K19 was an absolute blast, yet another fantastic year for the event. Now with around 200 exhibitors and more than 20,000 attendees, it brought together so much of this amazing and ever-expanding community and gave us a great opportunity to see all of the latest innovations.
A few upcoming products in the pipeline caught my eye: Financial Close being added to Financial Service Management from the New York release; better horizontal and vertical scalability for high volume instances; enhancements to Natural Language Understanding with direct voice-to-SQL translations; the DevOps app in New York release. I could list several more, but I think it’s clear by this point that there are some really exciting upgrades on the horizon.
What really stuck with me was hearing companies’ success stories and how ServiceNow had helped them to modernise their processes. We saw both Virgin trains and United Airlines demonstrate the power of the platform through how it enabled them to truly digitally transform their businesses. Virgin Trains started with ITSM in 2017, moving quickly to CSM in early 2018, before then moving to fraud management in late 2018. This is an impressive journey by any standard and a fantastic example of a truly Agile Digital transformation!
My favourite sessions of the conference were those relating to quality, best practices and reverting to the out-of-the-box functionality.The labs about service catalog design and best practices for ServiceNow upgrades were jam packed! Amgen’s insights session was particularly memorable, as they talked about returning to out-of-box after realizing that their heavy customization meant they were struggling to leverage the latest platform innovations such as AI.
All in all a great conference, and we are already looking forward to K20 in Orlando!