MicroStrategy Announces Latest Release of MicroStrategy 9 at Annual User Conference in Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- MicroStrategy^® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 at its annual user conference in Las Vegas. The latest software release from MicroStrategy was made generally available on January 22, 2010.

Work Faster with New Performance Enhancements

MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 includes significant enhancements that make business intelligence faster for BI users, even at the highest scale of usage.  Organizations today are faced with rapidly expanding data volumes and users, partners, and customers that need immediate data access to work more efficiently.  MicroStrategy's latest release can meet these expanding demands with even higher performance than before.  

"The demand for BI systems to provide faster data access is scaling at a rapid pace and requires dramatically more efficient technology," said Mark Smith, CEO and EVP of Research at Ventana Research. "MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 introduces enhanced performance and power to deliver interactive analytics that are easily architected, assembled, and deployed via dashboards and new forms of information applications." 

Faster Analysis

MicroStrategy's new release includes substantial performance improvements that enable business users to perform speed-of-thought analytical investigations to answer key business questions in significantly less time. Organizations can now provide information to thousands of employees and business partners with reliably high performance.  

New data compression algorithms in MicroStrategy's in-memory BI technology enable MicroStrategy in-memory cubes to store up to three times as much data as before and thus provide users with greater analytical depth and breadth. Additionally, new in-memory query algorithms can deliver answers twice as fast.  Testing at MicroStrategy Labs and at customer sites show that MicroStrategy's latest release of in-memory technology can deliver up to four times as many reports as before using the same customer servers, with an average response time of less than two seconds.  

"Organizations continue to be forced to do more with less -- less hardware, less people, less time," said Cindi Howson, Founder of BIScorecard. "MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 brings improvements to its in-memory algorithms that improve both real-time query performance, load times to OLAP caches, and memory required. While MicroStrategy 9 had excellent data scalability, the latest enhancements allow for more user scalability, even with complex analytic queries."

Faster Web Interactivity

MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 delivers higher performance for data interactions.  Testing shows that business users will see up to two times faster performance for their common data manipulations such as sorting, filtering, slicing, and calculations; and faster navigation, browsing, and searching.  The code improvements cause less data to be transmitted, streamline processing, and use less Web server memory.  As a result, MicroStrategy Web users gain these performance benefits upon upgrading to MicroStrategy 9 Release 2.  

Faster Dashboards

MicroStrategy's highly-visual, data-rich Dynamic Dashboards are significantly faster in MicroStrategy 9 Release 2.  Dashboard users will experience faster dashboard load times and faster dashboard interactivity as a result of enhanced data compression algorithms and new rendering algorithms.  Also, new on-demand data transfer technology will load data into dashboards incrementally, as users need them rather than all at once, enabling users to view the dashboard up to ten times faster.

Faster Data Loading

Creating in-memory cubes has been enhanced in MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 to allow organizations to incorporate more data into memory within regular data loading windows.  New data loading algorithms in MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 allow in-memory data to be loaded 30% faster than before, allowing companies to load more data into memory during their batch window.  

"The enhanced performance in MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 will allow us to distribute more information to our BI user population in much less time," said Joyce Vonada, Senior Vice President IT Business Solutions, Lowe's Companies.  "In our recent tests, we saw a 30% performance improvement for both in-memory BI and our most frequently used dashboard."

Deliver More BI with Less Effort

As BI becomes more prevalent across enterprises, the workload for IT personnel expands dramatically.  MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 offers numerous enhancements that enable IT staff to deliver more information with less effort, resulting in a lower total cost of ownership.

Easier to Get Started

Companies can rapidly create new BI applications using MicroStrategy's Jump-Start Project. New in MicroStrategy 9 Release 2, the Jump-Start Project includes more than 30 pre-designed reports and dashboards that can be directly connected to existing databases, providing people with immediate use of their new BI application. Suitable for any vertical or horizontal application, these dashboards and reports can satisfy initial reporting requirements and can be expanded as more reports and dashboards are needed.  

Easier to Architect

The ability to quickly deploy new applications is critical, and MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 offers improved capabilities that enable organizations to get BI applications up and running in less time. The new Graphical Architect features auto-modeling heuristics that make project setup as much as eight times faster for new BI applications, reducing the time to create BI applications from days or weeks to hours.

"In today's increasingly competitive business environment the ability to quickly deploy new applications is critical," said Wayne Eckerson, Director of TDWI Research at The Data Warehousing Institute. "I am impressed with MicroStrategy's auto-modeling heuristics, which make project setup far easier.  As an enterprise BI vendor, MicroStrategy is up to the challenge of being as easy to use and deploy as newer departmental BI vendors, without losing its advantage of enterprise scalability and architectural soundness."

Easier to Operate 

MicroStrategy Health Center, a new product available at no cost to MicroStrategy customers, automatically scans all MicroStrategy servers to anticipate and correct system problems, and provides coordination with MicroStrategy Technical Support Centers. With MicroStrategy Health Center, system performance is enhanced through problem prevention and system uptime is improved with faster issue resolution.

"Con-way is looking forward to MicroStrategy's new Health Center product that can provide our administrators peace of mind knowing that system problems can be automatically identified and resolution information would be readily available," said Sean Devine, Vice President Pricing and Engineering, Con-way Freight. "The new automated administrative features in MicroStrategy's latest release will enable our IT personnel to work more efficiently, saving valuable time and resources." 

Easier Dashboard Applications 

MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 introduces major enhancements to its Dynamic Dashboards technology to deliver easy-to-use dashboards to thousands of business users every day.  This next generation dashboard application, called "DashboardApps," can contain an entire day's worth of information for BI users within a single dashboard.  Simple-to-use, DashboardApps do not require any training or special software to install. DashboardApps are self-contained dashboards that can be personalized for the recipients and delivered via e-mail before each work day begins.

"MicroStrategy is committed to delivering the best business intelligence platform and products, and providing exceptional service to our customers," said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy COO. "MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 delivers exciting new enhancements that can improve worker productivity, helping BI users to quickly get answers to their business questions. In addition, the powerful new tools in our latest release enable IT personnel to deliver more BI with less effort."

MicroStrategy will be conducting a 50+ city Roadshow featuring the new capabilities and enhancements in MicroStrategy 9 Release 2.  For more details on MicroStrategy's latest release, visit http://www.microstrategy.com/Software/businessintelligence.

About MicroStrategy

Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a global leader in business intelligence (BI) technology.  MicroStrategy provides integrated reporting, analysis, and monitoring software that helps leading organizations worldwide make better business decisions every day.  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, http://www.microstrategy.com/freereportingsoftware.  More information about MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) is available at www.microstrategy.com.

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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SOURCE MicroStrategy Incorporated