Customers trust MicroStrategy's independent status
With consolidation at a fever pitch in the enterprise business intelligence
(BI) market, it would be understandable if MicroStrategy customers felt nervous,
given that the vendor remains as one of the market's few independents.
After all, Business Objects now has the support of new parent company SAP,
thanks to a US$6.7 billion acquisition, while Hyperion is now part of Oracle,
which spent $3.3 billion to buy it. Meanwhile, IBM is expected to soon finalize
its $5 billion purchase of Cognos.
Yet, MicroStrategy customers interviewed at the company's MicroStrategy World
2008 conference in Miami expressed confidence in the vendor and said its independent
status gives it certain advantages over Business Objects, Hyperion and Cognos.
In particular, several customers said they like that MicroStrategy will remain
free of pressures stemming from having to prioritize supporting complementary
products from a parent company and, conversely, diluting support for similar
products from competing companies.
Lindsey Aubuchon, MIS director at W.E. Aubuchon Co., which operates hardware
stores in New England, said her company likes to have flexibility to mix and
match IT products as it sees fit, creating multi-vendor environments to achieve
its desired implementations. "My company likes to have openness to choose
what they want," said Aubuchon, whose employer has been a MicroStrategy
customer for about seven years.
Consequently, she nodded in agreement when MicroStrategy's CEO Michael Saylor
said in his keynote at the event that the vendor strives to be agnostic and
neutral with respect to making its products work with complementary wares from
other vendors.
"Our view is to be Switzerland in this business, and to make sure we protect
your investment when we give you the ability to tap into lots of different vendors
and technology architectures to achieve your goal," Saylor said.
He predicted that Cognos, Business Objects and Hyperion will see their product
roadmaps re-routed based on competitive considerations handed down by their
new parent companies.
As an independent, MicroStrategy will continue to support a wide variety of
complementary, third-party products, such as Web browsers, operating systems,
processors, databases and application servers, based on the needs of its customers
and on market dynamics, Saylor said. "The market needs a vendor that provides
the flexibility we can provide," he said.
Phillip Julian, sales operations and senior data management analyst at Inspire
Pharmaceuticals in Durham, North Carolina, is all for product agnosticism and
flexibility in IT vendors. The company recently acquired the MicroStrategy software
to generate better, more interactive and visually appealing reports, he said.
Until now, Inspire had been analyzing data with SAS Institute data-mining software
and creating reports with Microsoft's Excel.
"We're doing it so we get into really good technology that would help
us grow," Julian said. "I want to move us into another generation
[of reporting software] where we're looking at something that's more graphical,
more visual. We need to have something that the VP of sales and the sales force
can understand."
Similar expectations led Robeks, a chain of fruit juice establishments, to
make a hefty investment in the MicroStrategy platform, which it is in the process
of implementing. With most of its presence in the U.S. West Coast, Manhattan
Beach, California-based Robeks is looking to grow significantly in other parts
of the U.S. and the world in the coming years, and, to support those efforts,
it needs better reporting and analysis tools than the in-house ones it currently
uses.
"Being able to analyze [sales and marketing] data more accurately will
help us grow the business. We're in a very quick growth mode right now,"
said IS Director Pete Carvajal.
As a new customer, he was interested in hearing Saylor address the recent wave
of market consolidation to find out what MicroStrategy's position is. "Them
emphasizing that they're one of the players in the market that's not in the
middle of all the turmoil of all the consolidation was good to hear and to understand
what the future is," he said.
"It's important for them to come out and indicate the whys and whens of
their business model moving forward. This is a huge investment for my company,
and the last thing I want to do is spend all this time and money in an application
that gets absorbed by a bigger company and maybe disappears," Carvajal
said.
IDG News Service
Symantec Backup Exec 12 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 deliver industry leading Windows data protection and system recovery. Download this whitepaper to find out the top reasons to upgrade and how to get continuous data protection and complete system recovery.
Data and system loss — from a hard drive failure, malicious attack, natural disaster, or simple human error — can happen anytime. Don’t leave your business vulnerable. Make sure you have a secure recovery strategy in place. Symantec's latest backup and system recovery technology can efficiently restore critical applications, individual emails and documents and even restore your entire system in minutes in the event of a loss.
Businesses face a growing challenge to ensure that the IT environment is properly protected. Backup Exec 12 integrates with other applications in the Symantec family of products, to complement your current data protection strategy, keep your data securely backed up and make it recoverable when you need it most.
