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MicroStrategy, Inc. is a provider of business intelligence (BI), mobile software, and cloud-based services. The company is based in the Washington, D.C. area and serves companies and organizations worldwide. Founded in 1989 by Michael J. Saylor and Sanju K. Bansal, MicroStrategy develops software that enables organizations to analyze internal and external data in order to make more effective business decisions and to quickly develop mobile apps. Its proprietary software can be deployed in companies' data centers, or as cloud services. Notable clients include Facebook, Starbucks, and Lowe's Companies.

Overview

MicroStrategy develops and sells business intelligence, mobile software, and cloud-based services for companies and organizations worldwide. The company’s scalable core business intelligence software platform performs analytics on a variety of data, such as sales figures, payroll data, and inventory in order to inform users' business decisions.

MicroStrategy’s mobile software offerings include a platform for viewing business intelligence data as well as apps for mobile identity and mobile marketing and commerce platform. The company also offers a Facebook-focused market research platform.

MicroStrategy remains one of the few independent, publicly traded BI software providers; in the business intelligence (BI) market. Its primary business analytics competitors include SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos, and Oracle's BI Platform.

MicroStrategy is headquartered in the Washington, D.C. metro area and has worldwide operations across 26 countries, in cities including New York, San Francisco, Paris, Warsaw, Madrid, London, Milan, Dubai, Tokyo, Sydney, and São Paulo. The current CEO and chairman of the board of MicroStrategy is Michael J. Saylor, the company's co-founder. Sanju K. Bansal, the other co-founder, is executive vice president and vice chairman of the board.

History

Michael J. Saylor started MicroStrategy in 1989 with a consulting contract from DuPont, which provided Saylor with $250,000 in start-up capital and office space in Wilmington, Delaware. Saylor was soon joined by company co-founder Sanju K. Bansal, whom he had met while the two were students at MIT. The company produced software for data mining and business intelligence using nonlinear mathematics, an idea inspired by a course that Saylor and Bansal took at MIT. During this time period, MicroStrategy experienced rapid growth. In 1992, the company gained its first major client when it signed a $10 million contract with McDonald's, and increased revenues by 100% every year between 1990 and 1996. In 1994, Saylor and Bansal moved the company's offices and its 50 employees from Delaware to Tysons Corner, Virginia. MicroStrategy had its initial public offering in June 1998. On its first day of trading, the stock price doubled.

In March 2000, after a review of its accounting practices, MicroStrategy announced that it would restate its financial results for the preceding two years, which resulted in an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In December 2000, Saylor, Bansal, and the company's former CFO settled with the SEC without admitting wrongdoing by each paying $350,000 in fines. The officers also paid a combined total of $10 million in disgorgement. MicroStrategy itself was charged with a number of violations and settled with the SEC by hiring an independent director to ensure regulatory compliance.

By the fourth quarter of 2003, the company added over 200 new corporate customers based on the strength of its business intelligence platform and grew sales steadily, posting increased revenue for every quarter through the end of 2007. New clients during this period included the United States Postal Service, DHL Express, and Priceline.com. In 2007 and 2008, the company was named one of the 200 Best Small Companies in America by Forbes.

In 2010, MicroStrategy began developing and deploying business intelligence software for mobile platforms, such as the iPhone and iPad. The company launched its mobile business intelligence platform for iPhone and iPad in July 2010, and in 2011 provided its workforce with 2,300 iPads. Also in 2011, the company expanded its offerings to include a cloud-based service called MicroStrategy Cloud.

In 2012, MicroStrategy expanded beyond its BI and mobile products with the release of Wisdom, a market research tool which allows for a demographic analysis of social media platforms such as Facebook. For example, The Washington Post used Wisdom to examine the books, music, and sports teams "liked" by Facebook users who also "liked" various GOP presidential candidates, while Boston.com used Wisdom to compare the "likes" of fans of the New England Patriots and the New York Giants.

Products

MicroStrategy's scalable core analytics platform for business intelligence (BI) allows users to search through and analyze large amounts of data from a variety of sources, including data warehouses, Excel files, and Hadoop distributions. MicroStrategy also provides Visual Insight, a data visualization tool. MicroStrategy's platform can provide near real-time analytics using its in-memory cubes of cached data. The most recent major release of the software is 9.3, which was released in September 2012.

MicroStrategy Mobile, launched in 2010, allows customers to build and deploy mobile apps for the iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry that deliver business intelligence data without needing to reformat the data for different platforms. MicroStrategy Cloud is a cloud-based platform as a service that allows businesses to provide business intelligence without investing in infrastructure. MicroStrategy’s Express is a software as a service (SaaS) data discovery analytics product. It allows users to build, schedule, and deliver customized analytic reports to recipients in their organization without extensive support from IT professionals.

In addition to its business intelligence products, MicroStrategy offers three standalone software applications. Usher is a mobile identity application, which provides an always-on electronic alternative to traditional employee IDs, keys, and proximity cards. Alert is a mobile commerce application that offers retailers and other merchants to create branded mobile apps for marketing, commerce, and loyalty. Wisdom is a BI application that can access the data in public application networks like Facebook and Google and provide market intelligence to companies.

Awards and recognition

In 2011, Apple recognized MicroStrategy's iOS app as one of the best business apps of the year. In 2012, the Business Application Research Center (BARC) ranked MicroStrategy first overall in Mobile BI in the BI Survey 12. Also in 2012, Information Management named MicroStrategy one of the “Forty Vendors We’re Watching” for its ability to understand new business trends.

References

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