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UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

 


 

FORM 10-K

 

FOR ANNUAL AND TRANSITION REPORTS PURSUANT TO SECTIONS 13 OR 15(d) OF THE

SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934

 

x    ANNUAL REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE

SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934

 

For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2004

 

OR

 

¨    TRANSITION REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934

 

For the transition period from                             to                             

 

Commission File Number 000-24435

 


 

MICROSTRATEGY INCORPORATED

(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)

 

Delaware   1861 International Drive, McLean, VA 22102   51-0323571
(State of incorporation)   (Address of Principal Executive Offices) (Zip Code)   (I.R.S. Employer
Identification Number)

 

Registrant’s telephone number, including area code:

 

(703) 848-8600

 


 

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

 

Not applicable

 

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act:

 

Class A common stock, par value $0.001 per share

 

Warrants to Purchase Class A Common Stock, par value $0.001 per share

(Title of class)

 


 

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant: (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days.  Yes  x  No  ¨

 

Indicate by check mark if disclosure of delinquent filers pursuant to Item 405 of Regulation S-K is not contained herein, and will not be contained, to the best of registrant’s knowledge, in definitive proxy or information statements incorporated by reference in Part III of this Form 10-K or any amendment to this Form 10-K.  x

 

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is an accelerated filer (as defined in Exchange Act Rule 12b-2).  Yes  x  No  ¨

 

The aggregate market value of the voting stock held by non-affiliates of the registrant (based on the last reported sale price of the Registrant’s class A common stock on June 30, 2004 on the Nasdaq National Market) was approximately $534.7 million.

 

The number of shares of the registrant’s class A common stock and class B common stock outstanding on March 1, 2005 was 12,830,884 and 3,394,399, respectively.

 



Table of Contents

MICROSTRATEGY INCORPORATED

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

          Page

PART I

    

Item 1.

   Business    1

Item 2.

   Properties    16

Item 3.

   Legal Proceedings    16

Item 4.

   Submission of Matters to a Vote of Security Holders    17

PART II

    

Item 5.

   Market for Registrant’s Common Stock and Related Stockholder Matters    18

Item 6.

   Selected Financial Data    20

Item 7.

   Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations    22

Item 7A.

   Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures about Market Risk    47

Item 8.

   Financial Statements and Supplementary Data    48

Item 9.

   Changes in and Disagreements with Accountants on Accounting and Financial Disclosure    48

Item 9A.

   Controls and Procedures    48

Item 9B.

   Other Information    49

PART III

    

Item 10.

   Directors and Executive Officers of the Registrant    50

Item 11.

   Executive Compensation    52

Item 12.

   Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management and Related Stockholder Matters    56

Item 13.

   Certain Relationships and Related Transactions    58

Item 14.

   Principal Accountant Fees and Services    58

PART IV

    

Item 15.

   Exhibits and Financial Statement Schedules    60

 

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CERTAIN DEFINITIONS

 

All references in this Annual Report on Form 10-K to “MicroStrategy”, “Company”, “we”, “us” and “our” refer to MicroStrategy Incorporated and its consolidated subsidiaries (unless the context otherwise requires).

 

FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION

 

This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. For this purpose, any statements contained herein that are not statements of historical fact, including without limitation, certain statements under “Item 1. Business” and “Item 7. Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and located elsewhere herein regarding industry prospects and our results of operations or financial position, may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. Without limiting the foregoing, the words “believes,” “anticipates,” “plans,” “expects,” and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. The important factors discussed below under the caption “Risk Factors,” among others, could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by forward-looking statements made herein and presented elsewhere by management from time to time. Such forward-looking statements represent management’s current expectations and are inherently uncertain. Investors are warned that actual results may differ from management’s expectations.

 

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PART I

 

ITEM 1. BUSINESS

 

Overview

 

MicroStrategy is a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence software that enables companies to report, analyze and monitor the data stored across their enterprise to reveal the trends and insights needed to make better business decisions. The MicroStrategy mission is to empower every business user to make more informed decisions by providing timely, relevant, and accurate answers to their business questions. To achieve this mission, MicroStrategy’s single, integrated platform is designed to support various styles of business intelligence through an easy-to-use interface. MicroStrategy provides sophisticated analytical performance to every business user in the format that suits them best, from high-level dashboards, to custom reports, to advanced analysis via e-mail, web, fax, wireless and voice communication channels. MicroStrategy engineers its software for reliability, scalability, security, and ease of administration for organizations of all sizes.

