In May 2023, we attended the Quest Oracle Community’s Blueprint 4D event. BP4D took place over four days at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas. It’s a unique opportunity to engage with the wider Oracle community as it is effectively several events in one, with separate summits for JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Oracle Cloud users, and more.
This year’s event attracted over 1,500 delegates, with hundreds of businesses represented. It felt like a “high-energy” event, with good levels of engagement across the keynotes, the plenary sessions, and across the exhibition halls.
This year was a year of firsts and lasts for DWS. For the first time, we were interested in talking to businesses about more than just Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications and JD Edwards. We were bringing a wider portfolio of services to the table, so we wanted to talk to delegates about their broader enterprise applications landscape and explore the challenges they face regarding software development and testing.
(Photo: A team of software developers and testers)
Amongst our traditional audience of JD Edwards users, there were a lot of conversations about code currency. Users had a range of opinions as to the best approach, but most acknowledged it was a worthwhile strategy to employ – especially amongst those who were looking to reduce their modified footprint, as every project unearthed an opportunity to retire redundant code.
Of course, this was music to our ears as we have continued to invest in our Dimension suite of products, which include a code-based analysis tool and fixed-price retrofitting services. The Dimension suite offers value to both end-users and channel partners as it mitigates a significant amount of the risk associated with change event projects (ESU updates, etc.).
Digitalization, AI, and robotic process automation, all a part of the broader “digital transformation” umbrella, were hot topics. Businesses that have a long-term vested interest in the future of ERP software are always on the lookout for ways to simplify or reduce the amount of effort involved in staying code current. Again, this is something we have been actively involved in since the introduction of our test automation solutions for JDE E1 and Oracle Cloud Applications.
(Photo: Automation can help save time, cut costs and mitigate risks)
As the install base has moved away from huge, infrequent upgrade projects to smaller, more regular updates it means we are carrying out more projects. More projects mean more testing, so automation provides an opportunity to reduce project timelines, eliminate risk and save money.
For test scripting and automation, we, have Dimension SwifTest which is “application-aware” and works with EnterpriseOne and any Oracle Fusion Cloud Application or extension that adheres to the Redwood UI (User Interface) standards.
It was a busy event for us as we had three presentation sessions of our own, in addition to the booth in the exhibition hall. The most exciting of these covered London Heathrow Airports’ recent experience and featured Caroline Knight, Heathrow’s Head of Technology. Even cooler, we received several name-checks in other presentations and roundtable discussions – Chris Noake of Granite Construction talked about testing and how we’ve been helping them, as did Todd Griffiths of Argano.
(Photo: The DWS team attended Blueprint4D between May 8 – 11th, 2023)
If you missed any of the sessions, you could check them out as part of the Blueprint4D virtual replay – available to attendees and non-attendees alike until the end of July.
There was also a degree of pathos associated with the event this year as it is likely to be the last time we sponsor, or attend an event, as “the gecko guys”. You’ll still see some of the old faces at future events, but they will be under the new brand identity of our parent company LogiGear.
We will still be a part of the Oracle community, but as the ERP division of the LogiGear group we will be able to offer services to JDE, Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce users. For more on this, check out the useful links below:
