Observations from OpenWorld 2018
I’m Christian Simko and I recently joined the Onapsis product team in the role of market analysis and strategy. Last week, I traveled completely across the country from Boston to the beautiful city by the bay, San Francisco, to attend the Oracle OpenWorld 2018 conference at the Moscone Center, joining my Onapsis colleagues and tens of thousands more of our “closest Oracle friends.”
This was the second year in a row that Onapsis attended and exhibited at OpenWorld after launching the Onapsis Security Platform (OSP) for Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) a little over a year ago.
At last year’s event, having just launched our security and compliance solution for EBS about a month earlier, we saw this as an ideal venue to rapidly get in front of thousands of attendees who use EBS. This year, our goal was more calculated and precise. We wanted to have more meaningful conversations with the right people to understand their critical pain points and show them the value our solution delivers. Mission accomplished!
My OpenWorld week kicked off bright and early on Monday morning with an intimate breakfast event hosted by SmartDog Services, where Nadia Bendjedou, Oracle’s vice president of product strategy for Oracle E-Business Suite development, presented a special preview of the EBS roadmap. Highlighting her presentation was the announcement that Oracle would continue innovation of EBS 12.2 with support through 2030. For those in attendance, many of which have invested heavily in EBS and relied on SmartDog’s implementation and optimization services, this message was positively received. Now, they had assurance that a migration to the cloud could happen on their own timeframe and even in a phased approach. You could feel the collective sigh of relief.
For much of the rest of the conference, I spent a lot of time in our booth where this message from Oracle really set the tone for conversations with EBS customers. Many of those that we spoke to were feeling the pressure of how migrations of their complex EBS environments to the cloud would impact them and their businesses. Now, they felt like they could focus on other priority projects to optimize and secure EBS as they start to plan out their cloud migration strategies. A survey we conducted in our booth seemed to back this up as over 60% of those surveyed stated that moving EBS to the cloud was still more than a year away.
In conversations, DBAs and EBS application developers commonly expressed the day-to-day challenges that security and compliance has placed on them. Senior level managers including CIOs and CISOs discussed EBS security concerns and the need to minimize risk. Collectively, they were all receptive to how Onapsis could help them at the application tier with more efficiency and visibility into EBS vulnerabilities and audit controls and policies. Additionally, many also saw the value we discussed when presenting how a cloud migration strategy should only start when EBS was in a secure and compliant state – giving them greater confidence in a successful migration.
Other Onapsis highlights from OpenWorld included six speaking sessions by our team of technology experts.
OpenWorld Conference Sessions:
Securing Oracle E-Business Suite with the Latest Features & Tools
Speakers: Juan Perez-Etchegoyen, CTO, Onapsis; Eric Bing, senior director, Oracle; Elke
Phelps, product management director, Oracle
Key Audit and Compliance Advantages of Running in the Cloud
Speakers: Matias Mevied, Oracle security specialist, Onapsis, and Cristian Peque, Oracle security specialist, Onapsis
For those who attended the OpenWorld conferences, materials from these sessions are available on the OpenWorld 2018 site.
Showcase Theater Sessions:
From Database to Application Security
Speaker: Paul Stamp, director of product management, Onapsis
Oracle E-Business Suite Cybersecurity Risk and Mitigation
Speaker: Matias Mevied
How to Implement Oracle CPUs for EBS
Speaker: Cristian Peque
ERP Applications Under Fire
Speaker: Paul Stamp
If you did not get a chance to see our Showcase Theater sessions, email us and we can send you the presentations.
Thanks to everyone who either came to our sessions, visited us at the booth or listened to me on the streets of San Francisco, at the bar, waiting at the airport or on the plane talking about EBS security and risk management. It was a pleasure talking to you about how we can help you protect your EBS environments and applications from constant internal and external threats. If you’d like to see a demo or didn’t get a chance to talk to us but want to learn more, let’s schedule a time today.