Knowledge16 Recap
Knowledge16 has been an exciting conference for PagerDuty. We’ve talked to hundreds of users, delivered some awesome demos, and connected with many of our customers. We’ve also had the opportunity to learn more about ServiceNow and how their products are revolutionizing the ITSM space.
Highlights and Learnings
For me, the highlight of the week has been demoing our certified ServiceNow integration. Seeing users’ faces light up with excitement during the demo has been incredibly rewarding for me. We have built a bi-directional integration with ServiceNow in which incidents, incident updates, and work notes are seamlessly synchronized between the two platforms. Users are excited about this integration because they can use PagerDuty as their primary incident response solution and still know that ServiceNow is being updated in the background. The added step of toggling back to ServiceNow to update incidents is completely eliminated – reducing the time users spend on managing a service ticket. Best of all, setting up the integration, just like our core platform, only takes only a few minutes (and as always, our award winning support team is ready to lend a hand if there are any hiccups getting setup).
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from Knowledge16 for me has been how revolutionary ServiceNow has been for organizations. Many of these organizations were either not tracking the inner-workings of their business, or were using legacy ITSM tools that offered confusing user interfaces and could not be easily integrated with other tools. The rise of ServiceNow has allowed these organizations to establish processes around all the services they offer. Once you can track these services, you can analyze them and improve upon them. ServiceNow is solving a big problem, and as a result, their conference has nearly doubled in size year after year.
In speaking with so many ServiceNow users over the last three days, it was clear they needed PagerDuty. Handling on-call rotations in Excel, combing through run books to find the correct responder, and using email as a primary notification tool are just some of the stories I heard. These hacked together incident response practices are leading to increased downtime, and lost customers, which ultimately costs companies significant revenue. PagerDuty provides a better solution to these inefficient practices, allowing organizations to coordinate responses to incidents in a quick and effective manner.
Tip of the Iceberg
Lastly, while adopting ServiceNow is a step in the right direction in developing a mature IT organization, it really is just the tip of the iceberg. PagerDuty can serve as the conduit to help organizations update their tooling and develop a more agile and DevOps centered focus to IT. We see our integration with ServiceNow as an essential piece in helping organizations chip away at the IT debt they have acquired and eventually overhaul their antiquated systems and tools.
We have had a great time at Knowledge16, and will take our learnings back with us to San Francisco and Toronto. I am eager to continue to watch ServiceNow lead the ITSM space, and the value PagerDuty will provide.
See you all at Knowledge17!