May in review: niche IT news ServiceNow and Infor

This month in niche IT news, ServiceNow Knowledge wraps up with some exciting announcements and release of a new update and AI engine, while Infor buys Birst and talks Cloud Based services and improved products coming soon!

In case you missed it – here are our highlights from Knowledge17

Washington Frank USA was proud to sponsor and exhibit at ServiceNow Knowledge17 in Orlando Florida! We were able to attend the top keynotes at Knowledge17, the Women in Technology breakfast and lunch series, and we got to see the unveiling of the Jakarta update.

Announcing the ServiceNow Intelligent Automation engine https://t.co/QkA9sBO2s8 #futureofwork #Know17 pic.twitter.com/ua0ySeiSOH

— ServiceNow (@servicenow) May 9, 2017

ServiceNow launches Intelligent Automation Engine™

There were so many new innovations announced at Knowledge17 – but the Intelligent Automation Engine was, perhaps, the most exciting things to come out of the conference. With the ServiceNow Intelligent Automation Engine, machine learning can be applied in order to prevent outages, route work, evaluate performance, and make predictions to drive improvements. Intelligent Automation Engine-enabled products will be available 2017’s third-quarter. Dave Wright, CSO for ServiceNow says: “Intelligent automation heralds a new era in workplace productivity. With this game-changing innovation, we have embedded intelligence across our Platform. Trained with each customer’s own data, ServiceNow is enabling customers to achieve a quantum leap in the speed and economics of their business.”

ServiceNow to deliver intelligent automation to everyday enterprise work

New on the NowPlatform will be the messaging capabilities brought in from the acquisition of Qlue’s virtual agent. This will enable users to more easily interact with customer support or with HR and IT service desks. BuildOnMe is an early-stage company delivering artificial intelligence applications.

Knowledge17: work at lightspeed

ServiceNow CEO John Donahoe hosts the Work at Lightspeed Keynote for the opening of Knowledge17. This was a not-to-be missed keynote, especially when VP & GM of Global Support for GE Digital takes the stage, announcing that GE Digital will hire 20,000 Women into the tech industry by 2020. A must-watch keynote session.

Infor buys business analytic vendor Birst

Infor is looking to merge the enterprise analytics of Birst with their industry-focused ERP. In a press release, Infor stated: “BI companies provide the analytics platform but don’t understand industry processes and potential insights. Application companies understand the processes and industries but have lacked the platform to render data and analytics. Infor and Birst represent the convergence of these worlds.”

Lessons learned from working with Amazon Web Services

Insights on moving to the cloud – an Infor executive talks about the three-year journey with Amazon Web Services, which hosted Infor’s cloud-based applications.

Infor’s Duncan Angove – riding out the retail sector turbulence

In an interview with Duncan Angove, president of Infor, he talks how retailers are working to compete with services like Amazon. Angove says, “Unlike manufacturing and other industries, retail has a much larger product count or SKU count. A manufacturer might have 1,000 SKUs. In retail, companies have 100,000 in a store up to one million active SKUs, then you multiply that by 5,000 stores and you need visibility of daily orders. Suddenly you’re talking about volumes in the billions. That’s why generally in retail, we’ve always managed through averages and that leads to imprecise decisions.”

Did we miss something in the exciting world of Niche IT news?  Let us know in the comments below, or by tweeting us @washington_frk.