Cisco Start
Airtasker is Australia’s largest online marketplace for odd-jobs. If you need a job done, you can find someone on Airtasker to do it. Handyman, gardener, cleaner, removalist, IT support, delivery, whatever. You just use your phone or computer to post a job, then choose the best offer. Since their launch in 2012, Airtasker has experienced rapid growth. They now serve over a million customers, and facilitate more than $75 million worth of tasks every year. Over the last five years, they’ve gone from just 10 employees in a shared office space to more than 70 people and their own dedicated Sydney office. Many of their staff also work remotely, so secure, efficient, hassle-free communication and collaboration are essential to day-to-day operations. What’s more, Airtasker operates solely in the cloud – they don’t house a single on-premise server. So, in the words of Airtasker’s Chief Technology Officer, Paul Keen, “Put quite simply, without a network the whole office is unable to function and we don’t have a business.”
The more the company grew, the more of a challenge day-to-day operations started to become. Despite their rapid growth, they were still a pretty small company, in the grand scheme of things; they didn’t have a specialist networking team in-house and - more to the point - they didn’t want one. They wanted to remain as agile as they’d always been, so everyone could remain focused on innovation and responding immediately to customer feedback.
The last thing they wanted to worry about was their network going down for several hours. According to Paul Keen, “Networking should be like electricity, it’s incredibly important but you don’t want to spend any time focusing on it.” So when Airtasker inevitably outgrew its shared space, and went in search of dedicated offices, they also began the search for a complete cloud managed solution.
