MicroStrategy Announces Cloud Personal, a Free SaaS-based Business Intelligence Service

TYSONS CORNER, Va., Sept. 28, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced the public beta release of MicroStrategy Cloud Personal, a SaaS-based business intelligence offering that enables anyone to upload data to the MicroStrategy Cloud, analyze it via rich visualizations with just a few clicks, and share powerful insights with colleagues or friends in a matter of minutes.

MicroStrategy Cloud Personal combines the company's latest technology innovations – MicroStrategy Cloud, MicroStrategy Visual Insight, and MicroStrategy Mobile, enabling any user to tap into the kind of analytical insight that previously was reserved for trained analysts with specialized tools. It can replace legacy departmental and desktop BI applications.  Users can experience the power of MicroStrategy Cloud Personal instantly at http://www.microstrategy.com/cloud/personal/.

With MicroStrategy Cloud Personal, users can view and share dashboards on the web or via the Apple iPad, enabling them to answer business questions quickly and easily, without buying software or waiting for IT. MicroStrategy Cloud Personal makes it easy to spot trends, identify outliers, and uncover insights that lay buried in Excel data. Users can also share their dashboards via email, or publish them to an unlimited audience via Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and more. Easy-to-use security settings let users choose which visualizations they wish to share and which ones should remain private.

There are thousands of ways to use MicroStrategy Cloud Personal. For example:

• A salesperson can create a sharable sales opportunity dashboard and update it on a periodic basis. MicroStrategy Cloud Personal enables visual analysis of a sales opportunity pipeline so users can review top and bottom ranked products, explore sales performance to see trends and find causes, and email a visualization of sales opportunity data to colleagues.

• A small business owner can build a dashboard to track financial performance. MicroStrategy Cloud Personal enables users to slice, dice, and drill through their data to gain insight without any help from an IT department. The dashboard can be shared with selected executives for viewing on their iPads.

• Anyone can analyze and share insights gleaned from publically available data sets. For example, MicroStrategy Cloud Personal supports analyses of trend and statistical data available on public sites such as Data.gov (http://www.data.gov/), The World Bank (http://data.worldbank.org/), or the National Center for Education Statistics (http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/). Users can create interactive dashboards of public data sets and then post them on a blog, or share them using Facebook or Twitter.

MicroStrategy Cloud Personal is based on the high performance MicroStrategy Cloud platform, so there is no on-premise software installation, modeling expertise, or administration required. MicroStrategy Cloud delivers high levels of security, leveraging data encryption, hardened network infrastructure, and other technologies to secure user information. Physical hardware environments are maintained in secure, SAS-70 compliant cloud-based facilities with layered physical security and multi-factor access control.

MicroStrategy Cloud Personal users are invited to submit their most insightful visualizations to the MicroStrategy Cloud Personal Gallery, where the best dashboards will be available for public access. The Gallery currently features more than 20 sample dashboards based on a variety of data sets, each of which was developed in under 30 minutes.

"MicroStrategy Cloud Personal is a new visualization service that allows business users to upload, analyze, and share data in a matter of minutes, and is as easy to use as consumer-oriented photo sharing services," said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy Chief Operating Officer. "MicroStrategy Cloud Personal is a great step forward in helping business people and individuals to quickly gain insight from data, and share rich visualizations with colleagues or friends with just a few clicks."

Starting in October, MicroStrategy will award a free Nespresso machine each month to the MicroStrategy Cloud Personal user who submits the best visualization to the MicroStrategy Cloud Gallery.  For more details about MicroStrategy Cloud Personal or the contest, visit http://www.microstrategy.com/cloud/personal/.

About MicroStrategy

Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a global leader in business intelligence (BI) technology. MicroStrategy software enables leading organizations worldwide to analyze the vast amounts of data stored across their enterprises to make better business decisions. The MicroStrategy platform delivers actionable information to business users via the web and mobile devices, including the iPad, iPhone, and BlackBerry. Companies choose MicroStrategy for its ease-of-use, sophisticated analytics, and superior data and user scalability. MicroStrategy offers free reporting software that can be downloaded from its website. To learn more about MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR), visit www.microstrategy.com and follow us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/microstrategy) and Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/microstrategy).

MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform, and 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.

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Contact:
Warren Getler
MicroStrategy Incorporated
703-744-6258
[email protected]

SOURCE MicroStrategy Incorporated