MicroStrategy Honors Four Companies for Excellence in Enterprise-Class Business Intelligence
AdvancePCS, Amway Corp., Avnet and Yum! Brands Awarded at MicroStrategy World 2003 User Conference
LAS VEGAS (February 05, 2003) –
MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence software, today honored four companies for achieving breakthrough enterprise- class business performance with their MicroStrategy-based business intelligence applications. The “Best Practices in Business Intelligence” award winners for 2003 are AdvancePCS, Amway Corp., Avnet and Yum! Brands. These customers have deployed world-class business intelligence (BI) applications and are successfully leveraging them across the enterprise to boost revenue, enhance efficiency and productivity, strengthen customer relationships and increase their competitive advantage. The awards were announced at the company’s international user conference, MicroStrategy World 2003, in Las Vegas, NV. The award categories and their winners are:
* Best Extranet Deployment: AdvancePCS
* Best Enterprise Deployment: Amway Corp.
* Best Information Delivery: Avnet, Inc.
* Best Data Scalability: Yum! Brands, Inc.
“We’re pleased to honor these four companies, all industry leaders, for demonstrating best practices in their MicroStrategy business intelligence deployments,” said Sanju K. Bansal, MicroStrategy’s COO. “While our customers consistently set new standards in their industries with MicroStrategy’s exceptional technology, these four winners have exhibited distinction, defined leadership and established paragons in business intelligence software deployment.” He continued: “The honorees have deployed innovative, enterprise-wide applications that help make thousands of their employees more efficient and proactive; they have harnessed vast, terabyte-sized databases for new insights to strengthen their internal operations and bring new value to their customers worldwide; and they have devised new, cost-saving solutions to common problems faced by business intelligence practitioners. Other dynamic companies may learn from their experiences and replicate their success within their own environments. We congratulate these four winners for their technology achievements and for making MicroStrategy software a critical component of their strategy to become better, smarter businesses.”
Following is a brief description of this year’s winners:
* AdvancePCS: A customer since 1999, AdvancePCS is the winner in the Best Extranet Deployment category for deploying a robust extranet that lets end users analyze 1.2 billion pharmaceutical claims contained in a 10-terabyte data warehouse, while strictly protecting individual patient confidentiality. “MicroStrategy software helps end users, including AdvancePCS management, clinical pharmacists, health plan providers, and other health care practitioners, analyze billions of pharmaceutical claims in order to make critical decisions that improve healthcare outcomes and lower pharmaceutical costs while protecting individual privacy,” said Mitch Henry, AdvancePCS Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer. AdvancePCS (Nasdaq: DVP – News), both a Fortune 500 and Fortune Global 500 company, is the nation’s largest independent provider of health improvement services, touching the lives of more than 75 million health plan members and managing approximately $28 billion in annual prescription drug spending.
* Amway Corp.: Amway Corp., a subsidiary of Alticor Inc., is the winner in the Best Enterprise Deployment category for utilizing the MicroStrategy platform to improve the productivity and retention of Amway’s millions of worldwide independent business owners (IBOs). Alticor is the parent company of Amway, a global leader in direct selling, and Quixtar Inc., a Web-based business opportunity in North America. Four of Amway’s affiliates — Korea, the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy, along with Quixtar in North America — use MicroStrategy’s technology to analyze sales and marketing data generated by approximately 3 to 4 million IBOs working in these countries. The software enables end users to offer incentives or information to IBOs that may increase affiliate sales and strengthen the affiliate-IBO relationship. “MicroStrategy’s global presence, its scalable platform and superior architecture were the main reasons we chose the company’s software back in 1997,” said Tom Kasprzak, Amway Supervisor of Data Support Services, Core Central IT. “MicroStrategy continues to be a leading force in the business intelligence industry.” Headquartered in Ada, Michigan, USA, Alticor and its subsidiaries generate annual sales of more than $4 billion, and offer products, business opportunities, and manufacturing and logistics services in more than 80 countries and territories worldwide.
