MicroStrategy Positioned in the "Leaders" Quadrant of 2012 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms

TYSONS CORNER, Va., Feb. 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced that it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the "Leaders" quadrant in the 2012 "Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms" report.(1) 

According to Gartner, "Organizations continue to turn to BI as a vital tool for smarter, more agile, and efficient business." Gartner describes Leaders as "vendors that are reasonably strong in the breadth and depth of their BI platform capabilities, and can deliver on enterprise-wide implementations that support a broad BI strategy. Leaders articulate a business proposition that resonates with buyers, supported by the viability and operational capability to deliver on a global basis."

A copy of the Gartner report is available, compliments of MicroStrategy, at http://www.microstrategy.com/Gartner.

In 2011, MicroStrategy continued to provide sophisticated BI platform capabilities and delivered numerous technology innovations.

MicroStrategy Empowers Business Users with Visual Insight
MicroStrategy enhanced ease-of-use by introducing a new data discovery feature, Visual Insight, that enables business users to explore data and spot trends, minimizing the need for IT to create reports and dashboards. With Visual Insight, business people have the power to control the process and get answers to questions quickly and easily.

MicroStrategy Mobile Provides Extensive Feature Set for Mobile BI
Organizations continued to adopt MicroStrategy's mobile BI platform to measure performance, monitor significant trends and take business action using their iOS and Android mobile devices. MicroStrategy's mobile customers include such leading brands as GUESS?, Inc., Whole Foods Market, Herbalife, MetLife, Edmunds.com, eHarmony, and Sonic Automotive.

MicroStrategy Transaction Services Accelerates Business Speed and Productivity
MicroStrategy Transaction Services helps companies accelerate the speed and productivity of their businesses by enabling mobile apps that connect to transactional systems and databases. Introduced in July 2011, MicroStrategy Transaction Services allows mobile apps and web-based dashboards to include action-taking features, including submitting orders, one-click approvals and denials, taking notes for tracking and directing business activity, and writing information back to data sources.

MicroStrategy Delivers on Big Data
Via continued investments in 'big data' technology, MicroStrategy enables organizations to easily reveal business insights hidden in their large, highly complex data sets.  In 2011, MicroStrategy enhanced its in-memory technology to provide improved scale and performance for large user populations.  Also, in October 2011, the Company partnered with Cloudera to introduce a Hadoop connector so that organizations can quickly and easily perform analytics on structured or unstructured data stored in Hadoop.

MicroStrategy Launches Major Initiative in the Cloud
In July 2011, MicroStrategy introduced MicroStrategy Cloud, a cloud-based platform-as-a-service. MicroStrategy Cloud enables rapid, cost-effective development of business intelligence and mobile and social apps. Compared to traditional on-premises BI approaches, MicroStrategy Cloud is faster to deploy, delivers better performance, and offers significant financial advantages. MicroStrategy Cloud is powerful and flexible enough to support the full range of cloud use cases, from fast, tactical BI solutions, to the largest implementations where performance and scalability are imperative. Unlike general-purpose cloud solutions, MicroStrategy Cloud is architected and optimized for large data volumes, high concurrency, and high performance. MicroStrategy Cloud includes the entire MicroStrategy BI platform technology for reporting and analysis, enabling users to tap into enterprise data from their desktop or mobile device, improving insight and business decision-making.

MicroStrategy Extends its BI Expertise and Analytics into Social Media
MicroStrategy entered the market for social software with several products aimed at capitalizing on the growing market of Facebook-compatible applications.  MicroStrategy's social intelligence offerings fall into two categories: Enterprise Social Intelligence and Consumer Social Intelligence.  These products can be used in different combinations by organizations worldwide to harness the power of Facebook data. 

Enterprise Social Intelligence Products

• MicroStrategy Gateway for Facebook.  Released in July 2011, MicroStrategy Gateway for Facebook provides high capacity connectivity between enterprise IT environments and Facebook's social graph using Facebook's open APIs. 
• MicroStrategy Wisdom.  Released in December 2011, MicroStrategy Wisdom is an analytic application built on MicroStrategy's BI platform which owners of Facebook-compatible applications can use to segment and analyze their Facebook application user populations. 
• MicroStrategy Alert.  Released in July 2011, MicroStrategy Alert is a Facebook-compatible application for marketing and e-commerce. It helps companies and brands extend the effectiveness of their Facebook pages.  

Consumer Social Intelligence Products

• Emma. Released in July 2011, Emma is a Facebook-compatible consumer application that provides an electronic marketplace for goods, services, and social activities. 
• Usher. Released in November 2011, Usher is a Facebook-compatible consumer application that allows users to set up and manage Facebook events.
• Wisdom for Facebook. Released in April 2011, Wisdom for Facebook is a consumer application that allows users to view and analyze the demographics and interests (Facebook Likes) of the entire Wisdom network or of just their own personal friend network. 
• Alert for Facebook. Released in July 2011, Alert for Facebook is a Facebook-compatible consumer application that is a convenient mobile Facebook Page reader.

"Our leadership position in the Magic Quadrant is a testament to our commitment to R&D and underscores our pioneering work in developing powerful technologies that capitalize on Big Data, Mobile, Social, and Cloud trends," said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy Chief Operating Officer. 

(1) Gartner "Magic Quadrants for Business Intelligence Platforms" by John Hagerty, Rita L. Sallam, James Richardson, February 6, 2012.

About the Magic Quadrant
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About MicroStrategy
Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a leading provider of enterprise software platforms for business intelligence (BI), mobile intelligence, and social intelligence applications.  MicroStrategy's BI platform enables leading organizations worldwide to analyze the vast amounts of data stored across their enterprises to make better business decisions.  Companies choose MicroStrategy BI for its ease-of-use, sophisticated analytics, and superior data and user scalability.  MicroStrategy's mobile intelligence platform helps companies and organizations build, deploy, and maintain mobile apps across a range of solutions by embedding intelligence, transactions, and multimedia into apps.  MicroStrategy's social intelligence platform includes a number of applications that help enterprises harness the power of social networks for marketing and e-commerce, as well as a suite of free consumer apps that use MicroStrategy's enterprise technologies.  The MicroStrategy Cloud offering combines MicroStrategy and third-party software, hardware, and services to enable rapid, cost-effective development of hosted BI, mobile, and social applications.  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 Cloud, MicroStrategy Mobile, Cloud Personal, MicroStrategy Transaction Services,MicroStrategy Gateway for Facebook, MicroStrategy Wisdom, MicroStrategy Alert, Emma, Usher, Wisdom for Facebook, and Alert for Facebook 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