Tomorrow, I begin my inaugural pilgrimage to the amazing event known as Oracle OpenWorld. It will be my first one (which I hope is the first of many) and I’ll finally be able to witness this 60,000+ person event up close. I’m super stoked to see how an entire conference takes over the city of San Francisco. Some highlights will include catching up with my ODTUG & RMOUG buddies, meeting new friends, grabbing some fresh seafood, and partying like a rock star (Gwen Stefani & Sting style)!

My good fortune began with interRel and their elite reputation as an Oracle EPM/BI partner, technology advisor, and industry expert. This, in addition to my Oracle ACE Associate status led to me being able to attend an EPM advisory meeting the Friday before OOW. As my sessions weren’t accepted, I was expecting to fly back home on Friday night. However, due to serendipity, I secured a free conference pass through ODTUG. This year, most of the Board members are able to attend on an Oracle ACE Director compensated ride or they get a free conference pass for being an Oracle ACE (it pays to be an ACE!). interRel was graciously willing to foot the remaining travel bill so I scored an awesome opportunity.

Then the craziness began. I was tapped to attend the #OTNWIT panel. Big shout out to Laura for thinking of me! I’m very excited to be joining some very esteemed colleagues – Kellyn Pot’vin-Gorman, Heli Helskyaho, and Natalie Delemar and have meaningful conversations about women in technology.

Next, I was asked to join Al Marciante on a Cloud panel for EPRCS. I will be sharing the stage with Investec and Neil Sellers from Qubix and will deliver the the North American perspective for EPRCS. EPRCS is an amazing reporting cloud technology and I can’t wait to gush about its best selling points and customer use cases.

Finally, just last weekend I was asked to join Gabby Rubin and Glenn Schwartzberg on a Cloud panel for Essbase Cloud Services and Data Visualization. We have some exciting use cases (both non-traditional and traditional) of customers who started with Excel spreadsheet environments and moved into BI reporting…and now have an interest in the “any day to be released now” Essbase Cloud Services.

On top of that, there are a number of fabulous meetups (including nightly community ODTUG meetups), networking events, exercising fun (yes, you read that correctly), and many great educational sessions to attend. But more on that in the next blog post. Until then, it’s a mad scramble getting all of these presentations together and packing for the week!

My hope is to blog on the exciting events and product updates throughout the course of the conference (from a newbie’s perspective, of course). I’m sure I won’t be able to see them all, but I’ll try! See you there!