marQuake helping businesses identify the online voices that matter

Headquartered in Delft, The Netherlands, marQuake is an award-winning international startup offering companies a highly customizable, cloud-based social monitoring and data analytics solution. With marQuake, organizations can easily sift through and analyze ‘online noise’ related to their company, helping them discover the conversations that will impact their business and improve their bottom line. Far more than just social-listening, reputation management, or media monitoring, marQuake’s comprehensive solution analyzes vast, inter-connected networks in real-time, so that users can zone-in on specific content signaling important trends in the market. Aiming to establish a new benchmark in access and analysis of online information, marQuake’s mission is to help their clients make sense of complex information, on external sites and within internal systems, to help them more efficiently and effectively react to market trends and potential growth opportunities, says CEO Perry Knoppert. “In the tech age that we are living in, every minute, of every day, millions of pieces of online information are posted, exchanged, commented on, liked and copied. Identifying and strategically utilizing ‘online noise’ is becoming increasingly important, but the sheer volume of data is overwhelming for many companies. That’s where we come in.”

“To put it in more of a technical framework, for those who may be interested,” says CTO Marc Molenwijk, “We have developed a highly scalable data streaming and classification service that converts unstructured data into structured data. We ingest large amounts of data but have an algorithm in place that can identify the stories that matter to each user and will improve their agile decision making processes. Every individual customer has their own private pipeline environment and personal classification/learning options.”

To ensure marQuake could be an effective option for smaller companies with little to no IT department, the team designed their solution so that it is simple to run and easy to maintain, says Knoppert. No special technological training is required and, with a variety of intuitive user interfaces, marQuake can be customized to fit the needs of every user -from CEO’s, to sales people, to data analysts.

A Microsoft BizSpark Plus member, marQuake has quickly achieved success in the competitive startup industry. After receiving recognition at numerous high profile events, including TNW Europe 2016 and DIA Barcelona, marQuake recently opened their first offices in the United States and has imminent plans to open further offices in mainland Europe, the UK and China, among others.

“The Bizspark program has been a huge part of our success,” Knoppert continues, “We can honestly say that without the access to Azure technology - and we have looked at other cloud solutions - we could never have built our service and reached this level of success.”

marQuake is highly dependent on Azure and leverages a variety of Azure features and other Microsoft products to increase the quality, security, and usability of their product. For example, the company uses Machine Learning for its global hosting capabilities and SQL Database to improve scalability and adapt to identified trends. marQuake’s roots as a high-end, .NET company makes Azure the perfect product to help grow the company, says Molenwijk. “Azure definitely fulfills its promise as a top line product for DevOps, and this has allowed us to focus more time, energy, and money on building scalable software. We never have to worry about the hardware environment, which is quite a relief. Great partnership. Couldn’t have asked for more.”

Check out marQuake.

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Microsoft is helping these startups succeed through its BizSpark program. To join or see other startup stories, visit us at our website here. To listen to our startups, check out these podcasts on devradio here.  Additionally, see the Azure for Startups GitHub repository which helps you learn about Azure and contains a variety of tutorials, code samples, ARM templates, and documentations for you to explore.

About BizSpark:  Microsoft BizSpark is a global program that helps startups succeed by giving free access to Microsoft Azure cloud services, software and support. BizSpark members receive up to $750 per month of free Microsoft Azure cloud services for 1 year: that’s $150 per month each for up to 5 developers. Azure works with Linux and open-source technologies such as Linux, Ruby, Python, Java and PHP. BizSpark is available to startups that are privately held, less than 5-years-old and earn less than $1M in annual revenue.