It’s hard to remember life pre-smartphones and online delivery services. But it was only 20 years ago that mobile phones were the hottest accessories in town and kids were fighting to beat each other’s high scores on Snake. Broadband internet was just starting to replace dial-up, and many businesses still relied on fax machines or phone calls instead of websites to communicate with clients. It was against this exciting backdrop of change that, in 2000, a Dutch student called Jitse Groen decided to build an online food delivery marketplace called Thuisbezorgd.nl, or ‘delivered at home’.
In 2009, he developed a mobile version for iPhones and Android smartphones. In 2011, the company was already connecting restaurants with customers in five countries and rebranded to Takeaway.com. Today, Groen’s fast-growing company is called Just Eat Takeaway.com after a merger in January 2020 made it one of world’s leading online food delivery marketplaces outside of China.
Throughout its rapid growth, the vision of Just Eat Takeaway.com has remained the same: to enable customers to add a meal to cart online and have it delivered to their doorstep. But how does this magic happen so quickly? How do clicks turn into deliveries? Erich Radstake, Global IT Director at Just Eat Takeaway.com explains: “Put simply, we built a technology that facilitates the way restaurants receive, confirm, and send those orders to the right people at the right time. We developed many systems, applications, and softwares in house to make sure there are no gaps in the process.”
Just Eat Takeaway.com processed more than 400 million orders in 2019, and helps more than 155,000 restaurants to efficiently connect with their customers via its platform. To do this, the company attaches its software to restaurants’ point of sales systems on their websites or apps, or provides them with hardware for viewing incoming orders and confirming their processing and delivery status in real time. Just Eat Takeaway.com monitors this information to ensure that every delivery request is received and completed on time with as little complication as possible. The company mainly collaborates with delivery restaurants, but also delivers for restaurants that don’t have their own delivery service, enabling them to expand their customer base.
A centralised corporate culture and the motto “one company, one brand, one IT platform” has ensured that best practices are applied across the entire organisation and that customers can enjoy a consistent experience anywhere in the world. But as the company continued to grow even faster, developing all of its technology in house became a challenge. So, Just Eat Takeaway.com decided to outsource a specialised identity management solution to support its growth securely and enable agility without overloading its internal team of developers. The solution that it chose was Okta.
Selecting the right tools for the job
“Over the past 20 years, we’ve continually developed our platform to adapt to new customer needs, industry standards, and technological developments,” says Erich. “Today, it no longer makes sense to do that by developing everything ourselves. There are excellent specialised SaaS solutions out there that are reliable and proven to work, so instead of reinventing the wheel, we’ve started partnering with the best in the market. When it comes to identity management, the best means Okta.”
To help determine whether Okta was the right choice for Just Eat Takeaway.com, the company worked with Identity and Access Management partner FuseLogic to run a deep assessment of 10 different providers. In the most optimistic scenario, they expected to spend a couple of weeks configuring and testing out their security scenarios, something Okta delivered 35% faster than the estimates and the competition. “We had nearly two weeks to complete the proof of concept,” says Leon Oud, Sales and General Manager at FuseLogic, “but because Okta was so easy to implement, it only took us nine days.” Leon received the green light in just three weeks to start expanding the implementation across more Just Eat Takeaway.com teams.
Today, 40 applications that are used on a daily basis by employees at Just Eat Takeaway.com are integrated with Okta’s Single Sign-On so that users can log in quickly using just one portal to access all they need, including Slack and several custom-built internal applications. To secure their logins, they also use Multi-Factor Authentication to validate their identities in a number of ways, from one-time passwords received via SMS messages to biometrics.
Meanwhile, Universal Directory is used to manage user identities, groups, and devices in one single directory hosted on the Okta Identity Cloud, and Advanced Lifecycle Management automates business processes such as provisioning access requests based on customised policies, workflows, and APIs.
“We have a lot of internal systems and applications that we’ve built over the years to bring our services to life, and that are now used by a lot of people, so identity management is crucial for our business,” Erich explains. “We have a banking licence and we handle sensitive information on our platform, so it’s absolutely crucial for us to have full control over who has access to what in our internal systems. Okta’s robust solution helps us with that,” he adds.
Growing faster and securely
14,000 Just Eat Takeaway.com employees around the world currently use Okta. “That’s almost all of us, from our CEO to customer support colleagues,” says Erich, who shares that Okta is now considered a natural and essential part of their work lives. On top of internal users, drivers make up 17,000 monthly active users. Next, the company aims to bring delivery drivers on board, so their identities and access rights can also be managed via the Okta Identity Cloud.
“Okta helps us save a lot of time by automating the provisioning and deprovisioning of employees. More importantly, it gives us peace of mind because it makes absolutely sure that accounts of employees leaving the company are deactivated immediately,” Erich explains, adding that the new solutions are also facilitating merger and acquisition processes for the company. “Migrating from other identity providers to Okta is easy, which makes our processes more agile when we merge with other companies,” says Erich.
Getting work done, hassle-free
In the online food delivery world, success often depends on seamlessness. Customers today expect it to be easy to choose and pay for food online, and have it delivered within minutes. Similarly, as Global Head of IT, Erich expects the technology he provides to his colleagues to function in a reliable way. With this in mind, he says that “ironically, the lack of feedback we’ve received from colleagues following our Okta implementation is a true mark of its success. It means that Okta is as easy to use as it was to set up, and that our colleagues are able to get their jobs done without any complications,” he shares.
“By helping us easily and securely manage our user identities and access rights, Okta lets us focus on getting our jobs done as we grow, so we can continue to develop, scale, and build the best possible offering for our restaurants, customers, and couriers,” he concludes.
