MicroStrategy Recognizes Excellence in Enterprise-Class Business Intelligence

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 26, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence software, today recognized five companies for achieving outstanding business performance with their MicroStrategy-based business intelligence applications. The "Best Practices in Business Intelligence" award recipients for 2011 are CVS Caremark, Starbucks, LinkedIn, Novation, and Societe Generale. In addition, MicroStrategy recognized Julio Ortiz, Sears' Divisional Vice President, for Individual Excellence in Business Intelligence. The awards were announced at MicroStrategy's 14th annual user conference, MicroStrategy World 2011, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

By deploying MicroStrategy for their BI applications, these organizations are sharing information across their enterprises to enhance corporate performance, improve efficiency and productivity, and strengthen customer relationships. "We congratulate these organizations and Mr. Ortiz for their achievements in using business intelligence to support organizational goals," said MicroStrategy Chief Operating Officer Sanju Bansal. "Each of these companies has demonstrated remarkable results with their BI applications."

The award categories and recipients are:

Extranet Deployment: CVS Caremark

High Performance and Scalability: Starbucks

Advanced Analytics: LinkedIn

Mobile Deployment: Novation

Enterprise Deployment: Societe Generale

Individual Excellence in Business Intelligence: Julio Ortiz, Sears' Divisional Vice President

Following is a brief description of this year's award recipients and their business intelligence applications:

CVS Caremark: CVS Caremark is recognized in the Extranet Deployment category for its RxNavigator® system, powered by MicroStrategy technology. Approximately 5,000 users across CVS Caremark's corporate client base use RxNavigator® to access their pharmaceutical spend information, and gain insight to effectively manage prescription benefit utilization. CVS Caremark clients access a secure extranet to analyze clinical and utilization data contained in a 38-terabyte data warehouse. With the MicroStrategy extranet, end users can more effectively track coverage changes, study population demographics, and better understand drug spending and utilization trends, thereby controlling costs while improving healthcare outcomes. Over 2 million reports are run on the system annually. CVS Caremark is the largest pharmacy health care provider in the United States, and is ranked #18 on the 2010 Fortune 500 list.

Starbucks: Starbucks is the award recipient in the High Performance and Scalability category. Approximately 20,000 Starbucks employees across 10,000 North American store locations access MicroStrategy-based BI Retail Dashboards. Using MicroStrategy technology, Starbucks is able to track revenues, understand store performance against labor, visualize peak product performance, align sales targets, and improve margins. 

Store managers and assistant managers use the MicroStrategy retail dashboard application to monitor sales performance and labor.  The Store Manager dashboard also illustrates item-by-item breakdowns of beverages, food, and promotional items sold by store, by time. In addition, this information rolls up to allow regional directors and district store managers to use the retail dashboard to monitor these same metrics, not only on a store-by-store basis, but also from an organizational or geographic view, across the company.  

Starbucks has 30 retail dashboards, each of which contains 12 or more reports. All 20,000 Starbucks BI users run the dashboards during a small window of time every Monday morning. A 4-node MicroStrategy server cluster processes an average of 40,000 dashboards in 3 hours, with an average completion time of 4.8 seconds per dashboard.  Starbucks is an international coffee and coffeehouse chain, with over 17,800 stores in 49 countries, including over 11,000 in the United States, almost 800 in the UK, and nearly 1,000 in Canada.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the award recipient in the Advanced Analytics category. LinkedIn relies on MicroStrategy to access the company's massive data warehouse and understand how its website is performing. MicroStrategy-based advanced analytics data helps LinkedIn identify customer behavior and intraday trends, as well as evaluate performance such as page views, registrations, invitations, and product usage. LinkedIn also performs analysis with MicroStrategy to better understand weekly shifts in usage trends.  LinkedIn is an Internet platform company focused on connecting the world's professionals. The LinkedIn website launched in 2003 and is the world's largest professional network with more than 90 million members, representing every country and executives from every Fortune 500 company.   

Novation: Novation is the award recipient in the Mobile Deployment category. In July 2010, Novation deployed VHA PriceLYNX for iPhone, a MicroStrategy Mobile application to VHA members. These health care organizations have the ability to use the application to retrieve and monitor important supply pricing information and compare prices on thousands of items using their iPhone and iPad, have a clear view of their supply chain on-the-go, and access graphical snapshots of pricing information that hospital buyers need to make smart purchases. With both the web-based and mobile applications, VHA members have realized an average annual savings of more than $4 million per facility using VHA PriceLYNX.  Novation is the nation's leading health care supply contracting company. With over $37.5B in purchasing volume, Novation serves the purchasing needs of nearly 25,000 VHA and UHC member organizations and 5,500 Provista members covering 28,000 sites.

Societe Generale: Societe Generale is recognized in the Enterprise Deployment category. Societe Generale has deployed five MicroStrategy-based BI applications across its 2,600 retail banking branches in France that are currently used by more than 16,000 employees, including bank branch managers, sales directors, and marketing analysts. With MicroStrategy reports and dashboards, Societe Generale is able to better understand customer needs, strengthen customer relationships, track trends, identify profitable areas, and prevent fraud.  The sales force relies on MicroStrategy dashboards to track sales and product performance, promote cross sell and up sell activity, and monitor employee performance. MicroStrategy is also used for risk management and profitability management.

Considered one of the largest BI deployments in France, MicroStrategy dashboards and reports run against a 20-terabyte IBM DB2 data warehouse. Societe Generale's BI user community is projected to expand to 22,500 in the near future. Societe Generale is one of the largest financial services groups in the euro-zone, and employs 157,000 people worldwide in retail banking, private banking, global investment management and services, and corporate and investment banking. 

Sears: Sears' Divisional Vice President Julio Ortiz is the award recipient in the Individual Excellence category. Ortiz was recognized for his efforts at spearheading the widespread use of BI across Sears. Ortiz leads the development and delivery of Sears Data Warehouse and BI capabilities, and is currently working towards developing additional BI solutions.  Sears Holdings Corporation, the publicly traded (Nasdaq: SHLD) parent of Kmart and Sears, Roebuck and Co., is the nation's fourth largest broadline retailer with approximately 3,900 full-line and specialty retail stores in the United States and Canada.

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, MicroStrategy 9, and MicroStrategy Mobile 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