SurveyMonkey opens Dublin datacentre region to court data-security conscious enterprises in Europe

SurveyMonkey will soon be serving up its online survey software from the Dublin-based Amazon Web Services (AWS) datacentre region, so that European enterprises can access locally hosted versions of its products and services.

The online survey software provider is on something of a charm offensive where the enterprise market is concerned at present, with its most recent set of financial results revealing that around 16% of its revenue during the first quarter of 2019 came from sales to this sector.

“We’ve become a much broader, bigger company than most people realise. In fact, we sit on top of one of the largest collections of market research data and probably have the canonical dataset with over five billion surveys answered and 50 billion responses in our database,” SurveyMonkey president, Tom Hale, told Computer Weekly.   

Increasing its share of the enterprise market has been repeatedly signposted by the firm as a growth priority, in combination with increasing its customer footprint within Europe and ramping up the size of its European sales and support teams.

“Today, about a third (35%) of our business occurs outside of the US, and the majority of that is in Europe. We have an operation in Dublin, and in April we closed the acquisition of a firm called Usabilla that is based in Amsterdam, which gives us a good-sized footprint in Europe,” added Hale. 

“We are investing in building out our capabilities and ability to support and service users in Europe, which is a multi-year strategy to serve enterprises in Europe, as well as [companies from] elsewhere that operate in Europe.”

That investment includes the opening of its first public cloud datacentre region in Dublin, which is operated by AWS, and will be critically important in addressing the data sovereignty concerns of the European CIO community the company is increasingly keen on courting, according to Hale.

“As we expand into Europe, a new datacentre and the public cloud infrastructure we’re launching will offer a better user experience, but most importantly allows us to store data locally which is a priority for European customers, and European users and survey takers, and reduces the complexity for customers that need to store data where they are operating,” he said.

SurveyMonkey is adopting a phased approach to moving customers over to its Dublin datacentre region, Hale revealed, with the first phase focused on moving “net new customers”.

“Phase two is when there is a lot of data being stored in your SurveyMonkey accounts already, and migrating those customers over. We’re mid-stride on that. We’ll land that in the next few months,” he said.