MicroStrategy Launches MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop™

-- Extraordinary Advances in Analytics with Free Visual Data Discovery Offering

-- Desktop Product Brings Fast, Easy-to-Use Analytics to Business Users, Freeing Them from IT and Budgetary Constraints

TYSONS CORNER, Virginia, Oct. 22, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- MicroStrategy^® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of enterprise software platforms, today 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 Desktop represents an extraordinary advance in analytics and BI because it allows users to connect to data, create compelling visualizations, and share those insights within minutes, all without IT assistance," said Paul Zolfaghari, President, MicroStrategy Incorporated. "We designed it to be easy to download and install, so that anyone could get more from their data in minutes. We also made it fast and easy to use, with MicroStrategy performance and power -- so you can literally analyze billions of rows of data on your desktop. It's faster than ever and it's stunningly effective."

According to Wayne Eckerson, President, BI Leader Consulting and industry analyst, TechTarget: "The new MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop makes MicroStrategy a top-tier competitor in the red-hot visual discovery market. The company was one of the first enterprise BI vendors to ship a visual discovery tool, so its offering is mature compared to others in its peer group, but it was locked away inside its existing platform. By offering a stand-alone desktop visual discovery tool and making it freely available, MicroStrategy places itself among the leaders in this new sector of business intelligence."

No Dead Ends
MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop is part of the newly released MicroStrategy Analytics Platform™ family of products. It leverages all the relevant features of that new release, including enhanced data blending features, in-memory performance, and map analytics. MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop users will be able to seamlessly upgrade to other products in the MicroStrategy Analytics Platform family if and when their requirements expand beyond standalone desktop-based self-service data visualization.

"Over the last several years, many new users, previously limited to Microsoft Excel, have embraced self-service visual data discovery tools to unlock the potential value of their data. But very often these tools are just the starting point of an organization's analytical journey. Inevitably, users start looking to extend to information-driven applications, mobile applications, enterprise data publishing and reporting, advanced Big Data analytics, and other higher-value analytical applications," continued Zolfaghari.

"Standalone data visualization point solutions simply don't support these use cases. So organizations hit a dead end. Our goal with MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop is to give business users a seamless path from quick, easy, desktop-based data visualization to enterprise-grade business intelligence that fully supports a full range of high-value, production analytics," he said.

According to Cindi Howson, Founder, BI Scorecard: "The new data blending feature in MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop will boost this enterprise solution's agility, and the easier-to-use, more appealing interface will up the ante in the competitive visual data discovery market. The new MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop, with no complicated modeling and free for now, seems easy enough for any BI user to test drive."

Available Today
MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop is a desktop solution for Windows operating systems and is available as a free download at http://www.microstrategy.com/free/desktop.  To learn more about MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop within the overall MicroStrategy Analytics Platform, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nySVK_Lxeg. 

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.  The MicroStrategy Mobile App Platform™ 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 Business Intelligence Platform, MicroStrategy Analytics Platform, MicroStrategy Mobile App Platform, MicroStrategy Identity Platform, MicroStrategy Loyalty Platform, MicroStrategy Usher, and MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop 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.

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Contact:
Warren Getler
MicroStrategy Incorporated
+1-703-744-6258
wgetler@microstrategy.com