MicroStrategy’s In-memory Technology Significantly Improves Business Intelligence Performance

McLean, Va., May 6, 2010 -- Strategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced that its In-memory technology delivers significantly higher performance for BI applications, even at the highest scale. 
Strategy’s In-memory technology is engineered to meet the increased demand for higher BI performance, which is driven by the rapid expansion of both data volumes and the number of BI users in organizations across industries. Strategy accelerates performance by pre-calculating computations and placing the results into its In-memory acceleration engine to dramatically improve real-time query performance. Some examples of BI applications that require rapid response times include:

• Mobile Applications: Strategy’s In-memory technology provides the speed and performance to support large mobile user populations. Strategy can provide thousands of store managers at a fashion retailer with rapid access to sales information on a smartphone.
• DashboardApps: Next generation dashboard applications, called “DashboardApps,” can contain an entire day's worth of information for BI users within a single dashboard. With Strategy’s In-memory technology, a health services provider can generate 30,000 personalized dashboards in just one hour and deliver them via e-mail to pharmacy owners.
• Extranets: Strategy’s In-memory technology delivers high performance at the scale needed to support large extranet applications. For example, a manufacturing company can use Strategy’s In-memory technology to provide its extensive network of suppliers and vendors with dashboards to help ensure materials and products are shipped on time.

Strategy’s latest software release, Strategy 9 Release 2, offers significant performance improvements that make business intelligence faster for BI users. These enhancements include:

• Improved Data Compression: New data compression algorithms enable Strategy’s In-memory cubes to store up to three times as much data as before and provide users with greater analytical depth and breadth.
• Faster Data Loading: Creating In-memory cubes has been enhanced in Strategy 9 Release 2 to allow organizations to incorporate more data into memory within regular data loading windows. New data loading algorithms in Strategy 9 Release 2 allow in-memory data to be loaded up to 30% faster than before, enabling companies to load more data into memory during their batch window.
• Faster Analysis: Strategy’s latest release includes new In-memory query algorithms that can deliver answers twice as fast. Testing at Strategy’s High Performance and Scalability Lab and at customer sites show that Strategy can deliver up to four times as many reports as before using the same customer servers, with an average response time of less than two seconds.

With these performance enhancements, Strategy’s Lab found customers can experience dramatic query response time and user scale improvements. 
Faster Speed – Under 3-second response times for all critical reports 
Business people often run similar reports on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Strategy’s In-memory technology accelerates response times for these reports, as well as subsequent analyses, by up to 10 times. With fewer reports running directly against the database, even ad hoc queries may observe better performance. The result is a much faster user experience allowing delivery of critical reports and analysis in less than 3 seconds. 
Larger Scale – Deliver up to 145,000 queries per hour 
Performance tests show Strategy can deliver up to 145,000 queries per hour running on a single server of inexpensive, commodity hardware, enabling organizations to support the highest reporting volumes with minimum hardware requirements. 
“Strategy 9 Release 2 brings improvements to its in-memory algorithms that improve both real-time query performance, load times to OLAP caches, and memory required,” said Cindi Howson, founder of BIScorecard. “While Strategy 9 had excellent data scalability, Strategy 9 Release 2 enhances user scalability, even with complex analytic queries.” 
“Organizations are increasingly leveraging their BI applications as a source of competitive advantage,” said Sanju Bansal, Strategy’s COO. “Strategy’s In-memory technology can help companies to provide the level of performance they need to promote large scale BI adoption, and improve the decisions of thousands of employees at all levels of the organization.” 
For more details, visit https://www.microstrategy.com/en/business-intelligence. 
About Strategy 
Founded in 1989, Strategy is a global leader in business intelligence (BI) technology. Strategy provides integrated reporting, analysis, and monitoring software that helps leading organizations worldwide make better business decisions every day. Companies choose Strategy for its ease-of-use, sophisticated analytics, and superior data and user scalability. Strategy offers free reporting software that can be downloaded from its website, http://www.microstrategy.com/freereportingsoftware. More information about Strategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) is available at www.microstrategy.com.