Knowledge12...

My company (ServiceNow) has an annual U.S. users conference, called “Knowledge”.  This year's conference is “Knowledge12”, and will be held in New Orleans, starting this coming Sunday.  I'll be attending this one, as I have the preceding four.  This year I'm presenting one lab (“Field Normalization”) and I'm helping on a second (“Discovery”) – but the most important reason I'm going is to meet and talk with our customers and prospective customers.  The Knowledge conferences are a wonderful opportunity for those of us who work for ServiceNow to meet our customers face-to-face.

Back in '08 we held the first Knowledge conference in our small (but beloved) Solana Beach office.  For the lunches, we rented tables and ate out in our parking lot.  I don't know the precise attendance figures, but my memory say that something like 40 or 50 people showed up.  Our “presentations” and “labs” were, for the most part, in tiny conference rooms with just a few people packed in.  I remember speaking to a group of perhaps a half dozen people about our Discovery product.

Every year the Knowledge conference has grown bigger and better.  This year is no exception.  There are many ways in which this Knowledge12 (or “K12” in our internal shorthand) has grown, but a couple stand out to me. 

First, we have many customers presenting their successes with our products this year.  In fact, I believe it's true that our customers dominate the presentor's list.  That feels like a significant milestone to me – enough customers have been using our products long enough to have made major achievements with it, and to be interested in sharing their experiences with their peers. 

The second standout item is really a silly little thing, but one that really stuck in my brain.  A few weeks ago, we (in engineering) had a meeting with our IT folks to help them understand the bandwidth requirements for the conference.  Until that meeting, it hadn't occurred to me that bandwidth might be an issue.  The IT folks, though, did the math: well over 2,000 people crammed into a single facility, and every last one of them was going to be using at least one (and often several) WiFi-equipped devices.  Furthermore, our demonstrations, presentations, and labs were all going to be completely dependent on quality Internet access – after all, we're a SaaS company, and our products are all out in the big old Internet cloud.  The bottom line was that we were going to need a lot of Internet bandwidth, and in particular, a lot more than the conference facility had readily available.  The IT folks had to scramble to find alternatives, and they didn't have a whole lot of time to do it in.  In a few days we'll know if the IT team pulled it off!

One consequence of Knowledge12 is that my blogging will be quite spotty between Sunday and Thursday this coming week.  I'm taking my camera, so hopefully I'll be able to post a few photos of the conference...