Virgin Trains Picks Box To Drive Employee Collaboration

Virgin Trains has rolled out Box to more than 1,500 of its employees after opting to move to the cloud content management platform to help drive collaboration and provide mobile access to documents.

The UK train operator is known for its long-distance services between several of the country’s major cities and employees will now be able to access documents from any device, wherever they are.

This includes working from different offices, as well as on the Virgin train’s themselves through the company’s on-board Wi-Fi network.

Full speed ahead

“We like our technology to run as smoothly as our trains so that our staff can do their best work behind the scenes: making customer journeys amazing,” said John Sullivan, CIO at Virgin Trains.

“With Box, all of our content is in one place, available anywhere, anytime and on any device which is useful when you’re travelling at 125mph around the country. Box has helped to transform the way we work internally so that we’re all using our time effectively.”

Virgin chose to deploy Box after becoming lumbered with legacy technology. Vik Pidsillidis, the company’s technical delivery manager, explained how employees identified “collaborative working” as something that would make their day-to-day lives easier, along with improved file-sharing capabilities and scalability.

Box will help to streamline processes and improve team collaboration within Virgin and played a major role in the launch the Virgin Trains Onboard Entertainment System.

The company will also be able to make use of Box’s document security and encryption capabilities and store all of its data in Europe to ensure compliance with EU regulations.

“We’re very conscious that, with GDPR coming into place, the legal regulations are going to need us to keep all of our data in Europe and ideally in the UK, so that was a really important piece for us to cover,” Sullivan commented.

Box also recently announced a partnership with BT Global Services to join its “cloud of clouds” vision and has been working with multiple UK universities, adding 100,000 students and staff to its ecosystem. 

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