Interview: Martin Russell, head of IT services, Just Eat

Martin Russell, head of IT services at Just Eat, is test driving a £1,000 Google ChromeBook Pixel and tells Computer Weekly about his experiences of going Google.

Just Eat launched in 2001 and now operates in 13 countries around the globe with nearly 1,000 employees.

After experiencing internal email issues and difficulties migrating systems following acquisitions, the company moved to Google Apps for Business in February 2012.

Martin Russell joined Just Eat two and a half years ago. At the time the online takeaway food service had a Microsoft Exchange on-premise server and faced the problems of a  business running its own on-premise Exchange Server normally experience. He says: "We had a massive failure and I spent seven days recovering data."

So why not use a co-location service to run the Just Eat Exchange server in a hosted data centre? "A co-lo facility only solves power and cooling. We would still have to manage the server ourselves." The clincher for Russell was that Just Eat is in the business of takeaway food. “Running on-premise was taking up a lot of man hours to maintain the email service.”

So he decided to look at the cloud. The choices were Google Apps and Office 365. He admits his only experience of Gmail was as a consumer. "I used Gmail at home, but I hadn't considered Google in the corporate world." Nevertheless he decided to work with Google consultant AppsCare to see ho wGmail could be used in the enterprise. "At only £33 per user per year, we were very impressed with Gmail, compared to Microsoft," he adds.

Switching to the cloud is the easy part – getting people to change the software they are accustomed to can be a bigger challenge.

Russell did not give the staff any choice over whether to opt out of Google. "We didn’t tell people we were moving off Microsoft Office and we tend to challenge any requirement for Microsoft Office." When people ask for Microsoft Word he explains to them how Google Docs can resave Word files. "If you have complex spreadsheets then you can have Microsoft Excel. But for general use, we tend to challenge any requirement for Office."

Training involved showing staff Google Apps, Google Drive and the collaboration tools. This is backed up with a weekly “Google Tip of the Week” newsletter. Rather than spending a lot of time writing up a  text-based guide, Russell’s team sends out a quick video tip instead which, he says, has been a big success. "We sometimes get email from people saying I didn’t get my Google tip email."

I like the idea of users being the first line of support

Martin Russell, Just Eat

Everyone in the support team has a chance to shoot a video tip, he says.

Russell also believes in self-help. "I like the idea of users being the first line of support." For instance, in a home environment, the iPad is intuitive, so people are able to figure out how to use it themselves. "You don’t call first line support to ask what to do. Why can’t we make our corporate tools as intuitive as Apple’s, so you can use them without tech support?"

For Russell, cloud computing and pay-per-use services are the way forward. He says: "Whenever we look at a solution we and have to worry about disaster recovery and power issues. But all the business wants is the ability to take customer calls."

Just Eat operates on a postcode-by-postcode basis and is available in 13 countries with local contacts for the callcentre who have knowledge of the local takeaways. Just Eat runs its callcentres using an on-premise telephony system. But as the business grows, the system needs to be upgraded. "When I started here we had 200 people. This has now expanded to 1,000."

Russell would like to see a callcentre telephony service priced on a per-user, per-month basis. This would be easier to scale compared to its existing on-premise system.

Russell believes companies offering telephony software should be looking to develop cloud-based services.

All Just Eat most applications are built internally. The biggest barrier to moving everything to the cloud for Russell is telephony, since it requires a desktop installation for the call manager. "We use Cisco for IP telephony," he adds, "but browser-based cloud based telephony would offer considerable savings."

Russell’s vision for a next-generation callcentre would be based on Chromebooks. A thin-client architecture makes sense in the callcentre, due to the focused nature of call handling. "We used to run thin clients using a massive server farm."

The ChromeBox, a Google desktop ChromeOS device, does away with the server farm as it connects directly to web applications. "The ChromeBox gives thin client without the server farm. I can deploy a callcentre application on the ChromeBox which boots up in 15 seconds."

In his ideal callcentre, staff would run ChromeBoxes as access devices that could almost be considered throw-away. "I can see a vending machine in the callcentre where you swipe a card to get a new ChromeBox."

Just Eat uses  Google+ as an internal social network and has been used to organise social events. It is being used to improve collaboration and communication amongst a geographically dispersed workforce, which has led to faster responses to questions and problems Russell says: “Everyone has mobile device, can all upload over Google +.”

Attackers reported seeding cloud services with malware

LAS VEGAS -- Malware writers are ramping up their use of commercial file hosting sites and cloud services to distribute malware programs, security researchers said at this week's Black Hat conference here.

Traditionally, malware writers had distributed their malicious code from their own sites.

