Cloud-based IT Service Management pioneer, Service-now.com is holding their annual user conference titled “Knowledge” at San Diego on April 18 – 22, 2010 at the Omni San Diego Hotel. The 4th annual conference of the SaaS player will officially start on April 20, with pre-conference sessions happening on the days before. The agenda has not been fixed yet and the call for papers is on.

Last year’s user conference was attended by 300 people, most of them being customers and partners from the Service-now eco-system.

User conferences are a good thing. It brings customers together with both the company and fellow customers. They learn from each other’s experiences and strategies. The vendor gets the opportunity to talk about best practices that can be used in the product(s). Case studies help understand different perspectives to tackle a problem. It can also be a great place for solution providers and partners to highlight their presence and expertise.

Some of the topics that could be covered in Service-now’s conference include:

• Creating a service catalog
• Designing an effective CMDB
• Workflow Automation
• Adopting ITIL v.3
• The full list is here.

I checked with Service-now and they have opened the conference to other vendors and speakers – it is not just restricted to people using/deploying Service-now. That is a good thing because finally the customer benefits.

Other interesting shows that you may be interested in going are:
- HDI’s 2010 Annual Conference and Expo – March 16 – 19, 2010 at Orlando Florida (http://www.thinkhdi.com/hdi2010/)
- Forrester’s Infrastructure & Operations Forum 2010 – March 17-18, 2010 at Dallas, Texas (http://www.forrester.com/events/eventdetail?eventID=2436)
- Interop Las Vegas – April 25 – 29, 2009 (http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/)

More details on upcoming events can be found on our events page.