 Okay, we're back, this is theCUBE, this is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. And this is SiliconANGLE.com's continuous coverage of knowledge, ServiceNow's big user conference. We're here with Michael Glenn. Michael's the director of architecture at AgriPore, which is a multi-billion dollar dairy farmer cooperative. Michael, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah, so we're here at the big conference. Now, this is not your first knowledge I take it? It is my first knowledge, actually. It is, okay, it is. That's cool, so what do you think? Extraordinary so far. I'm pleased to see the number of different sessions that we can go to, the lab sessions, very interesting and very informative. So I'm curious, what got you here this year? Well, how long you've been a ServiceNow customer? We've been a ServiceNow customer for two years now. And basically, we started off with the typical modules that everybody implements, configuration change, incident problem, et cetera. And we're looking at where our next steps are. So looking mostly at project management and things like that. So you're here trying to squint through all that stuff and learn from your peers? Get more ideas and see what our next steps are gonna be. So let's start with AgriPore. It's kind of an interesting organization. So tell us about it and tell us more about your role there. So AgriPore is a cooperative owned by about 3,800 dairy farmers basically in Quebec, a recent merger with some in the Atlantic provinces. So it's a growing business. Basically we're spread throughout Canada and Northeastern United States. About 25 plants, 5,500 employees. And we transform something like 3.2 billion liters of milk a year and generate about 3.7 billion in revenue. So talk a little bit more about your business and what's changing in your business. What's driving your business? Well, like I mentioned, we're constantly expanding. New CEO arrived last year which generated a lot of new strategic decisions. Mergers of a couple of our divisions and the most notable change on our side was the merge of our three IT departments which were totally separate before merged into one corporate IT. And so we've been leveraging a lot of stuff in service now to help manage that kind of change. So the industry that you serve is obviously a staple of most homes but there's more competition, right? You've got competition from soy products and rice products. How is that changing your business? Well, there's not that much space if you want to go in and grab new markets. So it's a lot of development of new products, value added products in the dairy part and on the cheese side also. So, and it's a little bit communicating vases in there. You grab a little bit of market share from one and it just moves but you know, overall it's the same amount of consumption, yeah. So I was going to say on the cooperative side, so that's got to be a unique challenge in terms of not just distributed employees but they're not really employees. Well, the owners are basically limited to being, they have to be dairy farmers. So that is basically the pool of people who own the company. In terms of employees, the employees can be from any type of walk of life. What's kind of the IT connection with all these distributed farms and points of contact and how does that all work? Actually, it sounds very different than kind of your traditional field office. Well, interestingly in Canada, the milk that our owners produce doesn't necessarily come to our cooperative. In Canada it's regulated by the government and basically all milk is distributed to different companies which aren't necessarily ours based on their needs. So the actual milk that's produced by our owners is not necessarily come to us. So that's a little bit particularly, which is a little bit different than in the States. But our link to, from an IT point of view is mostly with the actual employees of the plants and the sales people who transform the milk that is produced by the farmers and who sell it. So was the catalyst for service now the consolidation of your IT operations? No, the catalyst actually was we had quite a few applications built in-house on Lotus Notes, which we'd been working with for at least 12 years. And time goes on, more difficult to find Lotus Notes developers. So we started moving to Exchange for our email to SharePoint for document management. And we had to do something with all of our in-house applications, which basically helped us. We had inventory in there, we had some change management, which thankfully we had already developed using ITIL as our guidelines. So moving away from that to something else was pretty straightforward. And what we liked especially about service now is actually there are a lot of things that I find similar in service now than Lotus Notes. I see it more as a development platform, just like Notes is a development platform. Service now is also a development platform, which comes with a bunch of stuff already built in. So we really liked that aspect of it of being able to configure it and to modify it to suit our needs. I remember when IBM bought Lotus Notes, I remember talking to some IBM executives about that platform nature. And they actually saw that vision through. The problem is it's a product that was developed a long, long time ago. It really doesn't serve your needs as a CMDB that well. Compared to what we saw, we've seen in the demonstrations over the past few days of the application development on your service now. I mean, there's no comparison with the ease with which you can develop something. You don't need to be a programmer, really. You just need to configure things is what it comes down to. So one of the things that we've been trying to figure out, Michael, is how people justify bringing in service now. Because it's so obvious the benefits, but it's not necessarily easiest sale to a CFO. No, it's a hard sell because when we started looking at it, so this is like two years or so ago, we were looking at the big players in the ITSM type suite markets. And actually, service now was a footnote to our presentation. We were in the six figures, obviously, for implementing some of these suites. And we had this footnote that said, by the way, their software is a service that exists for this. And basically, our CFO saw the footnote and he said, no, I'd like to know more about that. And so basically, service now was our first foray into software as a service and going more to a constant cost, operating cost model, rather than a large capital expense type upgrade, which you have to go and repeat five or six years down the line whenever you decide to go to another version. Okay, so that move to a variable expense, obviously, is going to appeal to a lot of CFOs. Yeah, it could. At the same time, there's an expense related to other processes that you got to develop or you got to tear down old processes. Yeah. Did you have to do a business case to bring it in, or