I have asked myself this question and have posed it to my colleagues as well. Most of the Oracle EPM-related events – conferences, Meetups, Kscope, and Oracle OpenWorld – are hosted primarily in the US and Europe. I haven’t heard of similar conferences happening in India. I’ve always wanted to be part of a gathering related to EPM, so I decided to work with ODTUG to make it happen.
All of my questions and prayers were answered in 2016. I was lucky enough to be invited to be part of the ODTUG EPM Marketing Committee, thanks to Opal Alapat. During the interaction I had with ODTUG key members, I expressed my interest for an EPM Meetup in India and it was accepted immediately. So the first Meetup was arranged once we had a reasonable number of like-minded folks identified.
A special thanks to ODTUG for sponsoring this first Meetup. It was really great to meet people with varied experiences from different suites of EPM. Surprisingly, all the folks I met were anxiously waiting to attend an EPM event in India. I enjoyed hearing our attendees say things such as, “Yes, I need to learn every day – you never know what you will discover with your knowledge and achieve with it.”
It is a challenge to achieve all the knowledge needed to be an EPM expert by working alone. When you share all the knowledge, you have you actually learned more. Our India meetup is a great place to share and gain knowledge. Sharing and learning new ideas and techniques is a great benefit from these meetings as well as the value in meeting new folks with the same interests.
The day I got the go-ahead from ODTUG to sponsor a Meetup, I started to get it published across various networking sites and took input from like-minded folks on organizing it based on their views and interests. We chose to have our first Meetup in Café Coffee Day (CCD) with coffee and a little snack. The Meetup was well-received, and we had 20 people gathered for this event. It was great fun, memorable, and thrilling for all of us, as it was our first ODTUG EPM Community meetup in India.
