 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's theCUBE, covering Knowledge 15. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Wikibon's flagship program. We go out to the events, expect to see them from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest we're excited to have is Brian Andrews, VP of IT at Stone Brewing Company. Looking forward to this interview all week. Love IPA, love Stone, love your beer. Let's talk IT. Where's the props? Welcome to theCUBE. I know, I wish I had beer in here. Gosh, just water today. So thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. Thank you. You guys obviously brew beer, so that's business, brick and mortar business. You ship beer, you chuck it out, you distribute it, you manufacture it. IT's involved. Give us a quick overview of the business that you're involved in on the IT side. Obviously the brewery is the main business. But underneath that, the IT piece. Tell us all about that, and we'll get into some of the service now. Good. Stuff. Good. Well, it's a $100 billion market, the beer market. Craft has really taken off. We're growing fast, 80% growth in craft last year compared to the beer markets, just barely hanging on it even. So we're really taking market share. It's a lot of fun. So we're the ninth largest craft brewery in the United States at Stone. Four major parts of the business. We've got the beer brewing and distributing that nationally. We have also our own distributing company. So the national goes out through third-party trucks and national distribution third-party distributors. And we have our own, for Southern California, we distribute our own beer. So 70 of our own trucks and a team distributing their sales reps. That's where our headquarters is. And that's where our headquarters is in San Diego, San Diego. If you built out distribution around the region. Yeah, in that area, yeah. We were forced to do that really at the time, our 19th year now going way back. We had to do that to get in the market. We have some beautiful bistros, just beautiful experiences to come and enjoy craft. That's another part of the business. So the restaurants and the bistros, our own farm, organic farm, it's part of that. And we have a retail business as well. We sell great merchandise online and in stores, six company stores. So there's a lot going on in the business. It's a- You got a brand. Yeah. You got the retail. Yeah. Customer experience. I mean, you got it. This is a full on, this isn't just blocking and tackling bottling beer and sending it out. Yeah. Yeah, it's really, I think, a unique and complex model for- Hey, you have a lot of moving parts to the model. Yeah, that's right. So what are the big sort of challenges is the VP of IT, and what's the business that's pulling you a lot of different directions? How is that evolving in the last few years? Yeah. Well, I joined a year and a half ago and we have really decided to grow. And invest and build this business. So we're going to be opening two more breweries, one in Virginia, Richmond, Virginia. We're excited about that one. And one in Berlin, Germany. And be the first American craft beer company going anywhere in Europe. That's great. So we're committed- Also Territories, they know their beer. They're excited about- You got to be good to be in there. I know, I know. But the craft movement's starting there. So we're going to help out there. But yeah, so we're going to, we decided to grow. And not all the companies are doing that and we're unique in building two new locations at one time. So there's a lot going on. A lot of risks too. And that's how you could potentially- That's right. So we have really been assembling the team to take us to the next level. And we have committed to an enterprise IT strategy and have a centralized model where we just want to put in the key building blocks throughout the company with IT that we can really put that scalable platform in place. So we're really about scalability and flexibility, being agile, mobile-friendly. These were the kind of drivers that were coming out when I first started. And I joined, started talking to the business folks right away, what are your pain points and doing that around all the groups. And we started to hear the same things. I need a system in brewery maintenance to take care of this equipment. And we have downtime on the equipment and we can't afford that because our production numbers are going way up. We have to have those machines run in 24-7. So that was one thing that was like the acute pain point. But they wanted forms to request maintenance. They wanted workflow, service level agreements, transparency, dashboards and reporting analytics, those kinds of things. So what time frame was this? Take us to what year is it? This is about a year and a half ago. Yeah, when I first started. So 19 years, they had some IT. 19 years in the company. Some IT legacy. But yeah, really going to heavily now invest and really accelerate that curve. Did you have visibility on this before you came in or did it really just come into focus after you came in and started querying the business? Yeah, it was really when I joined. But it's an inflection point. So we had, what worked before to get us to a certain point was there and it was okay to get us to where we were but to grow at the pace we now need to do. And we had already really started to buckle, I think. We should have been ahead a little more. But to really lift to this next level now, we needed this heavy investment and a new technology set of platforms, key investments and again. So how did you do that? And this is really awesome because it's really a great example of timing the winds at the right time. Business is exploding, craft as a market segment is great. You got a lot of moving parts in growth and then all of a sudden you got a bolt in an IT. Tuck is through that, that's a great use case. Yeah, yeah, it's really, it's been so fun. So yeah, so this brewery maintenance that they really needed something. Now they had already started talking to plant maintenance vendors and they were looking at certain applications and when I came on our COO, Pat Tiernan's great, he said, hey, nothing gets purchased without going through Brian and the IT. You wanna make sure that they're involved. So that was great to have the executive support. But talking with those guys, they had a few favorites