With a view towards the most popular attractions of the British capital, Oracle vendors and users have gathered at the third O5 Live conference at the County Hall to discuss all things digital transformation, customer success stories and the benefits of networking in the tech industry.
Kicking off with a keynote event, Ellie Turner-Coughlin presented the audience with a perspective of rethinking what networking entails: “I think the problem has been that a lot of people confuse networking with sales. And often when we go to networking events, […] you have rooms full of people talking about themselves and their achievements and their careers. But the thing is, it should just be about building more meaningful relationships.”
The sentiment was shared by O5 Live CEO, Kerry Wilson, who told ERP Today that O5 Live is about “giving [Oracle] partners an opportunity to connect with their customers without any limitations.”
She added: “My final goal is to build an annual event for Oracle users where they can connect with the vendors and [each other]. Connecting and networking is the vision, which is why our keynote was about exactly that.”
Continuing with the theme of building long-lasting relationships, the conference presented the visitors with a variety of talks and user case studies. There, customers of Oracle partners had an opportunity to share their digital transformation journeys and discuss how third-party solutions helped them make the best out of their ERP.
Connecting users with the right vendors
Among the speakers was Education First (EF), a global education company that shared its experience of migrating from a legacy on-premise ERP system to the cloud with the help of More4apps. The project began in 2021 and was completed in January 2024 and, while most of it was successfully implemented, there was one issue that the company experienced – invoice data loading. Having used Excel to load the volume of over 200 invoices a month in its legacy system for decades before, the company wanted to find a solution that would allow it to continue doing that in the cloud – and that is how EF met More4apps.
“Looking at FBDI, the standard Oracle solution so to speak, it requires multiple sheets, because of the way the data is organized. It makes sense if you’re a data scientist by nature, but if you’re a simple accountant like me, it’s hard to wrap your head around,” said Pehr Karlsson, head of finance transformation at EF.
“So, I needed something that could be easy to train people on and something that I could do with limited resources. […] Then, in a short amount of time, [the accountants] were using the More4apps application and quite frankly, it was so simple that even I would have been able to do it.”
ERP Today also attended a talk by Live Nation, a live entertainment industry giant, to listen to its experience of migration from Discoverer to SplashBI’s reporting platform.
Jateen Patel, senior director of finance technology at Live Nation, said: “When I joined the company in 2015, [Live Nation] had just moved to [Oracle] EBS 12.1.3 and the story was that there was constant growth in terms of numbers and ticket sales. At the time our reporting platform was Discoverer and that became a big problem because it was [phased out] in 2022.
“So, we partnered with Splash and engaged them to migrate about 300 reports […] just after the COVID [pandemic], completing phase one of [the digital transformation]”.
Additionally, Patel shared that Live Nation is now looking to explore the Oracle Fusion Cloud reporting landscape in continuous collaboration with SplashBI.
As seen at the O5 Live, the buzz around the potential of joint efforts in technology does not fade out as soon as the stage lights are off. Including Oracle’s side, in between the sessions, Gary Brocklehurst, senior business development manager at Oracle, shared with ERP Today that “even after 35 years of working at Oracle, I am still always learning.”
He added: “We don’t get enough opportunity to speak to customers in an informal setting – this way they are much more likely to tell what they think than in a formal [situation].”
Perhaps, now that we live in a world where, in the words of Coughlin, “modern loneliness masks as hyper-connectivity,” companies can leverage events like O5 Live to build partnerships that will not just add to their own benefit, but also fuel the potential of technology drive and growth.
Founded by Arcivate, Innovate Tax, Fudgelearn and SplashBI, O5 Live will return to the County Hall on 26th June 2025 to share the latest insights, technologies and customer success stories.
