• Blog
  • Technology

Jenkins World: Taking Your User Conference from Zero to 60

PAN Communications
  • Blog
  • Technology

Jenkins World: Taking Your User Conference from Zero to 60

PAN Communications

With hundreds of tech conferences each year, it’s difficult to make yours stand out. Why should CIOs and CEOs send their employees to your user conference versus your competitors’? The key is to make your show so beneficial for attendees that they have no choice but to attend. This is no more evident than with the annual Jenkins World conference, where Jenkins users and DevOps professionals can gather to swap tips, discuss challenges and learn from industry experts. Jenkins World is taking place Aug. 28-31 in San Francisco this year.

Back in 2011, Jenkins World (then called Jenkins User Conference) was a small morning gathering in Boston led by PAN’s client CloudBees. Fast forward to 2017, and the conference is now expecting nearly 2,000 attendees, spans four days and is in downtown San Francisco! Jenkins World has become THE conference for Jenkins users, DevOps professionals, the hottest companies in the DevOps space and tech giants. With influential keynotes including Jez Humble, CTO at DevOps Research and Assessment LLC, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, founder of Jenkins and CTO of CloudBees, and Sacha Labourey, CEO of CloudBees, attendees are traveling from around the world to learn from the best in the industry.

With an estimated one million users around the world, Jenkins is the de facto continuous delivery and DevOps orchestration tool and is widely considered the most popular automation server in use today. As the community has grown, so has Jenkins World. It’s no surprise that it has grown to be such an influential conference, and we love planning, promoting, pitching and perfecting our Jenkins World strategy each year.

CloudBees, in partnership with PAN, starts early in planning for Jenkins World, ensuring that we execute on a fully integrated approach that touches on every front to generate awareness and drive registrations.

From a social media standpoint, CloudBees and PAN executed a Game of Thrones-themed social media campaign to drum up excitement and awareness as registration opened. To maximize engagement, we also conducted online contests. CloudBees drew on past success and audience personas in order to optimize this year’s social media activity.

PAN also worked closely with media sponsors such as DZone and DevOps.com to create a steady cadence of content that emphasized the keynotes, workshops and training opportunities, sessions, speakers and networking opportunities available to attendees. Together, there were 13 published articles in the month leading up to the show to ensure potential attendees had all information to attend and there was buzz leading up to the conference.

To continue the momentum, PAN and CloudBees planned ahead by inviting top media to the show. With a number of exciting announcements for both CloudBees and the Jenkins community, CloudBees leverages this show to make the most impact for both the community and media. Inviting top media, not only provides valuable facetime with CloudBees executives and customers but also gives them a chance to hear from all of the Jenkins World sponsors, keynotes and sessions. PAN planned an exclusive media event at the show to give reporters time to hear from a wide range of experts and customers in an organized setting.

CloudBees and Jenkins aren’t the only ones with news at Jenkins World. Sponsors of the conference also have an exciting lineup of announcements. With sold-out sponsorship packages this year, there will be a lot of news to stay on top of.

The growth of Jenkins World speaks to a larger trend that we’re seeing across our tech client portfolio. DevOps has gained tremendous recognition as the way to deliver software faster and align IT to the needs of the business. We have watched this trend grow and become a reality as the market adopts DevOps into practice and companies undergo digital transformation. We’re excited to hear more about the future of DevOps at Jenkins World. Stay tuned for our recap next week!

We’re ready to move.
Are you?

Contact Us