and could only be referred to as World sessions by using the most liberal correlation. The truth is the migration sessions and the World User Group meeting are the only sessions which should be classified as World. When World was a contributing member to Collaborate, a plethora of user-driven sessions involving the actual use of World Software was available. Sadly, this is no longer the case; and no amount of alternative facts on your part can change that reality.

Regarding World customer participation at Collaborate under the current paradigm, I too believe it is unfortunate that the focus for World customers has been turned away from Collaborate. Many World customers engage in efforts to modernize their software platform, short of migration to EOne. Integrations between World and other applications are being engineered and implemented every day. It's too bad those discussions won't be had at Collaborate. How that would make Collaborate "even more beneficial to the World customers" is hard for me to fathom.

Hi Dave,

We did some looking around and noted that Quest has even placed a link on the main page for World Education sessions and we noted that there are currently 59 Sessions available for World Users at COLLABORATE 2017, which, I would guage is more than any one person could even attend in the 5 days!

There is also general consensus in the discussions we have had, that this year's event will be even more beneficial to the World customers.  It will give the World customers the opportunity to network with others that have embraced the Strategic Value Shift (SVS)™ (a term our company, 9EDGE, has phrased, that describes what we are seeing today) but also to get more educated on how to leverage, whereever possible the new capabailities of JD Edwards and extended options (be it within IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, mobile, UX1, IOT and much more) to propel their businesses forward.  Even World users will find value!.

Our team would be happy to meet with you as well to discuss - please feel free to reach out to me, it would be a pleasure to get connected,

Take care and hope to see you at the Forum,

Dale Kaplan

9EDGE

310-944-5038

P.S. Instead of the End of the World as we know it.... lets look at it like the Beginning of a New and Exciting Era of JD Edwards!