But as security vendors get better at detecting and blacklisting those sites, hackers are increasingly distributing their malware products from legitimate host sites. The technique has been used a bit for more than two years, but now appears be gaining steam, researchers said. (See also "When malware strikes: How to clean an infected PC."

Often, the owners of legitimate sites fail to properly scan the content they are hosting, which allows attackers to furtively post malicious code with relative ease, said Michael Sutton, vice president of research at ZScaler, a provider of cloud-based security services for enterprises.

Malicious content distributed from a legitimate site is more likely to make it past corporate defenses. Vendors are also unlikely to blacklist a legitimate hosted service, allowing malicious content hosted on one to stay up longer, he said.

defcon
Zscaler said he's heard reports of malicious files hosted on Dropbox, but the they appear to have been removed, the blog noted.

Sutton pointed to recent incidents were attackers posted and distributed malicious code on Google Code and Dropbox as an example of the trend. A blog on Zscaler's website lists nearly three dozen malicious files hosted on the Google Code site, which contains tools for software developers.

The message for IT managers: Don't blindly trust domains that seem to be secure, Sutton said.

"Attackers are starting to leverage hosting services" to stage malicious code, he said. "It used to be that [attackers] would set up their own servers," to host malware. "Then we saw them infecting legitimate third-parties. Now they are using hosting services. They are no longer paying for hosting [malware] and are less likely to get blacklisted."

Meanwhile, Firehost, a provider of cloud-hosting services for enterprises, has seen an increase in Web application attacks originating from the networks of legitimate Web hosting services, said CEO Chris Drake.

In its latest quarterly security review, Firehost observed a noticeable increase in the number of SQL injection attacks, directory traversal attacks and other Web application attacks launched from within cloud service provider networks, Drake said.

Cloud providers often have weak validation procedures when signing up new customers, allowing attackers to create accounts with fake information. The accounts are then used to deploy and administer powerful botnets that run in the cloud infrastructure, he said.

In the second quarter of 2013, the IP filtering system that Firehost uses to protect its customers against malicious attacks blocked about 1.3 million unique attacks. Of the total, a noticeable number of attacks originated from IP addresses belonging cloud services companies, Drake said.

GDS tracks 'digital by default' progress of top 25 government services

The Government Digital Service (GDS) has launched a new website to track the progress of the 25 transactions targeted as the first to be put online under the new digital strategy.

The 25 services – ranging from visa applications to benefit claims to booking prison visits – were identified as “exemplars” that would be the first to be redeveloped under the “digital by default” plan to put more public services online.

Since the strategy was launched at the end of 2012, 13 of the transactions have reached the discovery phase, six are in alpha, five in beta, and part of one – student finance – is already live.

The aim is to digitally transform the 25 services – among those most widely – in a 400-day time period that started earlier in 2013. The progress updates were provided today at a GDS event, called Sprint Alpha, to mark the conclusion of the first 100 days of the plan.

“We’ve really focused on growing out the transformation programme of 25 exemplar projects. A lot of that has been done quietly and in departments, out of the gaze of the public eye,” said Mike Bracken, executive director of GDS in a video published on the Cabinet Office website.

“The spending round took more time than anyone could have guessed, but we’re though that and looking forward to our transformation of public services.”

A statement from the Cabinet Office added: “This is the start of a transformation that will mean people can interact with government in the same way they do with their bank or with retailers.”

Over the next three months, the digital strategy will focus on moving more than 300 agencies’ and arms-length government bodies’ websites across to the central Gov.UK web platform; as well as publishing a new governance model for the delivery of technology across Whitehall to support the digital strategy, which is expected this month.

The Cabinet Office claims that the digital strategy will save over £1.2bn, by moving online a number of costly phone, postal and face-to-face transactions.

Joyent targets Amazon, Google by blending compute/storage services

Cloud computing provider Joyent, a company with robust engineering chops that's looking to compete with the heavyweights of the industry, today rolled out Manta, its newest service that offers object storage with baked in compute features.

 

Combining compute and storage into one offering allows processing and data analytics jobs to be done without the need to transfer data from a storage system into a compute engine, speeding the time to process the transaction and creating a more efficient process.

 

Joyent engineers are no strangers to shaking up the cloud industry. Under the radar of even some in the cloud community, the company has developed its own SmartOS infrastructure stack, which includes an open source in-memory hypervisor. Joyent sells its SmartDataCenter as a public cloud IaaS option, or for users to install on their own premises.

 

CTO Jason Hoffman says Manta is the next logical iteration of the company's products. "This completes our platform," he says, after working on the project for about four years, internally using it for the last year and running a six-month multi-petabyte beta project on it with some of Joyent's largest customers.