 

Our software platform, MicroStrategy 8TM, enables users to query and analyze the most detailed, transaction-level databases, turning data into business intelligence and delivering boardroom quality reports and alerts about the users’ business processes. Our web-based architecture provides reporting, security, performance and standards that are critical for web deployment. Our products can be deployed on company intranets to provide employees with information to make better, more cost-effective business and management decisions. Leading companies and government organizations worldwide have chosen MicroStrategy as their enterprise business intelligence standard. By integrating information from across the enterprise, solutions built on the MicroStrategy platform are designed to give analysts, managers and executives the critical insight they need to make better business and management decisions and to optimize their operations. With extranet deployments, enterprises can use MicroStrategy 8 to build stronger relationships by linking customers and suppliers via the Internet. MicroStrategy facilitates customer success with a comprehensive offering of consulting, education, technical support and technical advisory services for our customers and strategic partners.

 

Industry Background

 

Business intelligence software offers decision-makers the opportunity to ask and answer questions about their use of data that has been captured but not yet fully exploited.

 

Four key business needs have driven demand for business intelligence tools:

 

    Increased User Access and Scalability:    In the past, dissemination of information has been limited to a few power users or analysts. Now a wide range of information customers—from customer service representatives to the CEO and from customers to suppliers—demand the insight that business intelligence can provide. The wide acceptance of the Internet as an information source has also fueled demand for enterprise data to be accessible over the Web to tens of thousands of users across the enterprise.

 

    Increased Data Scalability:    Increasing information generation, and in particular, the need to capture electronically and store every business transaction, has made terabyte-size data warehouses commonplace. Terabyte-size data warehouses store one trillion bytes of data or more and are among the largest databases in the world. Since transaction-level information is now routinely captured, organizations struggle to make productive use of such massive data stores. Organizations need to view data within the operational context of the data—making even the most detailed information meaningful and comprehensive to business users. As a result, users want to be able to discover easily trends hidden in these very large databases, and verify these trends by reviewing the underlying transaction detail.

 

   

Improved Supply Efficiency:    Supplier transactions become more efficient with direct access to inventory and other related data. For true vendor-managed inventory and collaborative commerce systems, vendors need to have access to key information about how their products are performing

 

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against business metrics. For example, vendors should be able to see how their products are selling in each geographic region so as not to over-ship products that are slow-moving or under-ship products that are selling quickly. By opening vendor performance information to the vendors themselves, buyers and sellers of goods and services become partners in the quest to optimize sales, margin and inventory.

 

    Improved Distribution Efficiency:    Business partners collaborate more effectively with access to shared data. By granting partners access to information such as the manufacturing pipeline and build schedule, partners can be more effective at satisfying demands of end customers and setting expectations. Furthermore, opening invoice and purchase order information to partners can enable them to reduce the overhead associated with channel management, resulting in cost savings and time efficiencies. For example, notifying channel sales partners of changes in the manufacturing schedule allows them to reset end customer expectations or to increase selling activity.

 

The emergence and widespread acceptance of the Internet as a medium of communication and commerce have changed the way businesses interact with each other and their customers by allowing businesses to establish new revenue streams, create new distribution channels and reduce costs. Simultaneously, the amount of corporate information stored in databases continues to grow exponentially, and companies are giving an increasing number of employees, customers and partners access to their information. Business intelligence tools are one of the gateways to this information. For example, companies are using Internet-based systems to facilitate business operations, including sales automation, supply-chain management, marketing, customer service and human resource management. Consumers are also becoming increasingly sophisticated in their use of the Internet, relying on the Internet not only to make online purchases, but to perform price comparisons, analyze recommendations from like-minded individuals, educate themselves about relevant products and offerings and enter into transactions that were once conducted face-to-face or via the telephone. The integration of the Internet into business processes and increased consumer sophistication create opportunities for companies to use business intelligence applications as part of a more dynamic business model. Factors driving demand for these applications include:

 

Increased Electronic Capture of Transaction, Operational and Customer Information.    The rapid growth in the electronic capture of business information and the increased availability of related profile data on the parties or products involved in each transaction are providing businesses with a rich data foundation for performing various analyses and making decisions. Powerful data analysis and mining tools are required to sift through massive amounts of data to uncover information regarding customer interactions, trends, patterns and exceptions, in turn enabling organizations to provide superior service and products to customers.

