I imagine, based on my own experience, the average tech worker thinks of surveys as small sets of questions used to easily and quickly collect a few data points. SurveyMonkey is fine for that. But for the types of real surveys that provide the data for serious research, Qualtrics is what you need. I've used it for government surveys, sociological, health/medical, etc., web and in-person, with lots of flow control, randomization, and all the other features needed to produce robust and accurate data.
1. It gives a great morale boost so many other not so sexy US places outside of silicon valley. YES big success possible outside of Silicon Valley.
2. Now with this big SAP investment, UTAH will get considerable 'tech employment' boost longer term instead of same old crowded Silicon valley & New York (sky rocking housing prices)
3. The way the company grew organically for long time instead of hitting VC money from day one (another big company that did was Atlassian)
4. a very rare father-son founder company and a family company (brother and many of family members in big roles)
> both his parents held doctorates and his father lectured about market research at the University of Oregon. The Smiths moved to Utah around the time Ryan’s father opted to work at Brigham Young University, and in 2002, the pair started Qualtrics, originally targeting academics that needed to conduct field research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute
SAS is an interesting company, both for their revenue growth and their work culture.
>During the 1980s, SAS was one of Inc. Magazine's fastest growing companies in America from 1979 and 1985.[18][23] It grew more than ten percent per year from $10 million in revenues in 1980[6] to $1.1 billion by 2000.[23] In 2007, SAS revenue was $2.15 billion, and in 2013 its revenue was $3.02 billion. By the late 1990s, SAS was the largest privately held software company.
>SAS is well known for its workplace culture.[36][41] The company was used as a model for workplace perks at Google[3] and is taught as a case study in management seminars at Stanford.
The page about the SAS CEO, James Goodnight, is also interesting:
I engineered in both offices. VP of engineering and product are both in Seattle and there are MORE engineers in seattle if talking absolutes.
I've heard some good things about the tech scene there, apart from Domo.
Qualtrics has come a LONG way in terms of underlying product quality, but they themselves got by for a long time selling the shit out of a product that could barely deliver. The company is 50% salespeople.
Less than a year ago their APIs were going down every day because of the crappy pile of legacy PHP monolith they were built on. They have brought in some very smart engineering leaders to transition to a more modular and scalable core product, but there's a ways to go. Another thing that really sucked about the organization was that half the engineers are professional services engineers building custom, overpromised, one-off solutions for large customers. The vast majority are almost completely unmaintainable and they do a very poor job of leveraging previous work or having cookiecutters/shared libraries to accelerate custom development.
With all that said, I think their market opportunity is fucking gigantic and they are serious about curing the underlying inefficiencies of the organization. They are the leader of the field in a time when pretty much every C-suite is realizing they need customer & employee experience data to stay competitive.
They expanded into Customer Experience and Employee Experience products with the big enterprise deals and fat margins that come with them but were much worse at those things than specialized competitors. They then came up with the concept of "Experience Management" to tie the data together. This is actually pretty cool stuff - Ford was able to find which crappy conditions at their dealerships were driving lower sales, etc etc. The strategy was basically if we can offer a total package where we're pretty good at everything, we'll beat competitors that are excellent at one thing.