memoQ streamlines global translation services with Microsoft Azure

memoQ, based in Hungary, has been empowering organizations with high-quality translation management software for almost two decades. “We serve a variety of industries where technical accuracy, safety and compliance is important, and we offer premium translations—translations where the human touch cannot be eliminated,” elaborates Balázs Kis, Co-CEO at memoQ.

In its early days, collaborative translation, where the source material is distributed among numerous translators and editors, was the gold standard. Eventually though, with increasing volume and tighter deadlines, managing document versions for publication became complex and time-constrained. This was when memoQ came in. The company provided translation management software to help translation providers get a handle on the many documents coming in and out concurrently, including the infrastructure and hosting to support its product.

memoQ serves clients not only in Hungary but around the world. Initially, the company rented physical servers in three countries. "Around the mid-2010s, it became clear that this was not scalable. We couldn't maintain consistent processes and needed too many resources to manage the infrastructure,” recalls Kis. The company needed a flexible solution that would enable its team to effortlessly manage global deployments.

Reliable, scalable, and secure infrastructure

memoQ transitioned to Microsoft Azure cloud to fortify its localization software. The company created hosting environments for different types of deployments, offering private cloud for larger customers, and even on-premises setups for entities like the armed forces. “We have 777 cloud instances—or virtual machines—in multi-tenant hosting, where a single virtual machine (VM) is shared among multiple users. We also have more than a hundred privately hosted customers,” explains Kis. “Before, it wouldn't have been possible to rent a physical server and manage the security and authentication infrastructure for all these customers. With Azure, this process is now pretty much automated.”

 ”We have an IT staff of four handling almost 1,000 customers,” he adds. “What’s more, we can easily react to customer requests and workload changes, because resizing virtual machines and storage with Azure is very simple.”

memoQ also started to automate deployment tasks, unlocking more scalability. “Access management is seamlessly integrated with Azure Active Directory,” Kis observes. “The time to onboard a new customer can be as little as a few minutes up to an hour, depending on complexity."

Maintaining data integrity was also key. "We can guarantee and demonstrate that we segregate and protect customer data. There's a separate SQL Server database for each and every customer," assures Kis. Furthermore, memoQ offers its clients the flexibility to choose their data's geographical location, ensuring compliance with local data privacy regulations.

Streamlined and cost-efficient operations

Microsoft also equipped the team with tools to streamline internal operations. While the memoQ team has always used Exchange Server and SharePoint, they also began exploring new tools with the move to Azure. "We started using Power BI to analyze business data and forecast our recurring revenues. Visual Studio is also used by our sizable development team as an integrated environment,” remarks Kis.

The migration also enhanced memoQ's cost-efficiency. Gloster Cloud, a Microsoft partner, advised memoQ on resource-optimization. "With reserved VMs, we have reduced our costs by about 15 percent," Kis highlights. “The highest praise for infrastructure is when you don’t notice it. It's just reliably there, and any incident is genuinely rare. That's the peace of mind we have with Azure: we don’t have to invest resources into the infrastructure.”

With all these positives, it’s no surprise that memoQ's key performance indicators have increased. "In 2018, the share of recurring revenue in the total revenue was 58 percent. In 2023, it has reached 74 percent," points out Kis. “The cloud infrastructure played a role in this improvement.”

Cloud translates into opportunities

As the company plans its future growth, it continues to leverage Azure's capabilities. "Azure infrastructure is a strong foundation that enables us to add more sophisticated security features, to improve our security posture and continue to build trust with our customers,” states Kis. “We plan to tighten security with Azure Defender and optimize our application architecture with Microsoft’s support. We’re also looking at repackaging services, having certain services bundled together or provisioned separately to make resource use more efficient."

The company is also exploring data intelligence for more informed decision-making and has ambitious plans to strengthen its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities using Azure Cognitive Services infrastructure. “The company's growth has been intertwined with our use of Microsoft solutions. Since the start, it’s enabled us to do more with less,” sums up Kis.