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Alternative strategies pay off for MicroStrategy

Kirsten Doyle
By Kirsten Doyle, ITWeb contributor.
Johannesburg, 14 Sept 2021
Phong Le
Phong Le

MicroStrategy has had an excellent year: its business intelligence business is booming, its alternative strategies in areas such as crypto-currency and bitcoin are doing very well, and its software is in a better place than it's ever been.

So says Phong Le, president and CFO of MicroStrategy, who was presenting a keynote during Microworld MEA 2021, being held as a virtual event today.

Sharing a few financial highlights, Le said: “Over the last four quarters we have seen 50% growth on our product licence revenues, which the greatest growth we've seen in over a decade. We’ve also seen a 23% growth in our consulting revenues.”

The company’s cloud business has grown 30% year-on-year, he added. 

MicroStrategy now holds over 105 000 Bitcoin, he said. “It's been a tremendously successful balance sheet strategy for us where we've invested over $2.5 billion in Bitcoin, which is worth over $4.5 billion today, and it gives us a strong balance sheet and a strong financial capability to deliver even more to our customers in terms of software, in terms of services, and in terms of success.”

Long term relationships

According to Le, the analyst community continues to see MicroStrategy as the top enterprise analytics platform in the world. Gartner has named MicroStrategy the number one in enterprise analytics on their critical capabilities, Ventana research cites the company as number one in product experience, and it was named Customers' Choice fpr analytics and BI in Gartner's 2021 Peer Insights Report

“We continue to serve the S&P 500 across all the major industries: retail, financial services, manufacturing, government, technology, healthcare and pharma. Something we're very excited about is that our top 15 customers in the world have been with us on an average for 23 years, which is a testament to the strength of our software, the value that we add to your day to day operations, and the relationship we have with some of the greatest companies in the world.”

Based on innovations

Le said MicroStrategy’s success is based on innovation, the most recent one being the release of MicroStrategy 2019. “We have focused on providing modern experiences and open architecture enterprise platforms, and being a trusted partner.”

The company now offers tools such as Dossier Library, which provides a personalised interactive book, as well as dashboards and mobile productivity apps, which enable customers to turn insights into actions. “Hyper Intelligence is one of the greatest innovations of BI in the last 20 years, providing answers before the questions have been asked, with zero clicks.”

The organisation has also dedicated a lot of time to its open architecture, Le said. It is an independent BI platform that enables customers to use the MicroStrategy semantic layer and all the data in whatever interfaces they choose, and put the analytics into mobile apps, Web apps, Excel, Power BI Tableau, or any other tools.

“We have also created a comprehensive set of SDKs and API so users can interact with MicroStrategy through code, and embed it into applications. We're enterprise grade, and provide the lowest TCO in terms of BI, while having the greatest performance and scalability. We also provide the best end-to-end extensible and role-based security in the BI industry.”

He said the company has been around for over 30 years and has invented something new in the BI industry every five to 10 years.

“We will continue to do this. We are now also aggressively moving a lot of our customers in a matter of weeks, sometimes months, over to the cloud. We want to give our customers lower costs, increased scalability, better portability, improved agility.”

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