Company background
Jerome Sopocko, born in 1968, studied mathematics and computer sciences in France (EISTI) and the United States (Florida Tech), where he specialised in factor analysis of text data.
He founded Askia in 1994, and spent two years with BMRB where he was employed as a consultant to design the TGI's PTK toolkit.
Patrick George, born in 1969, is based in Paris and is Askia's CEO. He studied management and optimization and spent a year as postgraduate at the LSE.
Patrick first became involved with Askia's business development back in 1996, having studied with Jerome. Patrick saw a commercial future in Jerome's software prototypes but was appalled by his lack of business acumen: he was too happy having people use Askia to consider charging them for the software.
When Jerome moved to England for love in 1995, when the Eurostar opened, Patrick ran the Paris office to concentrate on growing the French business whilst Jerome's remit was and continues to be R&D.
Askia, still a privately owned company, has offices in Paris, London, Brussels and New York, with customers in 20 countries.
It launched with askiaanalyse, a simple to use yet powerful software tool designed to facilitate the creation of crosstabs with specific emphasis on open-ended questions and multi-dimensional analysis techniques.
The full suite now includes a questionnaire design product as well as data collection solutions for CATI (1997), for CAWI (1999) and CAPI (2001). In 2004, askiaVista was launched, an online crosstabbing tool, which has proven to be extremely successful among large MR companies with adopters like TNS and GfK. The latest product askiaSurf, a tool to combine waves of continuous surveys on the fly adds to a complete range of software for MR.