and they really got hooked on this one platform they wanted. So okay, so I said, okay, hang on, let's, I'm talking to more people, let's just hold off a little bit, give me a little time, I'm new. So I talked to the facilities team and they said, hey, we need something for facilities that manages all our work orders and safety. We have a really good safety program and they wanted a system because it was all email-based and Excel. Same thing, track our requests coming in and analytics and everything was manual, so they wanted something. Media, they get tons of requests and t-shirts, posters, events, and all this comes in and they track it in a system that they were outgrowing. And of course in IT, I knew right away being on the BMC Tracket system, which was really an older client server. We hadn't upgraded it, we were limited on licenses. We can't even get in, they really use it as much as we need. I knew we needed something too. But these other pain points were out there that were significant enough that I said, well, we all want the same thing. So we started talking to ServiceNow. We had a great team that came to start working with us. We got a partner with Intraeus that helped us out as well. Getting these business requirements. We started to put some proof of concepts together and we were able to convince everybody that this platform could do it all for us. And we deflected all those other requested applications and just went all in on ServiceNow. We're basically a single platform. We're the single platform. So take us through that. So that's the classic. I mean sometimes in IT it's like you pack the parachute, someone else might have packed it, you pull a ripcord, it may not open. Right? So, you know, but let's take you through that. So did you have a confidence level? I mean, obviously they gave you demos, they had a team there. What was that decision point? I mean, you felt confident? Did they give, was there any kind of trial SE work? Well, I came to knowledge last year. That was the first experience I had. And we had been looking at the product lightly through the first quarter last year of 2014. We came here, really, really impressed with where the roadmap was going. And then it was really that second quarter after coming to knowledge that we were able to work with these different departments. They gave us the trust to give us some time and we built out some proof of concept. So now post decision, what happens? You have a meeting, everyone comes together, get training, was there development involved? How did that, what happened next? Well, we really just went for it in parallel with, we put IT last, that was, we needed something desperately, but I knew that if we focused on IT, we were going to miss our opportunity. So what does that mean? Does that mean make the technology decision last? Or does that mean the needs of the technology department came after the needs of the business? Yeah, more both, like I knew that this was where we were going to go for IT, the decision was made, that was, service now is it. But instead of starting the project, we said, let's just put that on hold and really start with brewing operations and maintenance. That was the number one driver. Facilities and safety came with that because there were some synergies. So those were the first groups we tackled. Yeah, so that's basically, you prioritize, that's the crown jewels of the business. So you go there first, right? Yeah, yeah. And then what happened after that? Yeah, so we got through several months of that and got all the requests working so that all the requests were coming into the system and started to fine tune that. So that was actually last year going through, see we signed our contract, service now in June, started the project in late July by October or so, we were getting requests into the system and used that quarter four to fine tune reports and analytics. We did start at that time then, we started media and IT as well. Media wanted project management and IT could get started too. So we started those in parallel and got through that end of the year. This, there's still some work we're doing. I mean, we're here at April now, but we're in pretty good shape here. Got through most of it. So you're invested, are you happy? Very happy, yeah, we're thrilled, yeah, thrilled with it. What are some of the proof points, kind of the before and after, kind of like, okay, we got service now, if we didn't have service now, this would happen. Can you give an example? Like just some pain points, I mean, pain points and vitamins. I would say aspirin vitamins and steroids and vaccines are like, kind of like, but we get a solution. So here you got an aspirin and vitamin. Yeah, yeah. What examples can you give? Well, I mean, we certainly would have been in a place with three or four, maybe five different systems. So I knew I would have needed if we would have gone that direction. Much more software expense, hardware for some client server, which would have been bad and more IT staff and business staff to support. So we avoided all that extra cost, at least a quarter million, I think, in saving so far by not going that direction. Plus, by doing this, now we've got a COO dashboard. He can go into each of his groups, all these groups I talked about, report into him, and he can drill down to each department and see these real-time dashboards. So the data we're getting out of it's been great. Each of the department stakeholders has their status meetings, they can pull those real-time dashboards up, see all the accounts. Real-time management decision-making going on the fly. On the fly, yeah. Transparency is big, you know, versus the black holes of requests coming through. Are you the defecto CIO or is it, yeah, okay. Yeah, we have 15 people on IT, very lean. You report to the COO. Report to the COO, yeah. But talk about the, I want to get your perspective on this, everything is a service, great marketing. Gotta give it to service now, good marketing. We believe that's going to be everything's a service. Amazon just launched machine learning as a service. Everything will be launched as a service. So what's your view of that, okay? I mean, that's marketing, it's cliche-ish, but you know, kind of a gimmick for marketing. But it does translate to this new API economy. It talks about the things that are really going on. Agile, DevOps. How