… and that’s a Hackathon-wrap!

ServiceNow Hackathons have a unique ‘soundwave’.

First there is an excited noisy rush of chatter as people make new connections and start to get enthused about their project plans ahead. Then there’s the quiet period of concentration, as work commences. This is interspersed with occasional spurts of exasperation and frustration mixed with moments of euphoria and elation. Finally, there is a kind of murmuring tidal wave of energy that surfaces into whoops and cheers as the final submissions get put forward.

ServiceNow’s 2017 global around-the-world Hackathon played out to something like this soundwave soundtrack in every one of its 17 locations around the planet. Okay there were a few cultural differences, but you get the idea, right?

The whole event actually ran for 36 hours from Sydney to San Diego. We provisioned the latest production build of ServiceNow in under sixty seconds to over 100 teams.

Breadth of work

This was a big Hackathon. We welcomed a total of 504 participants in 161 teams across 27 locations. The solutions built ranged from a complete rebuild of a learning management system, onward to an email campaign management tool, apps designed to help DevOps engineers and then downward to submissions that included chatbots and software agents.

So, essentially, we saw work focused on widgets and smaller application component functions, right the way up to full go-to-market solutions. Further here, we can say that we saw everything from browser-based solutions to mobile applications.

Breadth of attendees

This breadth of technical scope was matched by the work role diversity of the participants themselves. This Hackathon naturally attracted hard core software engineers, as always. But we also welcomed staff who hold down roles in marketing, legal, sales, testing, support, strategic team leadership and professional services.

ServiceNow Hackathons champion an approach that we like to describe as ‘low code, no code and all the way to pro-code’ – and at least one of the regional winners has come from the no code category.

Themes and threads

These events always provide great insight into the way emerging technologies are being implemented. Strong themes surfaced including the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation tools to help trainee developers get to working with source code submission more quickly.

Looking forward, we must look even more closely at which work practices and processes we undertake manually to be able to find more even areas where ServiceNow can be applied. Next, we’ll also look to make the whole event slightly more interpersonal by allowing participants to bring their kids along. It’s inclusivity at every level as far as we are concerned at ServiceNow.

Regional international winners

As a global event staged on a follow-the-sun structure to reflect the needs of many distributed software application development teams who find themselves located in different territories around the world.

Regional international winners were as follows:

EMEA Region: Amsterdam, Staines.

EMEA winner: Team 020 – Solution ‘ConnectNow’ is a collaborative combination of solutions to enable all resources that connect with a customer base to effectively manage and coordinate activities whilst utilising VTB, PPM, Reporting & Analytics, Chat and much more!

Americas region: Waltham, Massachusetts; Atlanta, Georgia; Florida; North Virginia; Chicago, Illinois; Minneapolis–Saint Paul; Dallas, Texas; San Diego, California; San Francisco, California; Santa Clara, California; Seattle, Washington State.

Americas winner: LearNow- Solution ‘LearnNow’ is an application built for learners, managers and admins who will benefit from the improved user experiences that this application delivers as they also save time and enjoy more efficient training experiences.

APJ Region: Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore, Hyderabad.

APJ winner – Save As Thugs – Solution ‘MarCEDes’ is an application built to create and manage email and marketing campaigns, incorporating a simple and intuitive designer to create meaningful and rich templates.

Overall global winner: TEAM 020 from EMEA – This solution blew the judges away! It encompassed everything we were looking for in terms of innovation, using the power of the platform, utilizing many existing features and functionality to deliver an overall solution that will change how ServiceNow works with its customers.

Why ServiceNow Hackathon’s Are Awesome 

If you’ve already been an attendee at a ServiceNow Hackathon then you’ll already know that these awesome events just rock. Our hacker events welcome both technical and non-technical staff (with other valuable project skills) and bring together teams of people that very often only just meet for the first time on the day itself.

ServiceNow Hackathons make people think differently, ServiceNow Hackathons make people create new innovations that really change lives… and ServiceNow Hackathons are amazing fun from start to finish. Come with us on our next global ServiceNow Hackathon and help create the shape of the soundwave.