Evaluation Based on Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute
McLean, Va., (January 28, 2009) –
MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced that it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the leaders quadrant in the 2009 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms report.1
According to Gartner, “BI platforms enable users to build applications that help organizations learn and understand their business.” Gartner describes leaders as “vendors that are reasonably strong in the breadth and depth of their BI platform capabilities, and can deliver on enterprisewide implementations that support a broad BI strategy. Leaders articulate a business proposition that resonates with buyers, supported by the viability and operational capability to deliver on a global basis.”
A copy of the Gartner report is available, compliments of MicroStrategy, at http://www.microstrategy.com/GartnerMagicQuadrant2009.
Commitment to BI Innovation
MicroStrategy is committed to providing its customers with innovative business intelligence software as evidenced by its upcoming software release, MicroStrategy 9, which is expected to be generally available in the first quarter of 2009. The company’s most significant release in nearly a decade, MicroStrategy 9 will deliver new technology and features designed to:
* Extend enterprise BI with enhancements for greater scalability, performance, and efficiency;
* Enable rapid development and deployment of departmental BI applications; and
* Provide a seamless consolidation path from departmental BI to enterprise BI
Extending Enterprise BI
As BI systems grow to thousands of users and hundreds of terabytes of data, maintaining fast query performance can be a tremendous challenge. MicroStrategy 9 includes new adaptive caching technology called In-memory ROLAP, which takes advantage of the large addressable memory now available on 64-bit Unix, Linux, and Windows computer servers, and provides a performance-optimized middle-tier database that can respond directly to data requests from reports, dashboards, and OLAP analyses. MicroStrategy 9 also introduces new SQL generation optimizations that can greatly improve performance for sophisticated queries involving complex metrics.
As companies merge and expand, there is an increased urgency for business intelligence to span all operations, across business units, across departments, and across the globe. This expansion introduces new requirements on BI systems to support global deployments. MicroStrategy 9 offers the ability to present reports, dashboards, or OLAP analyses in the local language of business users viewing the information. In addition, MicroStrategy 9 offers numerous capabilities to streamline coordination between development teams working around the globe on the same BI applications.
Rapid Development and Deployment of Departmental BI
MicroStrategy 9 includes significant new architectural components and features designed specifically to support the needs of smaller-scale BI systems for departments and workgroups. MicroStrategy 9 now enables departmental BI applications to be set up quickly, providing end users with the ability to create reports and dashboards, and to distribute information among themselves with little or no IT support.
MicroStrategy’s new Multi-source ROLAP, In-memory ROLAP, and rapid metadata creation enables business departments to quickly set up small BI environments, accessing multiple databases without the time-consuming and technically-intensive work of first creating a data mart or data warehouse.
MicroStrategy 9 offers numerous new features that make assembling reports simpler and faster. Business users can quickly create their own dashboards using new features in MicroStrategy 9, including out-of-the-box dashboard templates, support for custom-designed templates, and new design assistants that aid novice users in creating their own dashboards.
Because of its ROLAP architecture, one of MicroStrategy’s long-standing strengths is the ability of business users to freely investigate the data or “surf” through the data warehouse without having to design a new report for each new combination of data they want to see. MicroStrategy 9 has extended this ability by allowing users to perform these same OLAP manipulations such as pivoting and drilling directly on graphs.
MicroStrategy 9 gives users greater control of report and dashboard distribution with its new Distribution Services product. Users can set up report distributions for themselves or for other users, sending reports via e-mail, networked printers, or directly to recipients’ computers or servers. Business users are empowered to create and manage their own information subscriptions, without the intervention of a centralized IT administrator.
Seamless Consolidation from Departmental BI to Enterprise BI
Organizations have a mix of workgroup, departmental, and enterprise BI systems, and face the problem of having multiple ‘versions of the truth’ across these BI islands that can undermine the credibility of its BI systems. The solution is to merge the islands of BI into a more cohesive, enterprise-wide BI system gradually and incrementally.