was it just sort of, hey, we want to go into this SAS model? Well, I'd say the business case, the SAS model, if we looked at it over a period of five or 10 years, just again with the repeated large capex, it was even Steven, if you wanted to look at it that way. And so the other big thing that really weighed in with that was that ServiceNow comes with everything. You have all the applications. You don't have to buy another thing if I want to do, I don't know, change management, another module for whatever. Plus, there's all the other applications that are outside of the basic ITEL, the project management part, the finance management. So we just said, well, look, you're getting a lot more bang for your buck here. Yeah, so. You don't need it right now. You know you've got it, and you can do it whenever you want. But I can still see a lot of CFOs here. Well, we don't really need it right now, so don't spend the money, but you had a CFO that was forward thinking in terms of, hey, we want to move to this variable-expensing model, and this is a logical place to do it. Definitely. So what's been the business impact of bringing in ServiceNow? I think the most impact that we had, I think is what I was mentioning at the beginning. We were merging three IT departments into one, and it's mostly, it's the facility with which we've been able to integrate the IT staff from the other departments and to integrate processes, and especially on the CMDB side, being able to bring in the data from the other divisions. So in thinking about, so where are you at with the CMDB? Have you talked about that journey? Yeah, well the CMDB, basically, when we had started looking at the different modules that we could put in place, we were working with a consulting group and in discussion it was, okay, we go with incident, then we go with change and problem and configuration management. And when we started looking at incident management and categorizing incidents and things like that, we started saying, well, most of this information that we're trying to use to categorize is information that I have in the CMDB. It's either hardware or it's this software or this title or this device or whatever. So we said, let's start looking at the configuration management first then. If we want to base everything on that, let's structure it properly and use that as a leverage the information that's there for the other processes. So that's where you started. You started focusing on the CMDB and getting that built. Exactly, yeah. And we used both a bottom up and a top down approach. Our bottom up approach was basically going from our infrastructure. So our different locations, data centers, servers that are in there and what software is running on that. And our top down approach was basically going from a business component model. So basically a business component model describes absolutely all of the business processes for our particular industry. So for example, our dairy industry. And so that was basically the top part of our CMDB, the logical part if you want. And then we just worked up from there to describe which services are used by those different processes, which applications belong to those services, et cetera. So it gives us an end to end view of all of the components straight up to the business process. So the top down gave you the connection to the business. Exactly. And that's where value is flowing. Yeah, and I think one of the important things about putting the entire list of business processes, even if we don't serve them in IT, is the strategic part of it. When you're doing strategic planning, you want to know which areas of the business aren't well served by IT or which ones are over served by IT. So by having absolutely 100% of all the processes that you can have, you get that kind of vision in there. I love this story. Were there organizational issues with regard to getting people to give up those processes and put them into the CMPD? Well, who owns that now? Well, essentially the model itself, the business component model is static. So we didn't have to deal with, do you agree that this is a business process or not? It already existed. So it was straight like that. Where we got, had a lot more work to do was basically with the application side or the development side of IT which weren't really involved in our ITSM tools in terms of incident management and stuff like that. But we had to bring them on board when we wanted to get the application part of it and linking the applications to the business processes, et cetera. And they came on board pretty quickly with that and actually it brought them into also incident management and change management. So now we really have excellent collaboration if you want between the two, if you want dualities of IT, the tech part and the development part. I love this story. So you basically got your IT infrastructure connected to the applications with a logical view to business processes and as I was saying, value flows right to the business and you can essentially now track that. That's right. So that's about where we're at right now. Right now we've got a lot of information in there and now we have to develop, if you want, the tools to really use that information. Yeah, it just doesn't come out. I understand that. You've got some work to do there. We saw some tools around the exhibitor hall recently that start touching upon some of the things that you can develop. Are you using, do you envision using things like App Creator to develop some of your own apps? Absolutely, yeah. I don't have any specific examples right now so like I mentioned, we just reorg so our development team is also reorg-ing so once we've identified the resources in that group we'll look where we're going with that. All right, so we're out of time but Michael, I wonder if you could just share with the audience, you've been through this now, you've been around 24 months going through this. So you've got quite a bit of experience, you've sunk your teeth into the service now product but more importantly the internal organizational issues around that. What advice would you give to your fellow practitioners that are considering moving in this direction? I mean what's been a winning thing for us I think is what we were just mentioning, the configuration management aspect. If you have the opportunity to take the time and structure that in order to really encompass IT if you want from the business processes all the way down to the infrastructure I think that's a good way to go. If you start by structuring that and organizing that and you base everything on that you're going to have a really good view of what you're doing. Michael Glenn, very practical advice, really appreciate you coming on and telling us the Agapore story and how you're using ServiceNow. All right, keep it right there, we're right back. Petra Zilstras here, the CIO KPN and we're going to unpack what she's doing with ServiceNow, we're right back, this is theCUBE.