 

Gartner analyst Henry Baltazar says the key to Manta is the ability to run compute jobs without having to extract, transform and load (ETL) the data from object storage into compute servers. In traditional formats, the object storage is meant for the retention of data, but if some sort of processing is needed to be done on it, then a copy of the data is usually made and then transferred to make it accessible to the compute services. "You avoid the transformation and migration of the data because it's already sitting with the compute," he says.It's ideal, he says, for archival of data heavy information that may need some sort of processing done to it. Joyent specifically lists use cases such as video and image coding and reformatting, data analytics and log processing.

 

Customer Konstantin Gredeskoul, who is CTO of Wanelo, an online retail community, is already raving about it after using it as part of the beta. The company hosts a website for about 8 million users that has more than 6 million products from more than 200,000 stores that shoppers can browse, search and then be sent to other websites to buy from. During the past few months, Wanelo has been using Manta to storage log files of everything that happens on the company's website each day - what items people view, which are purchased and how they rated products. Storing those files in Manta allows commands to be run directly on the data.

 

Gredeskoul is currently using Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service (S3) as its back-end repository for all of Wanelo's images, but he hopes to migrate those over to Joyent's Manta service. If there's ever a point when Gredeskoul needs to convert petabytes worth of images from one format to another, that process could be done directly within Manta. On AWS, he would have likely had to make a copy of the files, transfer or copy it into Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or another compute service like Elastic MapReduce (EMR), run the processing job, then transfer it back into storage. Hoffman says Manta is like having AWS's EC2 and S3 baked into a single offering.

 

Gartner's Baltazar, says Manta is part of a larger wave of converging storage and compute into single systems, but he says it's one of the first large-scale cloud offerings in the category. Other providers like Simplivity and Nutanix offer customers so-called data centers in a box, which have compute, storage and networking functionality baked into a single system, which is usually run on customer premises. Baltazar calls this the "big squeeze" of infrastructure.

 

Joyent could kick off this wave for cloud providers to do the same. Already Amazon has a variety of storage options, between S3, Elastic Block Storage (EBS), its RedShift data warehousing service and Glacier, which is a long-term cold storage option that is cheap to write into and slow to retrieve information from. Amazon offers analytics services on top of such storage options, but they're not architected to be baked into the storage services as Joyent's is. Google has its Hadoop-like BigQuery data processing cloud-based service, which is an adjacent offering to its application development PaaS and Compute Engine IaaS.

 

Manta is generally available starting today. Prices start at $0.043 per GB of storage, up to the first 1 TB, with volume discounts applied after that. Joyent's default setting is to make two companies of all data. Compute service is priced by the second at $0.00004/GB of DRAM.

 

Follow me on Twitter @sajilpl

Oracle, NetSuite team on cloud services for mid-size customers

Oracle and NetSuite are to jointly offer cloud services to mid-size business customers.

 

The alliance announced Wednesday is the third this week around Oracle's technologies. The Redwood Shores, California, company announced earlier this week agreements with Microsoft and cloud computing company Salesforce.com.

 

Oracle's HCM Cloud, its human capital management software, and NetSuite Cloud ERP enterprise resource planning application will be integrated to connect human resources and finance systems for mid-size customers, the companies said. Deloitte will work with clients on the implementation of these systems.

 

Oracle reported last week that its fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of US$10.9 billion was flat year-on-year, reflecting to an extent the competition for its large business applications from cloud-based applications from more nimble operations.

 

The company's CEO Larry Ellison told analysts during an earnings call last week that the company was planning a "startling series" of announcements this week.

 

Oracle said Monday that under a new agreement with Microsoft, customers will be able to deploy Oracle software, such as Java, Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server on Windows Server Hyper-V or in Windows Azure and receive full support from Oracle.

 

By Tuesday, Oracle announced a deal with Salesforce.com that would see the companies integrate their clouds. Salesforce.com's customer relationship management software will be integrated with Oracle's Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud and Salesforce.com will also use Oracle technologies for its infrastructure, according to the agreement. Customers expect application integrations to work right out of-the-box even if the applications are from different vendors, Oracle said.

 

Ellison and Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff on Thursday are due to hold a conference call to provide details of their new nine-year partnership.

 

A pioneer in the SaaS (software as a service) market, NetSuite has Ellison as an investor. Its software has typically run on the Oracle stack including the database. HR has not been a priority area for NetSuite, and the arrangement with Oracle could have some synergies.

 

Follow me on Twitter @sajilpl

Ohio Family-Planning Services At Mercy Of Budget Bill

Family-planning clinics would be pushed down the list of health services receiving funding from the state if a budget bill moving through the Ohio Legislature is signed into law.

Working its way through the Ohio Legislature is a state budget bill that has major implications for the way family-planning services are provided. The Ohio budget contains language that puts family-planning clinics at the bottom of the list to receive funding.

