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 +.”

CIO interview: David Byrne, Carphone Warehouse - Connected World

Connected World Services is Carphone Warehouse's business-to-business offering, and is taking a platform as a service (PaaS) approach to supporting business partners,

IT chief David Byrne wears two hats: enterprise architecture director at Carphone Warehouse and CIO for the mobile phone retailer's Connected World business.

Carphone Warehouse is known as a mobile phone retailer and, predominantly, it operates in the B2C (business to consumer) sector. "But every so often we have done interesting things [in other areas] which have been a success,” says Byrne.

For instance, in 2003, the company launched the TalkTalk broadband business.

Connected World Services is its B2B division and runs as a one-stop-shop service to the company's clients for all their communication needs. It currently provides business telecoms and communication services, but Byrne says: “Our core business seems to be doing well and we’ve always had interest in other companies who want to do similar things.

"We have huge aspirations for Connected World."

Some of the Connected World processing uses the systems in Carphone's data centres which power the batch processing; reconciliation of the retailer's commission for selling the customer a mobile network contract; and billing on behalf of networks.

These processes run on different IT systems. “We started thinking about how a batch job started in Unix could be passed to another part [of the business process] running on Windows Server and decide what to do,” says CIO David Byrne.

Carphone Warehouse runs hundreds of thousands of scripts every night so scheduling and automating batch jobs is a priority. When the company first started building the batch jobs, Byrne says of the scheduling technology: “They could not operate over heterogeneous platforms.”

So the retailer had to write its own software to support this functionality. It recently switched to a batch scheduler called Automic , which Byrne says has allowed Carphone Warehouse to cut over 100,000 lines of code from its systems. “Automic provides much more visualisation than we had before and we can change the order of tasks.” In addition, it provides visibility and auditing.

Automic is also being used to enable Carphone Warehouse to achieve SEPA (Single European Payments Area) compliance in advance of the February 2014 deadline. The tool was used to automate the direct debit collection process.

In a similar way to how Tesco developed its "Tesco in a box" strategy to encapsulate best practices, technology and services when the supermarket wanted to expand into new regions quickly, Carphone Warehouse is encoding its know-how as a mobile retailer.

It plans to provide knowledge of mobile phone retail to business partners via the Connected World PaaS. Partners will use the platform to create their own mobile phone retail operations.

“We see Connected World Services as enabling retailers, original equipment manufacturers and network businesses around the globe to leverage all the expertise and processes that we have built into our operations over the last 24 years,” says Byrne.

One of the early partnerships was with US retail giant Best Buy. The partnership took Carphone's business competence and its knowledge of mobile phone retail and provided this at Best Buy.

"Previously we took people from our business and had them work in the partner business. We thought about a way to make it more efficient. This is where Connected World Services fits, to put the know-how into business processes packaged as the Connected World Services product,” says Byrne

Selling a phone to the public requires selling both a device and a network contract. The business processes are wrapped up in custom IT that Carphone Warehouse has built up. But, as Byrne explains, there is no off-the-shelf enterprise resource planning (ERP) that provides a system of record to capture the transactions.

The process of the sale of a handset and a mobile phone contract is handled in bespoke batch-based systems (see box), and there is no compelling business driver to modernise.

“In retail IT investment, there is a very strong emphasis on a short time to value so replacing something that works perfectly well, with something that does the same job may reduce TCO (total cost of ownership) in the IT group, but it brings no shareholder value," says Byrne. "So it is hard to make a good argument to replace the systems we have.”

Carphone Warehouse's retail business involves acquiring customers for mobile phone networks. Byrne says: “There are risks attached to different parts of the process in mobile phone retail. We have to make it predictable and error free.”

In retail IT investment there is a very strong emphasis on a short time to value so replacing something that works perfectly well, with something that does the same job may reduce TCO in the IT group, but it brings no shareholder value

David Byrne, Carphone Warehouse

This is not only about providing the correct information for the mobile operators.

He adds: “We are more likely  to get customers that the network will accept if we provide a good provider of credit checking or fraud detection.”

Part of the Connected World Services concept is about inserting these providers into the business process for signing up new mobile phone contact customers.

“We build in the steps and get it to work at scale as a PaaS. If we have a predictable and dependable process – every partner gets predictable and reliable service,” says Byrne. In addition, any improvements to the business process only need to be deployed once to benefit to all partners.

He says Connected World Services is built on a typical modern IT architecture.

“It has to be deployable to people around the world. Our main driver for the architecture is we have to go where our business partners need us to go,” he says.

Byrne chose not to build Connected World Services around a traditional three-tier architecture, where an enterprise application is separated into presentation (the user interface), a layer for the business rules and an application server that runs the business rules.

“Three-tier architectures can be somewhat constrained since we would have to invest in our own datacentre space, which  would be a capital expenditure,” he says.

Given Connect World Services is a semi-startup, Byrne believes it is better to buy services. As such, cloud computing is the main driver behind the architecture. It takes advantage of standardisation, and is built in a way that is deployed through local cloud providers.

However, he says: “Our cloud strategy balanced against regulatory concerns.”

So the architecture follows a cloud pattern but it may not be possible to deploy in the cloud in every market. He says: “We are building to deploy onto a cloud platform but it is not the right time to go fully into the cloud.”

Byrne believes cloud computing will become a bit like a National Grid for computing, with many providers offering cloud connectivity. He feels that the key players on such a cloud grid will be the brokers rather than the cloud service providers.

So it could be a bit like the business model Carphone Warehouse has pioneered in UK mobile phone retail since 1989.

