California-based online survey software company SurveyMonkey has opened a datacentre in Dublin with a view to attracting enterprise customers in the EMEA region.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey, which was established in Portland by Ryan and Chris Finley, has more than 750 employees globally and is estimated to have more than 600,000 paying users across more than 300,000 organisational domains.  190 countries and territories use the SurveyMonkey platform which is a cloud-based, online survey tool that is offered for free, or SaaS.

The company now has offices in San Mateo, Portland, Seattle, Dublin, Ottawa, and Sydney.  The Irish office was opened in 2014 and currently has around 50 employees.  SurveyMonkey went public in 2018.

Why A Datacentre In Dublin?

There are several good reasons for the move to Dublin coupled with a focus on wooing EMEA enterprise customers, such as:

• 16% of SurveyMonkey’s revenue during the first quarter of 2019 came from sales to the enterprise sector.
• More than one-third of SurveyMonkey’s business revenue comes from outside the US, with the majority in Europe.
• There is a huge opportunity for growth that’s offered by companies where SurveyMonkey has been adopted (as the free version) through back-door ‘shadow IT’, and where those enterprises can be encouraged to legitimately adopt the use of the software as company-wide deployments by being reassured that the data they collect is stored in a European data centre (Dublin). This has been termed a ‘land and expand’ strategy.
• Dublin is ranked as one of the best places to work in Ireland and offers many benefits to tech companies and start-ups.

Phased Approach

SurveyMonkey’s strategy, of which the Dublin datacentre is a part, is a phased one with the first phase being to acquire new customers, and phase two focusing on migrating customers who already have a lot of data stored in their SurveyMonkey accounts.

In addition to expanding across Europe, SurveyMonkey will also be looking at making customers aware of the other services that it offers.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

SurveyMonkey knows that the Europe /  EMEA region already delivers plenty of revenue and that there’s a great opportunity to expand further. Placing a datacentre in Europe may be very attractive to (and reduce risk for) enterprise customers who must be very careful about where their data is stored (refer GDPR) and who always want to reduce complexity about data storage.

This story also shows how the ‘shadow IT’ use of software has provided a way in and can be part of a successful strategy for growth and expansion.