Papa John’s embarks on ‘multi-phase’ move to Google Cloud

Pizza chain Papa John’s International is expanding a technology tie-up with Google Cloud that will see it migrate more workloads off-premise in response to the surging consumer demand for online orders.

There are Papa John’s franchises in 5,000 locations in 45 countries and territories across the world, and over the course of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic they have seen a surge in demand for online orders and delivery services.

In response to this, the company has decided to accelerate the pace of its cloud strategy, while also plotting plans to dig deeper into the Google Cloud product portfolio in an effort to improve the ordering experience for its customers.

“Google Cloud continues to be a strategic and trusted partner in supporting our best-in-class digital platforms, particularly as we’ve experienced tremendous growth in consumer demand over the past year,” said Papa John’s International chief technology officer Justin Falciola.

“As one of the largest pizza delivery brands in the world, innovative technology is an essential component of our business model, allowing us to create great customer experiences and increase efficiencies throughout our restaurant operations,” he said.

“Migrating and transforming our infrastructure capabilities to Google Cloud will increase our speed to value for Papa John’s digital, restaurant, and corporate solutions, ultimately delivering the best experience for our customers and our team members.”

As well as moving its on-premise datacentre workloads to the Google Cloud, the company has also committed to shifting away from its own mapping systems and onto the Google Maps Platform so that it can provide customers with real-time tracking data about the status of their deliveries.

Google Cloud described its expanded partnership with Papa John’s as the next part in a multi-phase body of work that is geared towards helping the firm optimise its application engineering, business operations and customer experience.

To this point, the cloud giant confirmed that Papa John’s already makes use of “several key Google Cloud technologies”, including its CloudSQL database, its Bigtable NoSQL database offering, and its cloud data warehousing tool, BigQuery.

“Papa John’s is using these products to build its loyalty program, multi-channel marketing platform, eCommerce, in-store, and various other customer touchpoints, including its award-winning mobile apps,” said Google Cloud, in a statement.

“Over the past year, retail and food services have had to adapt and shift their business strategies to a digital-first approach,” said Google Cloud vice-president of retail and consumer Carrie Tharp.

“We’re in the business of helping our customers remain resilient and agile using cloud technologies, and we’re proud of the work we’re doing with Papa John’s, so it can remain focused on achieving its business goals.”