Microsoft BizSpark Stories – Mitigate risk and capitalize on profitable new opportunities with SiteZeus

Located in Tampa, Florida, SiteZeus® is a startup company developing a cloud-based location intelligence platform that is intended to help businesses locate and capitalize on profitable opportunities. The company’s flagship service, SiteZeus Synergy, is a big-data GIS platform that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to help businesses visualize market potential and analyze the specific features driving their local, regional, and national sales. In other words, Synergy will help you predict store revenues for your existing business locations, as well as analyze which locations will be the most profitable to open new stores, ultimately helping brands mitigate risks and increase profitability.

Founded in 2013 by brothers Keenan and Hannibal Baldwin, SiteZeus has quickly achieved acclaim in the national startup community. In 2016 SiteZeus was honored to be recognized as Startup of the Year by the Business Intelligence Group (BIG), and was also included in the CIO Review’s list of the Top 100 Big Data Solution Providers. This year SiteZeus took home two wins at the Stevie® American Business Awards, for “Tech Startup of the Year – Software” and “Best Product or Service of the Year – Software Data Visualization Technology.”

The Baldwins’ prior experience investing in a variety of retail brands led the pair to realize that they would need a powerful technology stack to deliver SiteZeus. After workshopping several cloud platforms, the brothers decided that Azure’s seamless integration and advanced analytics made it their ideal solution. Hosted in the Azure cloud, SiteZeus’s back-end solution leverages SQL Azure as a primary database and SQL R-Services to facilitate their platform’s complex statistical models. On the front end, the SiteZeus team utilized Visual Studio because of its deep integration with Azure, and ASP.NET for its agile deployment capabilities. The application also uses Web Roles for business intelligence, and Service Web Roles to distribute complex analytics.

 The Azure technology stack and development tools have been instrumental in allowing us to release our product at a much faster pace,” 

says SiteZeus EVP of Product Development Chuck Cooper, “We host our application on Azure which has eliminated the need to sink a lot of money into building our own secure data center. Building our environment on Azure couldn’t have been easier. Microsoft takes care of everything from the hardware to the Operating System, and we can focus on building a great application. We are very happy we chose to build on Azure.”