Boxfusion attended the Oracle CX Partner Summit in Brussels in November 2015, to get the latest updates on Oracle's CX strategy - here's the Day 2 summary.

November 12th and November 13th saw the Oracle CX Partner Summit running in Brussels, it was a fantastic opportunity to learn more about Oracle's overall strategy for CX and to see what is coming up in the Oracle CX Roadmap for our customers. Our summary of day 2 is below, if you missed our wrap up from Day 1 you can find it here.

Our key takeaways:

• There were more details around the Day 1 initiative towards building out Industry specific applications in the CX Cloud;
• A session on PaaS and Cloud integration proved very interesting with a longer term view on the roadmap in this key area - customers will continue to pick up individual parts of the CX suite to integrate with their existing applications (both cloud and on premise) and there will be further moves towards BI in the Cloud with Oracle's BI Cloud Service, which will receive data from the various CX pillars.
• We heard again from Chris Shutts (co-founder of Big Machines, now CPQ Cloud) on how the business case for CPQ can be demonstrated, as well as more about the platform's strategic direction;
• Andy Kershaw, Senior Director on Oracle Social Network (OSN) gave fantastic insights into the roadmap for OSN and demonstrated how Oracle applications are being built to have Social embedded into the platform;
• Steve Buchan (Senior Director at Oracle Product Development), spoke about the roadmap for Oracle Sales Cloud;
• There were sessions on CX Journey Mapping, with Oracle providing insights into how to help customers build their business case to make the most from these sessions;
• And finally, there were a number of chances to mix with Oracle executives and product specialists from across the CX applications.

Focus on: the complete nature of Oracle's CX offering

While the main theme of the first day was the upcoming push for Industry applications across the Oracle CX Cloud products, Day 2 was more about the roadmap and completeness of the offering now available to customers through the Oracle CX suite. We saw slides demonstrating the pace and breadth of the "spending spree" undertaken by Oracle to acquire best-of-breed applications to supplement their CX offerings, alongside the speed of development on the existing products within the suite.

On OSN, the product demo was very impressive, further showing how the product is embedded within the other CX pillars. We were particularly interested, and impressed, with the demos of OSN features in both Sales Cloud and Service Cloud contexts. For Sales users, the embedded panel within MS Outlook gives seamless collaboration within their favoured email client and then we saw the power of related conversation threads against an Opportunity where different people may be brought in to collaborate. On the Service side, we saw the embedded collaboration help users of Service Cloud and beyond contribute to a thread, and related threads, whilst working to resolve an Incident. In all cases, the embedded OSN functionality comes with licences for users across the Enterprise, regardless of whether they access Sales Cloud or Service Cloud. On the Sales Cloud side, we got lots of information on the upcoming roadmap for 2015, covering the improvements to the core SFA functionality, as well as the opportunities for extensions and integration with the other pillars and the benefits customers will get from the enhancements in things like OSN which is built into the Sales Cloud platform.

Fig 1: Steve Buchan presenting on the new features in Sales Cloud R9.2

Here you can see Steve Buchan, Senior Director at Oracle Product Development, talking about the upcoming new features in Oracle Sales Cloud R9.2. There will then be monthly application updates with new features being made available for customers to switch on and access - helping to ensure a rapid pace of change on Sales Cloud, which is great news for customers!

In summary, we found this two day event hugely informative and a great success - having the opportunity to hear from so many of the executives involved in setting Oracle strategy for CX and see how each of the jigsaw pieces fit together was extremely powerful! There are many exciting innovations and developments coming through on all the CX pillars in the coming months, strengthening integration between long-established products like Siebel and the specialist Cloud CX products (for the co-existence model), as well as many fantastic looking enhancements within the individual CX pillars.

Learn More

If improving your sales team’s productivity is a priority for your organisation, why not contact us, or call us now on +44 203 2834315, to discuss how your organisation can benefit from using a sales automation application such as Oracle Sales Cloud. Boxfusion Consulting hold a number of Oracle CX/CRM Implementation partner specialisations.