MicroStrategy Recognizes Five Companies for Excellence in Enterprise-Class Business Intelligence
Verispan, Watkins Motor Lines, American Express, KeySpan, and NBC Universal Honored at MicroStrategy World 2006 User Conference
Miami, FL, (January 25, 2006) –
MicroStrategy® Incorporated (NASDAQ: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence software, today recognized five companies for achieving outstanding business performance with their MicroStrategy-based business intelligence applications. The “Best Practices in Business Intelligence” award winners for 2006 are Verispan, Watkins Motor Lines, American Express, KeySpan and NBC Universal. By deploying MicroStrategy business intelligence (BI) applications, these companies are sharing information across their enterprises to enhance corporate performance, improve efficiency and productivity, increase revenues, and strengthen customer relationships. The awards were announced at the company’s annual user conference, MicroStrategy World 2006, in Miami, FL.
The award categories and the winners are:
Data Scalability: Verispan
User Scalability: Watkins Motor Lines
Extranet Deployment: American Express
Enterprise Deployment: KeySpan
Innovative BI Integration: NBC Universal
“We are pleased to recognize each of these leading organizations for demonstrating best practices in their MicroStrategy business intelligence deployments,” said MicroStrategy COO Sanju Bansal. “We applaud them for their exceptional use of business intelligence to streamline and enhance their business performance.”
Following is a brief description of this year’s winners:
Verispan : A MicroStrategy customer since 1998, Verispan is the winner in the Data Scalability category. Verispan and its clients are using MicroStrategy to analyze nearly 10 terabytes of prescription claims, medical claims, hospital claims and client data stored in a 120-terabyte Oracle 9i® data warehouse. Dozens of data sources feed an enterprise data warehouse that currently supports 30 MicroStrategy applications. Approximately 1,650 client users, including pharmaceutical companies and government agencies as well as Verispan employees, run nearly 5,000 ad-hoc reports each month to analyze and report on granular patient-centric data, secondary audits, primary research, strategic studies, and customer profiles. Verispan, a healthcare informatics joint venture of Quintiles Transnational Corp. and McKesson Corp., provides a broad array of information products and services to the healthcare industry, including sales targeting and compensation products; market research audits; healthcare profiles; comprehensive managed care offerings; primary market research; opinion leader mapping; data integration, warehousing and mining; data analysis and consulting; direct mail; list services; disease management studies; clinical trial investigator targeting and protocol recruitment evaluation; healthcare outcomes; and cost/benefit analyses, among many others. Verispan is also the nation’s leading provider of patient-centric longitudinal data, with dozens of products used by clients spanning the industry.
Watkins Motor Lines, Inc. : Watkins Motor Lines is the winner in the User Scalability category. A leading transportation company, Watkins provides its customers with immediate, real-time information about freight movement, delivery times and shipment status via its personalized and secure extranet website, myWatkins.com. MicroStrategy powers the Customer Web Reporting application, which continues to grow and support over 20,000 Watkins customers and 250 internal account executives. End users receive custom shipment schedules and real-time freight shipment reports on an hourly/daily basis from data in an IBM® UDB DB2 database. This application relies on MicroStrategy Narrowcast Server(TM) to deliver critical reports to Watkins’ customers. The application produces over 40,000 on-demand scheduled e-mails and faxes each month. With annual revenues of $1 billion, Watkins Motor Lines is one of the nation’s largest privately held, less-than-truckload carriers. It currently has 139 locations in 42 states and the commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and employs more than 10,000 employees and contractors.
American Express : American Express Business Travel is the winner in the Extranet Deployment category for its TrackPoint Global Traveler location solution. Designed to address the safety concerns of business travelers, TrackPoint helps companies protect the well-being of their most important asset — employees — by speeding their ability to locate traveling employees worldwide. During a crisis, such as acts of terrorism or severe weather incidences, travel managers, risk managers or security personnel deploy TrackPoint to quickly access traveler trip itineraries, and thereby identify employees in harm’s way and make critical decisions about their needs. A key feature of TrackPoint is its web-based graphical user interface, powered by MicroStrategy, which, beginning with a map of the world, allows users to point-and-click through country, state/province, and city layers until they isolate the itineraries of impacted travelers. TrackPoint was recently rolled out to American Express Business Travelers in North America and Europe. American Express operates one of the world’s largest travel agency networks with over 2200 travel service locations across 140 countries and territories.
KeySpan : A customer since 1998, KeySpan is the winner in the Enterprise Deployment category and has adopted MicroStrategy as its enterprise BI standard. KeySpan has more than 2,000 users including marketing analysts, financial analysts and gas marketers accessing 36 MicroStrategy-based applications that run against a 1.5-terabyte Oracle 9i® data warehouse. The data warehouse has grown by approximately 50 percent each year since 2001, and the user community has grown 20 percent each year since 2001. MicroStrategy provides the single reporting and analysis platform at KeySpan, enabling users across the enterprise to access their data. The KeySpan user community runs approximately 40,000 reports per month. As a result of adopting MicroStrategy as its enterprise BI standard, KeySpan has integrated the majority of its major applications into the data warehouse, including a mission critical gas control supply application. A member of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, KeySpan Corporation is the fifth largest distributor of natural gas in the United States and the largest in the Northeast, operating regulated gas utilities in New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire that serve 2.6 million customers.
NBC Universal : A customer since 2001, NBC Universal is the winner in the Innovative BI Integration category for deploying MicroStrategy and Geac, yielding significant process improvements and enterprise-wide value. California-based Universal Studios Hollywood theme park business, owned by NBC Universal, replaced a challenging spreadsheet-based system with a MicroStrategy/Geac solution that provides visibility into the theme park’s central budgeting, financial reporting and consolidation mechanism. Using MicroStrategy, line managers can quickly make changes in attendance or park hour assumptions, and provide senior management with new performance targets in minutes as opposed to days or weeks. These daily budgets are then seamlessly loaded to a data warehouse so that operators and line managers can run self-service reports using MicroStrategy to make decisions that optimize revenues and contain costs. The Geac MPC-based financial application analyzes information from one source (SAP® R/3), and MicroStrategy reports on and analyzes operational and transactional data from 10 source systems that feed SAP. Since going live, both technologies have enabled managers to make quick operational decisions resulting in significant increases in customer spend and attendance rates. It is estimated that millions of dollars in additional revenue have been generated as a result of increased attendance. The MicroStrategy/Geac solution has also fundamentally changed the finance, budgeting, reporting and financial closing processes, and cut budget processing time by over 50 percent. NBC Universal is one of the world’s leading media and entertainment companies in the development, production, and marketing of entertainment, news, and information to a global audience.
About MicroStrategy
Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a global leader in business intelligence (BI) technology. MicroStrategy provides integrated reporting, analysis, and monitoring software that helps leading organizations worldwide make better business decisions every day. Companies choose MicroStrategy for its advanced technical capabilities, sophisticated analytics, and superior data and user scalability. More information about MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) is available at www.microstrategy.com.
MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform 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.
Wende Cover
MicroStrategy, Incorporated
1-703-770-1646
wcover@microstrategy.com
Source: MicroStrategy