MicroStrategy 9 was designed to enable the easy merger of independent islands of MicroStrategy BI into a more expansive enterprise BI system. Using the new Multi-source ROLAP capability, metadata and reports from departmental BI islands can be gradually merged into larger enterprise BI metadata, without also having to move any of the original data into data warehouses or data marts. As a next step, MicroStrategy 9 also enables companies to gradually move their data from disparate databases into the data warehouse simply by “re-pointing” the metadata to access the same data, but at its new location, with no disruption to reports or redesign required.
MicroStrategy Receives 2009 Editors’ Choice Award by TechWeb’s Intelligent Enterprise
MicroStrategy recently received the 2009 Editors’ Choice Award by Intelligent Enterprise. In selecting the 2009 Editors’ Choice winners, Intelligent Enterprise cited the companies’ exceptional vision, innovation, and leadership. According to Intelligent Enterprise, MicroStrategy has “focused on delivering world-class BI with state-of-the-art dynamic dashboards. The MicroStrategy 9 release set for Q1 2009 adds in-memory analysis to speed queries and reduce data-prep dependency on IT. And a new multi-source engine opens up data access while supporting flexible modeling as BI spreads from workgroup to enterprisewide deployments.”
Thousands of Companies Rely on MicroStrategy
Thousands of companies, many with vast amounts of data and large user populations, rely on MicroStrategy to report on and analyze their data to make analytically-based business decisions.
Several of MicroStrategy’s customers were recognized at its annual user conference in January 2009 for outstanding business performance with their MicroStrategy-based business intelligence applications:
Citi’s Global Transaction Services / Commercial Cards Business: A leading global financial services company, Citi was recognized in the Extranet Deployment category for its Citibank® Custom Reporting System, powered by MicroStrategy technology. The Citibank® Custom Reporting System is a robust business intelligence tool supporting Citi’s Commercial Cards clients globally in over 40 countries and 14 languages with extensive analytics, Key Performance Indicators (KPI), and detailed transaction and demographic reports.
Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company: Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company was recognized in the Enterprise Deployment category. Nationwide has deployed MicroStrategy across its enterprise, and has 27 MicroStrategy applications in production, primarily focused on four business areas: personal lines policy analysis, claims management, risk management appraisal, and agent productivity. Nationwide, based in Columbus, Ohio, is one of the largest diversified insurance and financial services organizations in the world, with more than $158 billion in assets.
Target Corporation: Target Corporation was the award recipient in the Data Scalability category. The second-largest general-merchandise retailer in America, Target has adopted MicroStrategy as one of its enterprise-wide business intelligence tools. Target uses MicroStrategy’s software to analyze over 100+ terabytes of vendor, sales, and product data stored in its data warehouse.
Bank of America: Bank of America was the award recipient in the User Scalability category. Bank of America is one of the world’s largest financial institutions, serving individual consumers, small and middle market businesses, and large corporations with a full range of banking, investing, asset management, and other financial and risk-management products and services. Global Product Solutions (GPS), a division of Global Corporate & Investment Banking at Bank of America, employs the BI Platform and designs, delivers, and services integrated credit and treasury products to more than 140,000 clients around the world, including small businesses, middle-market and large corporations, multi-nationals, financial institutions, and governments.
“We consider our placement in the leaders quadrant by Gartner as confirmation of our relentless focus on delivering exceptional BI technology and the highest level of service to our customers,” said MicroStrategy COO Sanju Bansal. “Our upcoming release of MicroStrategy 9 will raise the bar, once again, by providing new technology and features that will help to enhance the performance and efficiency of enterprise BI applications, and support the rapid development and deployment of departmental BI.”
About the Magic Quadrant
The Gartner Magic Quadrant is copyrighted January 16, 2009 by Gartner, Inc., and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
About MicroStrategy
Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a global leader in business intelligence (BI) technology. MicroStrategy provides integrated reporting, analysis, and monitoring software that helps leading organizations worldwide make better business decisions every day. Companies choose MicroStrategy for its advanced technical capabilities, sophisticated analytics, and superior data and user scalability. More information about MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) is available at www.microstrategy.com.
1 Gartner, Inc. “Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 2009” by James Richardson et al, Jan. 16, 2009
MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform, MicroStrategy 9 are either trademarks or registered trademarks of MicroStrategy Incorporated in the United States and certain other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
Wende Cover
MicroStrategy, Incorporated
1-703-770-1646
wcover@microstrategy.com
Source: MicroStrategy