MicroStrategy Extends Wares To Unix

06/22/2004

In what it calls “another milestone in extending user-friendly business intelligence software to mass users,” MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) released a Unix-based version of its MicroStrategy 7i platform.

The vendor provided the following details:

With the release of this new platform, called MicroStrategy 7i Universal Edition, MicroStrategy now offers the market’s first business intelligence (BI) product line that is compiled to 32-bit and 64-bit modes from the same code base and can run on Microsoft Windows, IBM AIX and Sun Solaris Operating System (OS).

“We expect MicroStrategy 7i Universal Edition to enable the development of exciting new business intelligence applications, among both existing and new customers. By providing high performance enterprise reporting and analysis, it will permit thousands of additional business users, ranging from line-workers to top executives, to reap the benefits of business intelligence,” said MicroStrategy COO Sanju Bansal.

“With MicroStrategy 7i Universal Edition, far more users will now be able to tap into the largest databases and obtain answers faster to their reporting and analysis inquiries,” explained Bansal. “High performance business intelligence encourages business users to ask more questions and can produce better decision-making, enterprise-wide.”

“IDC estimates that approximately 22 percent of the BI market is based on UNIX,” said Dan Vesset Research Director in the Data Warehousing and Information Access Program at IDC. “The new Universal Edition of MicroStrategy 7i opens up a significant sector of the BI marketplace for MicroStrategy. Equally important is the fact that MicroStrategy 7i now runs in full 64-bit mode, extending MicroStrategy’s already high scalability to deliver even better reporting and analytics performance.”

“Many organizations today are trying to standardize on an enterprise business intelligence tools platform driven by the need to reduce costs and expand the number of knowledge workers -- including customers and suppliers,” says Wayne Eckerson, Director of Research at The Data Warehousing Institute. “With the Universal Edition of MicroStrategy 7i, a 64-bit BI application server that can run on Unix, MicroStrategy has taken its scalable, high performance BI platform to a new level in support of an organization’s BI standardization efforts.”

“MicroStrategy 7i Universal Edition’s next-generation architecture gives us the comfort that it will seamlessly scale with the growth in our user and data sizes while delivering ultra high performance to our end users,” said Damon Dworak, Manager of Decision Support Services at MCI. “We currently support 1.5 terabytes of data and have found that we can easily grow our user base and increase data volumes with minimal additional hardware investments.”

“MicroStrategy 7i Universal Edition running on Sun Solaris OS offers massive user and data scalability enabled by Sun’s 64-bit through-put computing architecture,” said Cyrus Golkar, CXO, Business Intelligence, Sun Microsystems, Inc. “With MicroStrategy, Solaris OS customers can experience the power of a unique infrastructure to integrate many BI applications into a single platform with impressive performance.”

MicroStrategy 7i Universal Edition maintains MicroStrategy’s commitment to provide the most complete BI platform capable of delivering all five styles of business intelligence – enterprise reporting, cube analysis, ad-hoc query and analysis, statistical analysis, and report delivery and alerting – to thousands of corporate users, partners, and customers. MicroStrategy 7i accomplishes this on a single unified architecture.

MicroStrategy 7i’s unified architecture delivers a broad spectrum of BI functionality ranging from daily operational reports, ad-hoc queries and in-depth OLAP analysis. MicroStrategy 7i’s analytic server is architected to:

--Process queries, reports and analysis to millions of users

--Manage the definitions of reports, metrics and business that are used by all users in an enterprise in a central metadata repository

--Automatically generate highly sophisticated SQL to access the largest databases with high performance queries and reports

--Augment the native analytical capability of all major databases with an additional 200+ functions in the areas of OLAP, math, financial, statistical, and logical operators

--Protect sensitive information with ironclad security

--Provide fault tolerant operations on a 24x7 BI platform

--Eliminate the need to support multiple vendors and architectures for each different “Style of Business Intelligence”

The MicroStrategy 7i analytic server is compiled to both 64-bit UNIX and 32-bit Windows environments from a single code base, which provides companies with the flexibility to freely choose the hardware and software that best fits their needs – both now and in the future. Because of the single code base:

--Customers receive the same functionality and administrative ease regardless of operating system

--New features, service packs and patches are released across all operating systems simultaneously

--Corporations can conform to their hardware and operating system standards

The support for UNIX and Windows operating systems allows querying, reporting and analytical infrastructure to grow incrementally to meet increasing numbers of users and volumes of data from small departmental applications to massive enterprise and extranet implementations. This is accomplished with:

--Object-oriented metadata repository

--Highly efficient and tunable multi-pass SQL generation

--Four levels of shared caches

--Full-featured library analytical and BI functions

--Multi-server clustering and load-balancing capability

--Automatic failover and fault tolerance

--Full parallel processing

--Automatic resource reallocation and system tuning

--Administrative functions attuned to thousands or millions of objects and users

--Multi-leveled security features tuned for fine grained control of both intranet and extranet implementations

MicroStrategy 7i facilitates the monitoring and analyzing the real-time and historical use and performance of the BI system, making it easy to tune the system appropriately, deploy new applications rapidly and manage large BI implementations with textual scripts, all from a central location. The administrator-friendly interfaces:

--Allow centralized and remote management and configuration

--Allow fine-grained monitoring, logging and control of the system’s performance and usage

--Provide fine-grained control over the types of operations various classes of users are allowed to perform

--Define the level of detailed diagnostic statistics to capture for troubleshooting purposes

--Provide real-time and historical analysis to identify usage trends and potential bottlenecks

--Provide impact assessment of proposed configuration changes and potential changes to any part of the application definition

--Automate all repetitive tasks and initiate them on a time-based or event-based schedule

--Support bulk administrative operations to simplify system changes and reduce manpower investment

MicroStrategy 7i Universal Edition is included in the MicroStrategy 7i release and is expected to be generally available the week of June 21, 2004. Pricing for the Universal Edition of Intelligence Server begins at $744 per user or $58,000 per CPU. In this release, Intelligence Server will be available on Sun Solaris OS, IBM AIX, and Microsoft Windows.

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