Family Planning Association of Northeast Ohio operates several independent family-planning clinics. They do not provide abortions and have no affiliation with Planned Parenthood, but the clinics are still at the end of the line under a new tiered system because they give referrals.

Ahead of the facilities are local health departments, places like emergency rooms and free clinics. Family Planning's executive director, Mary Wynne-Peaspanen, says if there's any money left over — which she says is not likely — "then they could consider applications from independent, specialty clinics like my organization and like Planned Parenthood."

The budget bill from the Republican-controlled Legislature could well put the nonprofit out of business. Since 1970, it has served primarily low-income women, but it's facing an anticipated 40 percent hit to its funding.

"They've been very clear about the fact — at the General Assembly — that their target is Planned Parenthood. But that doesn't change the fact that there are other organizations that will be impacted by this funding," Wynne-Peaspanen tells Jacki Lyden, host of weekends on All Things Considered
.
National Trend

In Ohio and elsewhere, family-planning clinics typically provide a range of women's health services, like cancer screenings, blood pressure tests and contraceptive services.

Judy Waxman, vice president for health and reproductive rights at the National Women's Law Center, says the vast majority of women who are sexually active have used contraception at some point in their lives.

"So on one level, we as a nation have recognized that contraceptives are not only what everybody uses, but they also are very important for women's health," she says. "There is, however, a minority of politicians who try to use any issue related to 'sex' to make some kind of political hay out of it."

Waxman says a handful of states are looking at centers that receive Medicaid or state funding for family-planning services — and some are cutting the budgets. Those states include Indiana, Arizona, Wisconsin and now Ohio.

The Anti-Abortion Lobby

Michael Gonidakis is the president of Ohio Right to Life, one of the groups that lobbied hard for the current legislative approach. He admits the ultimate objective is a straightforward one.

"Our goal is to find a way to end abortion. Not make it illegal, but to end it," he says. "We're big proponents of adoption reform, foster care reform, and we want to find ways to continue to help women who find themselves in unintended pregnancy, to realize that they can have their baby, that there's support services there for them to keep their child."

He doesn't expect that women will have less access to family planning, not even those who are low-income.

"There's nowhere — and I repeat, nowhere — in the state of Ohio where there won't be other options in a very close walking proximity to ... a clinic that may go out of business," he says. "We're doing some good things here in Ohio, and there's access to these types of services and care for low-income women across the state."

But it still worries Jess Locher, a 28-year-old uninsured cosmetologist in Chardon. She went to the local branch of the Family Planning Association as a teenager. Ten years later, the mother of two still goes to the same clinic because she can't afford anything else.

"If they took family planning away, I wouldn't be getting the female care that I need because my job doesn't offer me insurance, so I couldn't afford to go to a gynecologist," Locher says.

Take Texas, For Example

Ohio is on the verge of making decisions that would alter the way family planning is funded. Texas started down this road two years ago.

"When the Tea Party wave came through Texas in 2010, there was a big movement to oust Planned Parenthood from all of the state health programs," says journalist Becca Aaronson.

Aaronson, who covers health care for the Texas Tribune
, says state lawmakers took a three-pronged approach to cutting family-planning funds. They cut family-planning funding, then set up a tiered financing system prioritizing comprehensive health clinics. Third, they prohibited any group affiliated with a provider that performed abortions from participating in the Medicaid women's health program.
More than 50 clinics throughout Texas closed their doors. As the dust settled, the consequences of this policy started to become apparent, Aaronson says.

"The state estimates that roughly 24,000 babies are going to be born as a result of these changes, and that's because women don't have as much access to birth control," she says.

The spike caused enough of a stir in Texas for state legislators to restore some of the funding to family planning.

"They decided to put an extra $100 million toward primary care for women's health, so that many uninsured women of all ages could get cancer screenings, diabetes treatment and family-planning access," Aaronson says.

Waxman of the National Women's Law Center considers the Texas legislation "a failure for women in the state."

"It's possible in some circumstances that women could go somewhere else, but many other health centers don't provide family-planning services because they know Planned Parenthood is available to do that," she says.

Stay Tuned

Waxman says the issue is an ideological one. "I can only hope that those people that are really outliers on this issue not continue to erode and really hurt the women in their states," she says.

Who's hurt and who's helped by laws on access to family-planning services is in part, of course, a matter of deeply held opinion and even religious faith.

In Ohio, Wynne-Peaspanen at the Family Planning Association is bracing herself.

"I've been with the agency for 27 years. And funding cuts happen and, you know, funding increases happen. But this is ... the most serious," she says.

Gonidakis from Ohio Right to Life says he's confident things will be just fine.

"I do not foresee any situation whatsoever where a woman's going to be denied services because of the availability of so many other clinics in the state of Ohio," he says.