MicroStrategy presents today with
Dan Kerzner, Senior VP for Mobile, and
Doug Chope, Director of Product Management, as a business and technology strategies. Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy has been in the top vendors of enterprise BI tool suites. However, they have maintained their independence, having over a million business users of their product, 2,100 employees of which 20% are R&D. FY2009 revenue was $337M. $200M in cash with no debt. Several slides gave an overview of their customer base, which is quite extensive and worldwide.
We had an interesting discussion as to why MicroStrategy does not want to be acquired. Dan and Doug stressed their open systems strategy is best for their customers, since it gives customers the choice to move among a variety of alternative vendors for database, security, browsers, etc. An example of a customer who transitioned from Oracle to Teradata and was able to move several thousand MicroStrategy reports in three days. However, the bottom line is that Michael Saylor, Founder and CEO, owns 60% of the stock. So like SAS with Dr. Goodnight, MicroStrategy future will be determined by its founder, rather than a diverse Board of Directors.
Doug outlined the dimensions that their product line spans, across user scale, security, BI styles, data scale, distributed teams, and application quantity. Click on figure to the right to enlarge. Note the five styles of BI as: enterprise reporting, OLAP analysis, scorecards/dashboards, advanced analysis, and alerts/proactive notification ...all from a single unified architecture.
Doug continued with
mobile BI apps as a new paradigm for BI analytics. They are seeing rapid transformation of using mobile apps in their customers. I downloaded the
iPhone app for MicroStrategy - free with several nice demos. Doug made the point that there is one billion persons having PCs but there is five billion persons...implying that there is a huge leverage to drive costs down for smart phones. As BI display device, future value will come from integrating new functionality like: GPS location-aware, multi-touch (tap, pinch, swipe), sensors (accelerometer, speech, barcodes), and data capture via photos.
Good discussion on collaborative BI relative to MicroStrategy. And good demos of dashboards. See this set of demos
here.
My Take... MicroStrategy is an oldie and a goodie! It is amazing that for 22 years they have endured and prospered and remained in the top 5 BI analytic vendors. They continue to be strong on innovation with cool technologies relevant to large corporations.
