On 7, 8 and 9 October, we hosted the second edition of NowForum, the IT Transformation event series in Frankfurt, Paris and London. Launched in 2013, the series evolved globally this year with the addition of NowForums in Washington, D.C., Sydney and Singapore. We’re likely to add more events to the NowForum 2015 calendar.
NowForum is all about our customers
With over 1,750 attendees, 40 contributing sponsors, 40 customer presentations and average attendee grades of 8.2 out of 10 across the 3 cities, NowForum 2014 was a tremendous success – a great testament to ServiceNow’s growth in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, reiterated in today’s announcement of Q3 earnings.
NowForum is all about our customers. 70% of this year’s event content was delivered by 30 of our local customers in Germany, France and the UK. Volkswagen, Coca Cola, Betfair, Lafarge, Deutsche Post DHL, Accenture, the NHS, to name but a few – our customers delivered keynote presentations, hosted breakout sessions and made themselves available to meet with prospective customers and journalists to share their perspective and answer questions. Most of their presentations are available in our community (Frankfurt – Paris – London to follow).
Our customers are proud of the transformations ServiceNow enabled them to drive throughout their organisations. They are appreciated for the time and money they save, which can then be used to accelerate innovation. They get credit for driving real innovation in the enterprise – they are very passionate about ServiceNow.
Here is our NowForum 2014 recap video:
Slootman, the leader
ServiceNow keynotes were all about our customers as well. President and CEO Frank Slootman shared his vision on Enterprise Service Management and the strategic direction of ServiceNow. Every claim was backed by customer feedback and insights. How is service defined, delivered, assured and analysed in the modern enterprise? How can ServiceNow help organisations structure and accelerate these processes, remove redundant tasks, create transparency and enable data-driven decision-making?
Luddy, the innovator
ServiceNow founder and Chief Product Officer Fred Luddy talked about empowering the Service-Oriented Enterprise. He shared a good number of innovations that will become available in future releases of the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform. It is all focused on removing email, MS Excel, SharePoint, PowerPoint and Visio out of the day-to-day working process. Instead, a single system of record allows employees to engage data, knowledge, co-workers, products, services, vendors, analyses and reporting. This system of record and engagement can quite easily be augmented with custom applications that help route even more work across the enterprise. The line of business can create apps without the support of IT. ServiceNow is quickly evolving into an online collaboration platform supporting the global service process and the users tasked with improving the service experience.
McGee, the operator
COO Dan McGee showed what it takes to run a Service-Oriented Enterprise. Dan’s presentation has evolved from the keynote he delivered at Knowledge14 in San Francisco. For his contributions to NowForum, he got the highest grades from our audience in 2 out of 3 cities. Dan started with pointing out that no cloud is created equal – we have public and private clouds, consumer clouds and enterprise clouds, departmental clouds and enterprise-wide clouds. The ServiceNow platform is of the latter kind – it supports the enterprise across departmental and geographical boundaries and processes more transactions per customer than any other SaaS infrastructure, Salesforce, Workday and Netsuite included. Rather than just the sales force, the HR process or the finance workflow, ServiceNow sustains the enterprise IT cloud across all functions. Today, each company is an IT company, and each department relies on IT. It creates an awesome requirement in terms of cloud infrastructure, security, performance and availability.
ServiceNow invested in building an enterprise cloud that is second to none – which again is all about our customers. They are the ones taking the heat when the service is not available.
Industry changing
We gathered 1,750 people over the course of 3 days. NowForum displayed the growth, determination and energy of our community. The New Age of Service is Now and Enterprise Service Management is how we get there.
These are two of my favourite quotes, taken from the attendee surveys:
In UK: “NowForum was an excellent event. Thank you for making IT Service Management exciting again!”
In Germany: “What great energy! ServiceNow feels like SAP in the early nineties.”
See you at NowForum 2015!
@keeshenniphof 