Christmas and the New Year are often times to reflect upon the previous twelve months and to look forward to the next. So it seemed timely to look back to Knowledge13, ServiceNow's annual global customer event, and then forward to the upcoming Knowledge14 event in San Francisco.
Held at the Aria in Las Vegas last May, the Knowledge13 event was attended by 4000 IT pros making it one of the largest IT service management (ITSM) events in the world. But to call it an "ITSM event" is an understatement and perhaps misses the point of the conference. Knowledge is a business-focused event where attendees share, and learn from, success stories related to innovation, cloud, mobile, automation, app dev, customer-centricity, enterprise enablement, ITSM, and more.
Knowledge13 — by the numbers
The most amazing number has to be the number of attendees — close to 4000 — and the year-on-year attendee growth levels. As the diagram shows, attendance has doubled year-on-year since Knowledge07:
At Knowledge13 there were 174 breakout sessions and labs:
- 15,716 lab instances were provisioned by ServiceNow Orchestration
- There were close to 10,000 individual lab attendees and none were turned away due to capacity issues.
Of the 120 breakout sessions:
- 93% of sessions were delivered by customers (other sessions included industry analysts and industry luminaries such as Gene Kim and Ken Gonzalez)
- 15 breakouts were delivered by customer executives.
There were 9 pre-conference training courses with nearly 1,000 students — that's double the previous year and more than the entire attendee audience for Knowledge11.
There were 45 Innovation of the Year entries — again double that of the previous year. With Target the winner:
The first CreateNow Hackathon was won by KickITnow — 7 people, from 6 different customer companies, who came together JUST for this event. They proved that, in just 11 hours, a group who have never worked together before can build a functional application on the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform.
Knowledge14 — the lowdown
So to 2014.
Knowledge14, in San Francisco next April, will be a point of sharing, learning, and collaboration for thousands of IT professionals representing the world's most innovative companies and recognizable brands. That's over 6000, yes 6000, CIOs to System Administrators and all roles in between — who will congregate at Knowledge14 for five days to share proven service automation strategies and to learn how other IT pros achieved significant and real results with the cloud.
Throwing out some other numbers:
- There will be 180+ presentational/interactive sessions spanning CIO to Developer topics.
- Up to 90% of these sessions will be delivered by ServiceNow customers, i.e. those that have "been there, done it, and bought the t-shirt."
- There will also be more than 100 lab sessions — almost double Knowledge13 — to help customers get more out of their investment in ServiceNow.
So make attending Knowledge14 your "professional" New Year resolution
If numbers and stats aren't your thing, hear what attendees said about last year's event in this video. Knowledge14 will be an amazing event and I hope to see you there.
