Sovos Attendees’ Insights from Oracle’s OpenWorld

At the end of October, members of the Sovos Compliance Sales and Marketing teams attended Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, California. The conference, that consumed the Moscone Center both inside and out, was spread out over four days and included a wide variety of educational sessions, numerous high profile keynote speakers, and two exhibit halls filled with the industry’s best and brightest, including our highly trafficked booth. OpenWorld’s Focus on Cloud Computing The obvious theme of the week was cloud computing and its growing influence on today’s technology. Jumping on board with the trend, Oracle has come out with a number of new products to appeal to those using the cloud. Our team member, Product Manager Jeremy Wahlman-Krogh, attended the ‘Oracle cloud platform as a Service and Middleware Demo’, where he said they presented real-time, context-driven experiences for customers and user-friendly back-end analysis tools for companies. At this session, Jeremy said the presenters also announced a number of new products and services including: Oracle Identity Cloud (identity management/security), Oracle WebLogic Server 12cR2 (the first cloud-native, enterprise, Java platform), and Oracle Private Cloud. At Sovos, we understand the benefits of cloud software. Our tax determination engine, TWE has both on premise and SaaS offerings. Having a hosted solution allows business users access to best in class technology and capabilities with little to no IT involvement. This allows our clients to take back the time spent managing systems, programming compliance changes, and installing updates as they are all seamlessly handled in the background by our in-house team. In addition to having products to serve the cloud, our tax experts have been continuously tracking the emergence of cloud computing and its effects on tax calculations. Back in 2014 we issued a four part blog series around cloud computing and the nuances that companies must pay attention to. JDE Offerings and Enhancements – Integration with Taxware TWE by Sovos In addition to their focus on new cloud software, Oracle provided sessions on a number of other topics of interest. Brain Porcelli, a Solutions Engineer at Sovos Compliance, said the stand-out sessions for him were the JDE activities he attended. Brian joined a JDE demo, where he was delighted to see various parts of the JDE software, as well as have the opportunity to discuss these capabilities with an Oracle subject matter expert (SME). He observed that there was a lot of functionality being added to JDE to make interaction with the system more dynamic. Additionally, Brian attended a session that detailed one company’s upgrade of their JDE version. These sessions were of special interest to Brian since Sovos Compliance was recently granted Oracle Validated Integration of Taxware TWE 8.4 with JD Edwards 9.1.. In fact, Sovos Compliance’s Taxware software recently attained Oracle PartnerNetwork Gold Level membership. The certification means our software is recognized by Oracle for our commitment to establish Oracle-related knowledge in calculating transaction taxes for sales, purchases and services. Taxware has been certified for domestic AR/AP. In the future, the Sovos team plans to grow our partnership with Oracle and continue the improvement of our products and adapters.