TYSONS CORNER, Va., March 6, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- MicroStrategy^® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of enterprise software platforms, today announced that it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the "Leaders" quadrant in the 2014 "Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms" report.⁽¹⁾  A copy of the Gartner report is available, compliments of MicroStrategy, at: https://www.microstrategy.com/gartner-bi-magic-quadrant-2014

According to Gartner, the dominant theme of the market in 2013 was that data discovery increasingly continued to be a mainstream BI and analytic architecture. Furthermore, Gartner believes that "by 2015, enterprise buyers of BI platforms will predominantly purchase platforms that support both strong and broad business-user-accessible data discovery capabilities and IT-driven enterprise features for data reuse, governance, security and scalability."  Additionally, Gartner predicted that "by 2016, 25% of net-new BI and analytics platform deployments will be in the form of subscriptions to cloud services."  MicroStrategy believes data discovery is most valuable when seamlessly combined with governed enterprise business intelligence.

In 2013-2014, MicroStrategy delivered a bold set of innovative solutions and critical capabilities for its Business Analytics, Mobile App Platform, and Cloud offerings.

MicroStrategy PRIME™ Running at Multi-Terabyte Scale

In 2014, MicroStrategy announced the availability of its new Parallel Relational In-Memory Engine (PRIME) option for the MicroStrategy Cloud™ at its annual user conference, MicroStrategy World 2014, in Las Vegas. MicroStrategy PRIME™ is a massively scalable, cloud-based, in-memory analytics service designed to deliver extremely high performance for complex analytical applications that have the largest data sets and highest user concurrency. Facebook has successfully built high value information-driven applications with the technology that powers MicroStrategy PRIME.

Most organizations struggle to harness the value of the information in their Big Data stores due to poor performance. Big Data technologies can store large amounts of information, but distributing that information in an interactive manner to thousands of users with existing commercially available technologies is a huge challenge, often resulting in risky, multi-year projects. MicroStrategy PRIME breaks new ground by tightly coupling a state-of-the art visualization and dashboarding engine with an innovative massively parallel in-memory data store. This architecture allows companies to build highly interactive applications that deliver responses to hundreds of thousands of users in a fraction of the time and cost of other approaches. MicroStrategy PRIME acts as a performance accelerator, opening up the data in databases to a much larger user population, driving new demand for information.

MicroStrategy PRIME combines:

• Massively parallel, distributed, in-memory architecture for extreme scale. MicroStrategy PRIME is built on an in-memory, highly distributed, massively parallel architecture, designed to run on cost effective commodity hardware. Complex analytics problems can be partitioned across hundreds of CPU cores and nodes to achieve unprecedented performance. MicroStrategy has worked closely with leading hardware vendors to take full advantage of today's multi-core, high memory servers.
• Tightly integrated dashboard engine for beautiful, easy-to-use applications. MicroStrategy PRIME includes a state-of-the-art dashboard and data exploration engine, built on the MicroStrategy Analytics Platform™. The visualization engine includes hundreds of optimizations designed specifically for the in-memory data store. This engine enables customers to build complete, immersive applications that deliver high-speed response.
• Cloud-based delivery for rapid deployment.  MicroStrategy PRIME is available as a service on MicroStrategy Cloud, MicroStrategy's world-class Cloud Analytics platform. MicroStrategy Cloud offers a complete service, including the infrastructure, people and processes to enable customers to quickly and easily develop and deploy high-scale, information-driven applications.

MicroStrategy Analytics Platform: a Comprehensive Family of Powerful, Easy-to-use Analytics Solutions

In 2013, MicroStrategy unveiled its new MicroStrategy Analytics Platform, a comprehensive family of powerful, easy-to-use analytics solutions. The MicroStrategy Analytics Platform is MicroStrategy's most important new software release in years and is the culmination of over two decades of innovation in analytics and business intelligence. It includes three distinct products:

• MicroStrategy Analytics Enterprise™ (Enterprise-grade business intelligence)
• MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop™ (Free self-service visual analytics tool)
• MicroStrategy Analytics Express™ (Free Cloud-based self-service visual analytics)

Together, these products support a full spectrum of business needs with maximum flexibility and affordability, running at individual, team, departmental, or enterprise-scale; delivered as a desktop application, on the web or mobile devices; supporting high performance analytics on gigabytes, terabytes, or petabytes of data; and deployed on-premises or up to 100x more quickly in the MicroStrategy Cloud™.

The three MicroStrategy Analytics Platform products also share a common user experience—making it easy to start small with self-service analytics and grow into the production-grade features of Enterprise.

MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop Product Brings Fast, Easy-to-Use Analytics to Business Users

In 2013, MicroStrategy unveiled MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop, the company's new desktop-based product for self-service data visualization. The product is freely available and can be downloaded at http://www.microstrategy.com/free/desktop.

MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop is a fast, powerful, easy-to-use product that will enable business end users to gain deep insight into their own data. With MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop, it takes just minutes for an end user to gain valuable insight into their data by creating stunning, useful visualizations without the need of an IT department.  After a simple download and installation process that can be completed in less than five minutes, an end user can:

• Access Data. Users can quickly connect to data from any source. Users can pull data from Excel files, relational databases, multi-dimensional databases, cloud-based applications and even Hadoop – all without writing a single line of scripting or SQL code. And, unlike pricey data visualization solutions that charge even more to access data from databases, with MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop, it's all included for free.
• Visualize. Business users can quickly illuminate the story in their data by creating beautiful, impactful data visualizations. With just a few clicks, these brilliant visualizations—from basic pie graphs to advanced matrices, networks and maps—bring the underlying data to life. MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop is powered by MicroStrategy's lightning-fast in-memory database technology – the same technology behind some of the world's largest business intelligence implementations, but in a package now easily accessible to everyone.
• Build Dashboards. Building dashboards has never been faster or easier. Users simply drag-and-drop to arrange multiple visualizations in a dashboard to convey a story.  Users can also blend/combine data from different sources to create new metrics and data views. No IT needed!
• Share. Users can share insights by exporting and sending their dashboard as an image, a PDF file, or a full MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop file. It's never been easier to creatively share and experience visual insight from data.

MicroStrategy Analytics Platform Certified With MapR Distribution for Apache Hadoop
In 2013, MapR Technologies, Inc., the Hadoop technology leader, and MicroStrategy announced that both companies tested and certified interoperability between the MicroStrategy platform's latest release, MicroStrategy 9.3, and the MapR Distribution for Apache Hadoop.

The MapR Distribution brings dependability, speed, and ease-of-use to Hadoop. MicroStrategy 9.3, in combination with MapR's high-availability, enterprise-grade analytic processing platform, enables customers to unlock insights in Big Data that were previously inaccessible due to prohibitive costs, by making corporate information transparent and more useable for analyses and decision-making. MicroStrategy's highly-scalable, high-performance platform delivers mobile apps, predictive analytics, visual data discovery, and enhanced dashboards that make it easy for organizations to easily extract and deliver actionable insights to business people.

MicroStrategy Analytics Platform Fully Integrated with SAP HANA® platform
In 2013, the SAP® Integration and Certification Center (SAP ICC) certified that the MicroStrategy 9 BI platform integrates with the SAP HANA® platform.  MicroStrategy customers such as Adobe and Adidas can now harness the blazing speed of SAP HANA with MicroStrategy's advanced visualization capabilities to build breakthrough analytical applications. To learn more about the business benefits of integrating MicroStrategy with SAP HANA, please visit http://www.microstrategy.com/sap-hana.

With this integration, business users can quickly and easily transform data in SAP HANA into visually insightful dashboards, reports, and data discovery applications.  Companies can unlock the business value of big data assets using the MicroStrategy BI platform's advanced data visualization capabilities, custom reporting, and interactive dashboards.

⁽¹⁾Gartner "Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms" by Rita L. Sallam, Joao Tapadinhas, Josh Parenteau, Daniel Yuen, Bill Hostmann, February 20, 2014.

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 Incorporated
Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) is a leading worldwide provider of enterprise software platforms.  The Company's mission is to provide the most flexible, powerful, scalable and user-friendly platforms for analytics, mobile, identity and loyalty, offered either on premises or in the cloud.

The MicroStrategy Analytics Platform™ enables leading organizations to analyze vast amounts of data and distribute actionable business insight throughout the enterprise.  Our analytics platform delivers reports and dashboards, and enables users to conduct ad hoc analysis and share their insights anywhere, anytime.  MicroStrategy Mobile™ lets organizations rapidly build information-rich applications that combine multimedia, transactions, analytics, and custom workflows.  The MicroStrategy Identity Platform™ (branded as MicroStrategy Usher™) provides organizations the ability to develop a secure mobile app for identity and credentials. The MicroStrategy Loyalty Platform™ (branded as MicroStrategy Alert) is a next-generation, mobile customer loyalty and engagement solution.  To learn more about MicroStrategy, visit www.microstrategy.com and follow us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/microstrategy) and Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/microstrategy).

MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy Analytics Platform, MicroStrategy Mobile, MicroStrategy Identity Platform, MicroStrategy Loyalty Platform, MicroStrategy Usher, MicroStrategy PRIME, MicroStrategy Analytics Enterprise, MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop, MicroStrategy Analytics Express, and MicroStrategy Cloud 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.

SOURCE MicroStrategy Incorporated