Kscope24 Recap!

The ODTUG Kscope conference attracts Oracle experts from all over the globe to learn and share knowledge with other Oracle technology users. This year Kscope24 was held in Nashville (aka music city), at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center. Representing Brovanture this year was myself (Lydia Maksoud) and my colleagues Sarah Dow and Roger Cressey.

Friday

As Sarah and I were travelling over from London, we flew in on Friday and after a relatively smooth journey (compared to the connecting flights last year) we arrived in Nashville on Friday evening. The first thing that hit us was the heat, it’s around 38 degrees in Nashville and very humid! The second thing was the size of the hotel – the Gaylord Opryland has multiple regions, almost like a small town, and is quite literally the biggest hotel either of us had ever been to.

Saturday

Luckily on Saturday we had some spare time to explore a bit of Nashville before the conference kicked off. This of course meant we had to tick off a few of the music city highlights, including:

  • Proper Nashville BBQ from Peg Leg Porker
  • Wandering down Broadway, dipping into shops and bars along the way
  • Trying on some cowboy boots, before deciding they don’t suit everyone!
  • Listening to true country music, live in any one of the hundreds of live music bars

 

Sunday

The conference kicks off on Sunday with all the main symposiums. The key one for us was the EPM symposium, led by the Oracle Product Management team, which covered all the latest EPM roadmap and gives us an idea of where Oracle are heading with the products in the near and planned future.

  • Some highlights from the opening EPM symposium include:
  • GenAI is being built in to aid with narrative reporting and enhance explainability of insights
  • AI is still the hottest topic and isn’t going away anytime soon
  • Enhancements planned for the EPM search UI
  • Smart Assist in Smart View will aim to allow users to use natural language requests, e.g. find the sales budget for the US market, to create an ad hoc grid retrieve for them

Monday

The first full conference day starts with the general session. This session includes the keynote, which again was very AI focused from Oracle. This is also where they announced that next years venue for Kscope25 will be a return to Dallas, Texas!

Roger Cressey kicked off the Brovanture sessions on Monday morning with his presentation on Advancements in Essbase: Federated Partitions and ADW Integration – Long live Essbase! Although he only had half an hour, this was a great session, exploring the transformative potential of Oracle Essbase and Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW), integrated seamlessly using federated partitions.

Then it was time for the ODTUG Women in Tech (WIT) luncheon, with our very own Sarah Dow giving a short summary of her experience in the ODTUG mentorship programme. Sarah described how she was inspired to get involved when she heard about the programme at the previous years’ WIT luncheon.

Finishing up the Monday sessions, it was my turn to represent Brovanture covering IPM Insights: Crystal Balling through Time – Past patterns, Future Paths. This was a new “Zero to Sixty” presentation format which allows people to come in with zero knowledge of the topic and leave with a good understanding after 60 minutes. We covered all the basics of IPM, delved into the configuration tips and ended with a live demo of IPM insights.

Finally, to round out the first full conference day, Sarah and I were invited to join the other Oracle ACEs for an ACE dinner at the Saltgrass steakhouse, in the mall next door. This involved custom named “ACE” cocktails, steaks and of course the largest piece of chocolate cake known to man.

Tuesday

Sessions continued on Tuesday with highlights including loading data in any text format using the API (Kyle Goodfriend), why we should be creating freeform apps (Shankar Viswanathan) and an introduction to operation modelling (Muthu Ranganathan).

Operational modelling is an exciting addition to the Planning suite, which will allows businesses to plan at a more granular, transactional level, for large data sets. Traditionally this has been a weak point of the Planning tool so it’s great to see this being included. Some of the example use cases given by Oracle were  planning for manufacturing bill of materials, trip level planning or detailed ESG planning. Looking forward to seeing this in the coming months (safe harbor!).

Wednesday

The final day of sessions kicked off with several Oracle roadmap sessions, including What’s New and Coming in Oracle EPM (Shankar Viswanathan), Predictive Cash Forecasting (Muthu Ranganathan), and Important new AI features in Oracle IPM (Marc Seewald).

Sarah also had her session on Wednesday, covering DiscoverIE’s journey of discovery! This was a brilliant session gave insight into DiscoverIE’s project to move from HFM to FCC cloud.

On Wednesday I also had the pleasure of participating in a Planning Expert Panel, hosted by Peter Nitschke, along with Sara Beth Good, Pete Nitschke, Mike Turrell, Mark Rinaldi and Jeff McAhren.

Then finally it was time to relax and get ready for the main event which was a night of denim and diamonds, aboard the General Jackson Showboat. The showboat was brilliant, taking us along the Cumberland river and dropping us in downtown Nashville, ready to explore the neon fuelled bars of music city – as usual it was an ODTUG night to remember!


Very much looking forward to Kscope25 in Dallas next year – hope to see you there!

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