* Avnet, Inc.: A customer since 1997, Avnet is the winner in the Best Information Delivery category for using the MicroStrategy platform to anchor a multi-lingual, multi-geography and 24 X 7 Business Intelligence (BI) environment that delivers nearly 23,000 formatted email reports to thousands of employees on a monthly basis. “Avnet has found MicroStrategy’s platform of tools to be effective in providing direct and immediate distribution of critical information to our customers and employees,” said Bob Mason, chief information officer at Avnet, Inc. “Through systems integration with MicroStrategy, Avnet has increased its capability to manage its global inventory to support our customers’ growing needs. Management of millions of dollars of inventory globally has been achieved with analytics derived by our reporting processes in our data warehouses, using MicroStrategy. In addition, the MicroStrategy Web and Narrowcast applications have allowed Avnet to bring a self-service Web environment as well as dynamically distributed information to the fingertips of its global customer base, using the Narrowcast application via smtp e-mail.” Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT – News), a Global Fortune 500 company with annual sales of $8.9 billion, is one of the world’s largest technology marketing and services providers serving customers in 63 countries, distributing semiconductors, interconnect, passive and electromechanical components, embedded systems and computer products from leading manufacturers.
* Yum! Brands, Inc.: Louisville, KY-based Yum! Brands is the winner in the Best Data Scalability category for using the MicroStrategy platform to analyze a multi-terabyte database of transactional, product, market and customer data stored in a Teradata(R) data warehouse. “The MicroStrategy platform is the business intelligence standard across our U.S. operations,” said Tom Rosing, Director of Decision Support at Yum! Brands, Inc. “Unlike its competitors, the MicroStrategy platform offers the power, flexibility and ease of use that we need 24/7. KFC, Pizza Hut and Long John Silvers employees currently access the MicroStrategy platform to uncover critical business insight aimed at improving promotions, pricing and product offerings, and strengthening customer relationships.” Yum! Brands (NYSE: YUM – News), a Fortune 300 company formerly known as Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc. and the world’s largest quick-serve restaurant company, operates more than 30,000 KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Long John Silvers and A&W restaurants in more than 100 worldwide territories.
About MicroStrategy Incorporated
Leadership in a Critical Market: Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a worldwide leader in the increasingly critical business intelligence software market. Large and small companies alike are harnessing MicroStrategy’s business intelligence software to gain vital insights from their data to help them proactively enhance cost-efficiency, productivity and customer relations and optimize revenue-generating strategies. MicroStrategy’s business intelligence platform offers exceptional capabilities that provide organizations — in virtually all facets of their operations — with user- friendly solutions to their data query, reporting, and advanced analytical needs, and distributes valuable insight on this data to users via Web, wireless, and voice. PC Magazine selected MicroStrategy 7(TM) as the 2001 “Editors’ Choice” for business intelligence software.
Enterprise-Class Business Intelligence: MicroStrategy 7i(TM) is a truly integrated, enterprise-class, Web-based business intelligence platform. With MicroStrategy 7i, enterprises can now standardize on one business intelligence platform and deploy high-value business intelligence enterprise-wide. MicroStrategy 7i’s configurable query, reporting, and OLAP Web interface is designed to support all users, from casual report viewers to power analysts.
Diverse Customer Base: MicroStrategy’s customer base cuts across industry and sector lines, with over 1,900 enterprise-class customers, including Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse, AT&T Wireless Group, Wachovia and GlaxoSmithKline. MicroStrategy also has relationships with over 500 systems integrators and application development and platform partners, including IBM, PeopleSoft, Hewlett-Packard, and JD Edwards.
MicroStrategy is listed on Nasdaq under the symbol MSTR. For more information on the company, or to purchase or demo MicroStrategy’s software, please visit MicroStrategy’s Web site at http://www.microstrategy.com.
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Marc Brailov
MicroStrategy Incorporated
(703) 770-1670
mbrailov@microstrategy.com
Source: MicroStrategy