A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending ServiceNow’s annual user conference, Knowledge18. It was my first time attending, and, frankly, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.
I spent most of my time prior to Zenoss working with hardware platforms, so attending a software conference as a software vendor was a new, unique experience for me. I was blown away by the number of attendees (about 18 thousand, I was told). On the first day, John Donahue, CEO of ServiceNow, unveiled the company’s new identity — a much more human-focused brand that heavily leans into the concept that cloud software can change the way people do work, much in the way it has transformed how we live, play and socialize. As a marketer, I thought the new direction was relevant and clearly thought out, and I look forward to seeing where they take it.
On the second day, for some reason, they opened with a skit involving a parrot and a cavewoman. Not really sure what happened there.
But! One thing I heard from the clients attending is that eliminating blind spots and streamlining their ITOM workflows were key pain points for them. As businesses move more and more toward cloud platforms and service-oriented architectures, the challenges of running an effective, efficient ITSM shop continue to grow. There are too many events going on, too many resources to manage, and too many tickets to look at. The people responsible for IT need help — whether it’s a tool that helps them enrich their CMDB or open the right tickets with the right actionable data, a monitoring platform that understands all kinds of IT resources and shares its data with any other ITOM software in their arsenal, or a partner that understands how to implement frictionless ITOM workflows.
We also gave away some pretty sweet Yeti coolers at our booth.
All in all, a great conference. Right now, we’re all gearing up for OUR big user conference of the year, GalaxZ18. Hopefully, you’ve all signed up! We’ll be talking a lot about our deep integrations with ServiceNow and other ITOM tools, as well as breaking some new product updates you won’t want to miss. And, we’re already looking ahead to Google Cloud Next in July — our first time at that conference and definitely one you'll want to check out.
