Google Data

Posted Martin Russell, Head of IT Services at JUST EAT

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Martin Russell, Head of IT Services at JUST EAT, a UK-based leading online takeaway ordering service. The company has over 1,000 employees worldwide and partners with more than 38,000 restaurants around the world. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

JUST EAT connects local hungry consumers all over the world with local takeaway restaurants that they love. Through our online and mobile app service, we enable consumers across 13 countries to get their favorite dishes delivered to them with our quick and easy online ordering system.

Since I joined JUST EAT in November 2010, our business has grown from 200 employees to more than 1,000 in a span of two and a half years. But with this incredible pace of growth, our IT services were strained. I needed to give our employees the basic tools they needed to get their jobs done that would scale at our rapid pace, while keeping our data and the data of our customers secure. Since we expanded internationally, giving them ways to collaborate regardless of location was of the utmost importance.

When I first joined the team, we were in the middle of one too many IT outages. The time and resources we wasted dealing with the upkeep of our email solution was getting out of control. I started exploring email alternatives and the cloud was a secure and scalable solution. When I looked into Google Apps, I was really excited about how collaborative, flexible and secure all the tools were. At £33 per user, Google Apps was also the most cost-efficient solution.

We now use the entire Google Apps suite. Initially, we were most interested in Gmail, but adoption of the rest of the apps spread organically across our company. Hangouts have completely changed the way we communicate. Video chat connects our globally dispersed staff, and now I can manage my entire team remotely via Hangouts. Google+ quickly gained popularity within our company for internal conversations—it’s essentially taken the place of our internal social network. As we grow, it becomes more difficult to maintain relationships but tools like Hangouts and Google+ have really kept us connected.

Google Apps has removed a lot of the stress that is traditionally associated with my job. I don’t have to wake up at 5 a.m. anymore to make sure our email is up and running or rush to restart the server because the system is down. Now, if an employee loses a work laptop, I don’t have to worry about lost or stolen files. Having the assurance that all our documents are securely stored on Drive is a relief.

The one thing I recommend to businesses switching over to Google Apps is to do the migration quickly. I wish we had migrated faster as the transition was much smoother than expected and most of our employees were eager to switch. Google Apps have saved us massive amounts of time, made our work environment much more collaborative and flexible, and have taken a lot of the stress out of my job.