do you translate those trending, you know, topics to reality, your world? And what do you guys look at that roadmap as for your future? Yeah, well we're really starting with that concept of all the departments that are coming on are providing services for stones. We can get this amazing beer out to our fans, right? That's what it's all about. So in order to do that, we all have to be executing. We've got to eliminate the thrash. Lots of cross-team dependencies that happen. You know, big enterprise initiatives that require us to work together. But yeah, it's really just helping each other to get it done. There's so much reliance on each other. So yeah, each team- Are people happy on the IT team? Oh sure, sure, very happy. We're so committed to the business and care so deeply about what we're doing. Being close to that business and knowing that we're contributing just feels so good. And company, how many people in the company? We're coming up on a thousand now. Oh, okay, I was going to ask you, 15 people in IT, did you look at Express? Yeah, no, we're going for it. Although I suppose you're a candidate, but you need more. So we are, Dave and I were talking about this. We think you guys should be the official beer for theCUBE. Yeah, absolutely. I'm wondering about that. Absolutely. theCUBE brought to you by Stone. All right, all right, I love it. That sounds really good. We've got the background. Stone. Okay, next year we're going to talk about that. Yeah, that sounds really good. That's a real ESPN of tech. We've got to have, you know, Stone. Yeah, we're excited about this project management concept too. So we have, I mean, there's so much going on, but we have these different silos happening. It's so hard to give service when you have the silos of information. So for a new beer to launch, and we did like 40 new beers last year, special releases and collaborations, that's a big project in itself to get that out. Yeah, that's a good point. It brings up the dashboard piece, right? So you have the real-time dashboarding and you've got the data. If it's in a silo, it's going to have a lag. That's right. Real problems. So I've got to ask you, that being said, external data, because you guys must move on things like trends at Coachella to all the, you know, cultural trends. Because if you see any blip in the radar, you've got to react to it, give you flavor. So how do you guys deal with the external data coming in? Yeah, well, we're not there yet in service now, but I would love to get there. But there's a ton of information that we have to get about what's happening at our distributors and what have they purchased? And we don't get to actually see what beer is going to what account, because that goes through the distributor, unless we get it from a third party data aggregator. So we've got to be able to feed that back in, which we do, and that's part of our ERP, but- But do you get the data from the local, because you have local distributors. And that's ours, because yeah, that's ours. So we have that data, but the other 105 distributors out there, we have to rely on the third party data. So you can envision building on top of service now in terms of dealing with extensibility around- Absolutely. Data coming from third party. Absolutely. Workflow, value chain, supply chain. Yeah, no doubt, yeah, for sure. And yeah, we're just, we're not quite there yet. What's the secret sauce in the beer? Can you share? Oh, I can't. I love. I love. I love. There's a lot of passion about doing quality. I love it. That's a key part of it. I love beer. The developer community, it's not time to value, it's time to beer. That's the expression we hear. Oh, I like that. That's really good. Time to value, that's a business, or no, no, developer, time to beer. And then Fred, he says, no, people don't, they don't stop coding. And I go, well, they'll drink beer while coding. That's right, that's right. It is really, it's all about the beer. We really stay focused on that, but yeah. Well, Brian, I really appreciate you coming on. Any advice I'd like to get you to share with the group watching? A lot of people are watching ServiceNow right now. Certainly the developer community now with the private instances really makes for a more robust and then the extensibility is going to go through the group. In my opinion, I believe that now that they have that, I think you're going to see a lot of point applications, this marketplace coming out of the store. I think you can see a ton of innovation. So let's share with the folks out there, your experience, your vision, what it means to your business and you personally and your staff. Yeah, ServiceNow as a whole. Yeah, ServiceNow as a whole platform, the tech. The tech and under the hood. Well, I'll just say it really is a cornerstone platform for us to grow this business on. And we do feel like those building blocks that are in there make it quick for us to deliver value to the company and that's been big for us. We were able just within a couple of months to get these groups on and there's a lot more to do but we're going with that agile continuous improvement model. You know, there's just so much common thread and so much power in these building blocks coming together that you can reuse, repurpose, get into mobile interface. And we love the idea of bolting on new apps that we can build without having to have a big development team. We really don't have a development team on our 15 person IT. We don't have QA, we don't have a real development group. So we need to be able to have a few people deliver powerful solutions quickly without having to get into serious coding and testing and the like. So speed, speed to beer, I like that, time to beer. I just followed you guys on Twitter, 191,000 followers. Obviously social media is big. We will test out your ticketing system with our media requests for t-shirts and event beer at our parties. And congratulations on your success story. I mean, I think it's a great example of, you know, this shift that we're in, people are re-transforming and re-architecting in real time, looking at these cost decisions, value, timing, and it's a really great use case. Thanks for sharing. John, thanks, Dave. Thank you very much, guys. We really appreciate Brian Andrews, VP of IT, CIO, a stone brewing company here inside theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.