MicroStrategy Announces General Availability of MicroStrategy Cloud

MONTE CARLO, Monaco, July 12, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced the general availability of MicroStrategy Cloud, a cloud-based platform-as-a-service. MicroStrategy Cloud is the first cloud-based service to enable rapid, cost-effective development of business intelligence, mobile and social apps, leveraging hundreds of thousands of terabytes of data and scaling to hundreds of thousands of users. The announcement of MicroStrategy Cloud was made today at the company's worldwide launch event and European user conference in Monte Carlo.

Compared to traditional on-premises BI approaches, MicroStrategy Cloud is quicker to deploy (within 48 hours) and more flexible, delivers world-class performance, and offers significant financial advantages. MicroStrategy Cloud is powerful and flexible enough to support the full range of cloud use cases, from fast, flexible tactical BI solutions, to the largest implementations where performance and scalability are imperative.

Cloud-based solutions typically accelerate application development and deployment, which speeds time to market, increases return on IT investment, and creates competitive advantage. While generic cloud approaches are not designed for the unique requirements of large scale business intelligence, MicroStrategy Cloud is a purpose-built cloud service architected and optimized for large data volumes, high concurrency, and high performance.

Complete Business Intelligence Platform-as-a-Service

MicroStrategy Cloud makes the complete MicroStrategy BI platform available as a cloud-based service. Subscribers have unlimited access to the full suite of MicroStrategy technology for reporting and analysis, enabling users to tap into enterprise data from their desktop or mobile device, improving insight and business decision making. Additional benefits include:

• Elastic and Scalable. MicroStrategy Cloud scales dynamically in response to demand, from tens of users to multiple thousands of users.

• Multiple Data Source Options. MicroStrategy Cloud customers can connect directly to their on-premises or cloud-based data sources via MicroStrategy's multisource capabilities. In addition, customers can opt to build and host their own database on the MicroStrategy Cloud through integrated database and data integration options.

• Managed Environment. MicroStrategy Cloud is configured, optimized, and maintained by MicroStrategy, so organizations no longer have to worry about provisioning hardware, tuning the architecture, or upgrading software.

World-Class Performance

MicroStrategy Cloud is a tightly integrated, highly optimized environment that combines the latest hardware and software from best-of-breed vendors. It combines the latest in-memory, 64-bit business intelligence technology with massively parallel, high memory database architecture. This world-class infrastructure is continuously monitored and optimized by an elite team of performance specialists.

Integrated Database and Data Integration

MicroStrategy Cloud includes optional database services in three pre-integrated and optimized configurations to meet a range of price and performance requirements. Service options range from a highly cost-effective base service to an extreme high performance enterprise service that leverages dedicated warehouse appliances and supports high performance analytics on hundreds of terabytes of data. Optional data integration services include high throughput and parallel data loading capabilities. They integrate with on-premises or cloud-based data sources through a variety of out-of-the box connectors.

Accelerated Time to Market

Developing a large-scale BI infrastructure is typically a multi-year project that involves significant operational and financial risk. MicroStrategy Cloud eliminates inefficient and risky processes related to planning, architecting, sourcing, contracting, budgeting, hiring, training, installing, testing, deploying, and more. It enables organizations to directly tap into decades of experience in business intelligence and data warehousing, and into an expert team that has designed, managed, and operated some of the largest and most complex BI environments in the world. New customer-specific MicroStrategy Cloud environments can be made available in 48 hours, enabling organizations to immediately access a world-class platform that features industry-leading advanced hardware and software, pre-integrated and pre-optimized for high performance and availability.

Comprehensive Security

MicroStrategy Cloud services are designed to deliver the highest available levels of security and operational control. The MicroStrategy Cloud architecture leverages secure virtualized BI environments, data encryption, hardened network infrastructure including secure customer VLANs, and multilayer authentication and access control to secure customer information. Operational processes are managed via an adaptive control framework that maps to various industry standards. Physical hardware environments are maintained in secure, SAS-70 compliant cloud-based facilities with layered physical security and multi-factor access control.

Elite Platform Partners

MicroStrategy has carefully sourced, selected, and integrated technology from strategic vendor partners as part of the MicroStrategy Cloud architecture. These strategic vendor partners were chosen after a comprehensive analysis and performance assessment and will be at the core of MicroStrategy's growing cloud partner ecosystem. Initial MicroStrategy Cloud vendor partners include:

• IBM Netezza. IBM Netezza will provide its complete family of analytical appliances.  Together, IBM Netezza and MicroStrategy will deliver the first Big Data cloud database offering in business intelligence that can scale to handle petabytes of data.

• Informatica. Informatica has been selected as the data integration foundation for the MicroStrategy Cloud because of the company's long history of success in Cloud Data Integration. MicroStrategy Cloud customers will be able to choose from a multitenant Cloud-based Data Integration solution, or run their own dedicated Informatica environment in the MicroStrategy Cloud.

• ParAccel. ParAccel will bring its analytic platform to MicroStrategy Cloud customers, delivering extreme scalability to thousands of nodes and tens of thousands of users in a flexible, solution that is optimized for virtualized and cloud-based environments.

Global Data Centers

MicroStrategy Cloud services will be hosted from data center facilities worldwide.

Streamlined Access to Services

MicroStrategy Cloud includes full access to Technical Support. Additional MicroStrategy services ranging from metadata modeling to application and database tuning are available as options.

Cost Effective

MicroStrategy Cloud is designed to be extremely cost effective over the lifecycle of each customer project. Subscribers only pay for the services they consume each month, so it's easy for organizations to start small and grow their implementation over time. Pricing is based on customer configuration and sizing and is available on request.

Cloud Alliance

MicroStrategy's launch of MicroStrategy Cloud is a core component of the company's mission to establish a growing cloud partner ecosystem—"the Cloud Alliance"—that assembles resources from data warehousing and data integration companies, establishes advanced worldwide data centers, and hires the best minds in the industry.

"MicroStrategy Cloud will transform the way our customers build and deploy solutions and strategic information applications," said Michael J. Saylor, MicroStrategy Chairman and CEO. "MicroStrategy is building and deploying this infrastructure so that each customer can avoid investing millions of dollars on their own hardware and human resources."

Available Now

MicroStrategy Cloud is available now. For more information, please contact your MicroStrategy account executive or email us at [email protected].

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, MicroStrategy 9 and MicroStrategy Cloud 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.

MSTR-G

Contact:
Claudia Cahill
MicroStrategy Incorporated
703-270-2207
[email protected]

SOURCE MicroStrategy Incorporated