Today's entry is written by Chris Warner, Director, Product Strategy at Oracle.

By now you’ve undoubtedly seen the blogs and announcements about Oracle OpenWorld. And perhaps you’ve also seen the news about OpenWorld’s newest sister event: Oracle Customer Experience (CX) Summit @ OpenWorld. Oracle CX Summit was created to be the most meaningful CX event, to be truly unique, to serve as the place to discover what it takes and what it really means to put the customer at the center of your business success. One long-time Oracle customer, when told about the Oracle CX Summit, put it this way: ‘This makes me rethink how I think about Oracle and Customer Experience’. Listen to what she heard and you be the judge.

We believe Customer Experience (‘CX’) is a movement, not just the latest ‘IT’ tech trend. CX isn’t something you can simply ‘install’. CX is one of the most strategic initiatives an organization can undertake. Customer Experience is about connecting with an organization’s most important asset, the customer, and the critical role that connection has to an organization’s success. And there’s never been a bigger gathering of the smartest CX minds, most successful CX companies, and innovative CX examples than Oracle CX Summit.

Take Subaru, for example. The company fully embraced the CX opportunity and their CX leadership will be on stage at the Oracle CX Summit to share their CX journey. They radically changed the way they interact with their customers, empower their employees, and differentiate their brand. And this is a story with a phenomenal happy ending: in a stagnant market and shrinking economy, they GREW their business and outpaced their competition.

At Oracle CX Summit, you will be surrounded by dozens of CX leaders, visionaries and innovators like Subaru. This three-day event brings together the largest collection of thought leaders and practitioners in Customer Experience ever. Notable presenters include:

• Seth Godin - World-renowned blogger and one ‘the World’s Top 21 Speakers’, author of 14 best-selling books like “Permission Marketing”, and founder of dozens of startups such as Squidoo.com (ranked one of the top 125 sites in the US).
• Kerry Bodine - VP Principal Analyst at Forrester for Customer Experience, author of the just-published book “Outside In - The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business”, and renowned author of “The Customer Experience Ecosystem”.
• Bruce Temkin - Co-founder and Chair of the Customer Experience Professionals Association, revered blogger of “Customer Experience Matters”, former VP Principal Analyst at Forrester for Customer Experience, Founder and Managing Partner of The Temkin Group, a leading Customer Experience research and consulting firm.
• George Kembel - Executive Director and Co-founder of the Stanford Design School, an established, recognized thought leader in design thinking and innovation, and a Silicon Valley based-CEO, venture capitalist and educator.
• Gene Alvarez - VP Research Analyst at Gartner and a recognized authority in the Retail and Consumer Goods industry. Gene has been published, featured and referenced in a variety of trade publications for Customer Experience insights.
• Senior Executives from innovative Customer Experience brands and agencies like AT&T, Intuit, Southwest Airlines, Marriott, Quiksilver, and Sapient.

But the CX Summit includes much, much more. There are over 30+ role-driven sessions and rountables as well as one-of-a-kind events including:

• The Customer Experience Innovation Tent featuring hands-on demonstrations of bleeding-edge customer experiences like the Share Happy Ice Cream Machine
• A hands-on Customer Journey Mapping Workshop that lets you learn design thinking techniques for innovating differentiated experiences that drive cross-functional alignment
• Access to the Oracle OpenWorld Exhibition Halls and DEMOgrounds as well as a week-long Live Music Festival and the Oracle Appreciation Event featuring Pearl Jam and Kings of Leon

At Oracle, we are quite proud of our award-winning suite of CX products, a suite of solutions that can help an organization greatly accelerate their CX journey. But Oracle CX Summit isn’t about products. It’s about how an organization can succeed in its CX initiative. There’s never been a bigger gathering of the smartest CX minds, most successful CX companies, and innovative CX examples than Oracle CX Summit.