McLEAN, Va., December 6, 2001 — MicroStrategy® Incorporated (NASDAQ: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence software, today announced that it secured 41 new sales with retail companies in the first three quarters of 2001. MicroStrategy now boasts 103 of the top 200 global retailers as customers. MicroStrategy’s sales in the year’s first nine months were to both new and existing customers, including such companies as Ahold, Belk, Inc., Big Lots, Inc., Circuit City, Crane & Company, CVS Corporation, Faith Shoes, Hallmark Cards Inc., Raley's Supermarkets & Drug Centers, Supervalu, The Limited, and WH Smith PLC.
MicroStrategy attributed its growing retail success to “the superior features and capabilities of its business intelligence software platform.” Of particular importance is its software’s “exceptional capability to scale to large data and user bases while also providing outstanding security protections.”
The company underscored that retailers, typically looking to deploy MicroStrategy as their enterprise-wide solution, spend approximately $250,000 to $2 million on MicroStrategy software. According to MicroStrategy, the wide utility of its software is allowing retailers to realize important benefits in such critical areas as merchandise buying, marketing analysis, management of inventory levels and assortments, tracking of consumer purchasing trends and forecasting of sales.”
“We've built our reputation and success on providing excellent customer service,” said Dennis Bowman, senior vice president and CIO at Circuit City. “MicroStrategy Web™ enables our users to more closely monitor sales performance and to better understand our customers' preferences, allowing us to improve customer relationships and increase sales. By standardizing our entire enterprise on the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform™, we will be able to more quickly determine how our products move in order to create more effective and timely marketing campaigns, run real-time sales reports and deliver pertinent information to all members of our organization via the method they prefer. These capabilities are critical to our business growth.”
Setting a Standard in Retail
“We’re proud that we’re setting a standard in the retail sector, a sector whose health can affect the entire economy,” said MicroStrategy’s Vice Chairman and COO Sanju Bansal. “Especially in this difficult economic environment, retailers must find ways to keep a step or two ahead of fickle consumers, to squeeze inefficiency out of all aspects of their business and to maximize the productivity of each supplier, department and individual employee,” he added. “Through the expansive capabilities of our software platform, retailers are expanding their capabilities to become more customer-savvy, proactive and efficient.”
Business Intelligence Software: A Missing Link for Business Place
Bansal concluded: “Business intelligence software increasingly appears to be a prerequisite – a missing link -- to a fuller, richer use of information technology as a multifaceted business tool. Companies who have found themselves inundated with raw data in the years following the PC, Internet and wireless explosions now have the technology to refine that data into actionable insight. And our software is specifically designed to extend the benefits of business intelligence to as broad a segment of a business as possible, whether that business is big or small, in the New or Old Economy.”
An independent survey, the largest of its kind, has found that MicroStrategy’s customers are more loyal than those of its competitors -- including Business Objects, Cognos, Brio, Oracle, Hyperion and Crystal Decisions/Seagate. The OLAP Survey, by the market research firm Survey.com, also found that MicroStrategy customers are the least likely to defect.
In August, PC Magazine, a Ziff Davis Media publication, selected MicroStrategy 7 as its “Editors’ Choice” for business intelligence software in a review of business intelligence software. MicroStrategy 7, the Scalable Business Intelligence Platform Built for the Internet™, outperformed its competition and was given the highest rating of four stars in this report, which included Cognos® Business Intelligence Platform, Brio® Enterprise 6.2.2, and Crystal® Enterprise 8.0, each of which received a 3-star rating.
About MicroStrategy Incorporated.
Leadership in a Critical Market: Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a worldwide leader in the critical business intelligence software market. Large and small companies alike are harnessing MicroStrategy’s business intelligence software to gain vital insights from their data to help them proactively enhance cost-efficiency, productivity and customer relations and optimize revenue-generating strategies. MicroStrategy's business intelligence platform offers exceptional capabilities that provide organizations -- in virtually all facets of their operations -- with user-friendly solutions to their data query, reporting, and advanced analytical needs, and distributes valuable insight on this data to users via Web, wireless, and voice. PC Magazine recently selected MicroStrategy 7™ as the 2001 “Editors' Choice” for business intelligence software.
Built for the Internet: MicroStrategy 7 is the Scalable Business Intelligence Platform Built for the Internet™. Its pure-Web architecture provides Web reporting, security, performance and standards that are critical for Web deployment. Within intranets, MicroStrategy's products provide employees with information to enable them to make better, more cost-effective business decisions. In extranets, enterprises can use MicroStrategy 7 to build stronger relationships by linking customers and suppliers via the Internet.
Diverse Customer Base: MicroStrategy's customer base cuts across industry and sector lines, with approximately 1,500 enterprise-class customers, including Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse, AT&T Wireless Group, Wachovia and GlaxoSmithKline. MicroStrategy also has relationships with over 400 systems integrators and application development and platform partners, including IBM, PeopleSoft, Compaq, Informatica and JD Edwards.
MicroStrategy is listed on Nasdaq under the symbol MSTR. For more information on the company, or to purchase or demo MicroStrategy's software, please visit MicroStrategy's Web site at http://www.microstrategy.com.