MicroStrategy Recognizes Five Companies for Excellence in Enterprise-Class Business Intelligence

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- 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 2010 are AmerisourceBergen, Con-way Freight, Yahoo!, Lowe's Companies, and Ross Stores. The awards were announced at MicroStrategy's annual user conference, MicroStrategy World 2010, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The award recipients are recognized for their exceptional use of business intelligence to improve efficiency and productivity, enhance corporate performance, and strengthen customer relationships. "We are delighted to honor these industry-leading organizations for their outstanding use of business intelligence and for making MicroStrategy software a critical component in their BI initiatives," said MicroStrategy COO Sanju Bansal. "Each of these companies has demonstrated remarkable results with their BI applications."

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

AmerisourceBergen: AmerisourceBergen is recognized in the Extranet Deployment category for its InSite system, powered by MicroStrategy technology. The InSite system supports AmerisourceBergen's community pharmacy clients across the U.S. with powerful dashboards and scorecards that provide rich analytics and tailored information. The extranet allows pharmacy owners to quickly identify suspect claims that may contribute to profit leakage, and uncover opportunities to expand their business and reduce unnecessary costs. In addition, the data helps pharmacies to identify high-value patients and focus staff training on attracting and retaining these important patients. The InSite system also provides users with the ability to compare business performance versus peer-group pharmacies; to optimize interactions with consumers; and to identify, implement, and measure business improvement practices.  

AmerisourceBergen is one of the world's largest pharmaceutical services companies, with operations primarily in the United States and Canada. Servicing both healthcare providers and pharmaceutical manufacturers in the pharmaceutical supply channel, the Company provides drug distribution and related services designed to reduce costs and improve patient outcomes. AmerisourceBergen is ranked #26 on the Fortune 500 list.

Con-way Freight:  Con-way Freight is the award recipient in the Advanced Analytics category.  Approximately 1,200 knowledge workers at Con-way Freight spanning all departments, including Operations, Linehaul, Safety, Sales, Marketing, Pricing, Engineering, HR, and Finance, rely on MicroStrategy to access the company's corporate data assets.  Every day, 500 to 1,000 users access dashboards and scorecards and create their own reports to investigate new questions and hypotheses. Con-way Freight cites MicroStrategy's technical strength, including object-oriented design, ROLAP engine, integrated data mining functionality, and the ability to facilitate its most analytical objectives.  

Con-way Freight uses advanced regression models to anticipate customer behavior. To continually evaluate its freight network and reduce waste, Con-way Freight has created an optimization model to monitor and enhance the flow of freight. Con-way Freight is the industry's leading less-than-truckload (LTL) freight transportation company, providing guaranteed, day-definite regional and transcontinental service with exception-free delivery, on-time service performance, and faster transit times through a single, unified network of approximately 300 service centers in North America.

Yahoo!, Inc.:  Yahoo!, Inc. is recognized in the Data Scalability category.  A MicroStrategy customer since 2002, Yahoo! uses MicroStrategy's software to analyze petabytes of Web traffic and ecommerce data.  Yahoo! analysts generate an array of dashboards and reports to optimize the company's Web sites. Yahoo! attracts hundreds of millions of users every month through its innovative technology and engaging content and services, making it one of the most trafficked Internet destinations.

Lowe's Companies:  Lowe's Companies is the award recipient in the User Scalability category.  Lowe's is the second-largest home improvement retailer in the world, serving approximately 14 million customers per week.  Lowe's currently has a number of MicroStrategy-based BI applications that support over 16,000 employees across a variety of business functions. Current MicroStrategy-based BI applications at Lowe's include DART (Data Access and Reporting Tool), which provides employees with greater insight into key performance metrics. Lowe's employees use the data to manage inventory, improve margins, review market specificity, and identify sales opportunities. Lowe's relies on BI to track millions of store items against billions of transaction records to assist in the management of stock levels at its stores. In addition, Lowe's uses BI to help its suppliers and vendors monitor the performance of their products.  Lowe's recently expanded its deployment of MicroStrategy to support a new business intelligence application for its store management, and relies on MicroStrategy 9 to provide store management teams with access to key reports and business metrics. Lowe's MicroStrategy-based applications are used to improve decision making, enhance productivity, and provide better service to customers.

Ross Stores, Inc.:  Ross Stores, Inc. is recognized in the Enterprise Deployment category.  Across its enterprise, Ross Stores has deployed eight large-scale MicroStrategy applications, primarily focused on Merchandising, Store Operations, Store Score Carding, Loss Prevention, and Supply Chain Efficiencies.  In addition, Ross Stores relies on the MicroStrategy platform to provide labor management reporting.  The MicroStrategy-based reporting and dashboard applications run against a multi-terabyte Netezza data warehouse.  Ross Stores, Inc., a Fortune 500 and NASDAQ 100 (ROST) company headquartered in Pleasanton, California, is the nation's second largest off-price retailer with more than 1,000 stores in 27 states and fiscal 2008 revenues of $6.5 billion.

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 9, and MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform 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