CIO interview: Mark Ridley, Reed.co.uk

His track record as director of technology at Reed.co.uk shows that Mark Ridley is not afraid to take unconventional decisions.

“Everything apart from Windows Active Directory is run in a software as a service environment," he says.

The recruitment website uses Google Apps in the cloud for email and calendar functionality, while the company’s intranet uses Jive, which is hosted externally. OneLogin provides cloud-based single sign-on for the software as a service (SaaS) applications, while AirWatch is used for mobile device management (MDM).

“Instead of rolling out Windows, we are offering devices that people can use to connect to the internet,” says Ridley. In fact, the company has recently deployed 100 Google Chrome desktops for its sales staff to access Google Apps and Salesforce.com.

“We never set out thinking we could deliver corporate IT through a browser, but everyone here loves the internet. It’s our job, so there is a lot of familiarity with web-based systems.”

Mark Ridley started working at Reed in 1997 as a web developer. At the time, the website was a startup business within the recruitment firm. In 2007, following a consultation with McKinsey, Reed.co.uk became a separate entity.

"We wanted to look at how to monetise our platform," he says. Initially Reed.co.uk used Reed's IT systems. At the start of 2012, the company decided to go its own way with IT.

Desktop IT was based on a virtual desktop using Wyse terminals, which have a heavy server requirement. There were two drawbacks: Wyse required a Windows client access licence to enable users to run a Windows desktop on the terminal; and Wyse needed internal IT expertise.

As an alternative to desktop virtualisation, Ridley says Reed.co.uk looked at remote desktops, provided through a hosting contract, but the cost per desktop per month was much higher than putting a physical PC on a desk. Users have less flexibility with thin clients, since they cannot be used as standalone devices, he adds.

From an IT perspective, Ridley says the role of the team is to administer cloud-based systems: “People in our internal team are not enterprise architects or heavyweight admins, [but] they are able to understand permissions management, such as who should have access to what.”

His approach to specialist IT skills involves buying in few days of consultancy a year. “You don’t need a disk I/O specialist all the time,” he says. “I learnt 15 years ago not to be within kicking distance of the servers because they always fall over.”

For deep technical expertise, such as when he needs Unix skills, Ridley uses IT services firm Attenda. The firm has worked for Reed.co.uk since 2003, building and hosting the Microsoft Internet Information Server recruitment website.

Reed.co.uk recently moved to Google Enterprise, with Office 365 losing out to Google. One of the reasons behind his decision was a Microsoft licensing clause that would have affected the company’s IT strategy: "Office 365 with E3 seemed attractive, but it did not cover Office on virtual desktops."

At the time, virtualisation was part of his plans for desktop IT, so the company selected Google instead.

It is an interesting decision, as Reed.co.uk has acted as a Microsoft reference for SQL Server in the past, but Ridley’s decision illustrates a disconnect between the various Microsoft businesses. He recently told Computer Weekly: “It would fantastic if when you contacted to Microsoft you talked to one person, not a different person for Office and SQL Server.”

He uses the Google operating system himself, albeit within MacOS. “I use a Chrome remote desktop on my Mac, so Chrome is effectively my primary machine at the moment, and one of our guys has Chromium running on a PC at home.”

Switching from Microsoft to Google is not easy, however, and Ridley warns that using Google presents a few hidden challenges.

“SQL Server reporting doesn’t work very well outside Internet Explorer,” he says.

Reed.co.uk recently moved to Google Enterprise, with Office 365 losing out to Google

Google Drive, which Reed uses for enterprise-wide file sharing, has a few unique challenges that people need to be aware of, according to Ridley. “With Google Drive, if I drop a file in a certain location, I would be the owner and would then share ownership. But if I left the company, other users would lose access to the file.”

Its new SAP system also has a few compatibility niggles, which means active users in HR and Finance will be using Microsoft Office on Windows PCs to access the system. For the sales team, who use Chrome-based PCs, a sales team leader will need to enter holiday information via a Windows PC into the SAP system.

As part of building a new IT department, Reed.co.uk is rolling out SAP ByDesign, which replaces a legacy Reed corporate system based on Lotus Notes and Oracle. One of the difficulties Ridley faces is that the user interface for SAP ByDesign uses Microsoft Silverlight, which is not supported in Chromium.

However, SAP is building a pure browser-based user interface written in HTML 5.0, so he hopes he will soon be back on track with browser-based enterprise IT by the end of the year.

The move away from Microsoft on the desktop shows that it is possible to provide a corporate desktop that does not rely on Windows or Office.

“We looked at Windows 7 devices, Chrome devices and Linux devices through Ubuntu Advantage. There was a compelling argument to use Chrome due to its remote admin tools," says Ridley.

The Google Chrome desktop was also cheaper than an equivalent Windows desktop PC.

There was a compelling argument to use Chrome due to its remote admin tools Mark Ridley, Reed.co.uk

Ridley admits it was quite a foolhardy decision to switch to ChromeOS and Google hardware. "Buying Windows would have been a bit like buying IBM [the natural choice], but the Chrome boxes can be plugged into the network and work." He says no extra configuration was needed.

This is not the only decision Ridley has taken that has run contrary to conventional wisdom. While there is a trend to virtualise server applications, Ridley has gone the other way. He says it was cheaper to run the Reed.co.uk website on 2U and 3U physical servers than to virtualise.

To maintain performance during the inevitable spikes in traffic, Ridley says he simply ensures there is enough capacity to cope.

That said, he is keen to move to the cloud and use cloud services as a commodity for offloading work. "I would want to offload some work to Amazon Web Services and Azure, and select between them depending on the cost at the time."