 

Need to Create a Personalized, One-to-One Customer and/or Supplier Experience While Maintaining Privacy.    Many companies are initiating strategies that establish personalized relationships with each customer and/or supplier based on individual needs and preferences, and earn their loyalty by providing superior service, security and convenience. In order to successfully acquire, retain and upgrade customers, organizations need to understand their profiles, their transaction history, their past responses to marketing campaigns, and their interactions with customer service. Retrieving information from widely dispersed and complex data sources and providing a holistic view of the customer can be challenging. At the same time, while businesses have the opportunity to collect a variety of information that could improve targeting, customers are increasingly concerned about the potential for loss or abuse of their privacy.

 

Need to Integrate Online and Traditional Operations.    While there are substantial benefits to conducting business electronically, companies need to ensure that their online operations work in combination with their traditional operations. Companies are seeking to ensure that an order placed online can be reliably fulfilled according to the expectations of the customer and to develop and maintain consistent interactions with customers across different channels. Maintaining the integrity of, and enhancing, the customer experience are crucial to fostering customer loyalty and supply chain relationships.

 

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Increased Openness of Business Intelligence Applications to Customers, Suppliers and Partners.    Business intelligence systems are no longer confined to the corporation. Today, companies are extending their business intelligence insight to suppliers, channel partners and customers via extranets. Business partners can have up-to-the-minute access to sales histories, inventory status and billing information through their web browsers.

 

Emergence of Wireless Internet and Voice Technologies.    Information can be more valuable if there is untethered, ubiquitous access to the information. An integrated platform reduces the need to rely on multiple vendors for these products and services. This development is expected to generate new business opportunities for companies by providing an additional channel for existing services and creating opportunities to provide new services that can be delivered to any place and at any time to anyone that has access to a wireless device.

 

MicroStrategy Solution: Business Intelligence for the Whole Enterprise

 

MicroStrategy offers MicroStrategy 8, an integrated, industrial-strength business intelligence platform designed to enable organizations to consolidate business intelligence applications onto a single platform for reporting, analysis and monitoring of real-time business information. The platform provides reliable and maintainable solutions with a low total cost of ownership and can be used in a departmental, enterprise or extranet deployments. The MicroStrategy 8 business intelligence platform can be used to identify trends, improve operational efficiencies, reduce costs and increase profitability. Since businesses integrate information from across the enterprise, solutions built on the MicroStrategy 8 platform give analysts, managers and executives critical insight they need in optimizing their business operations. Integrated web-based reporting, report delivery and real-time alerting capabilities can enable the entire enterprise to work smarter, faster and better.

 

MicroStrategy’s business intelligence platform provides the functionality users need to make better business and management decisions. The MicroStrategy 8 platform delivers a high-performance solution that meets users’ demands and is highly functional, simple to use, scalable and easy to administer. With one platform, users are able to report, analyze and monitor their business with all of the five most popular styles of business intelligence, which consist of:

 

  1. Scorecards and Dashboards—Reports are formatted with broad visual appeal and can easily convey information “at-a-glance”. This style of business intelligence targets the business monitoring needs of managers and executives.

 

  2. Reporting—Report formats can have more detailed operational information than is conveyed on a scorecard or dashboard. These reports serve critical information to all personnel across the enterprise.

 

  3. OLAP Analysis—Slice-and-dice analysis with drilling, pivoting, page-by, and sorting capabilities serves business users whose analytical needs exceed the content of the operational reports, and require a simple environment for basic exploration within a limited range of data.

 

  4. Advanced and Predictive Analysis—Investigative queries that can analyze data in the database, down to the transaction level detail if necessary. This style provides extensive predictive and statistical treatment of the data for correlation analysis, trend analysis, financial analysis and projections.

 

  5. Alerts and Proactive Reporting—Information that needs continuous monitoring requires alerts and proactive reporting to serve large populations on set schedules, business exceptions, or on-demand. This style of business intelligence targets large user populations, both internal and external to the enterprise.

 

Specific benefits of the MicroStrategy 8 business intelligence platform include:

 

Flexibility to Report, Analyze, and Monitor.    MicroStrategy is the first and only business intelligence architecture to unify reporting, analysis, and real-time business monitoring into one experience for the business user, into one efficient and scalable architecture for the IT professional, and into one economical and extensible utility for the CIO.

 

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Industrial-Strength Business Intelligence.    The MicroStrategy platform enables industrial-strength business intelligence with enterprise-caliber IT, high user scalability and high database scalability. MicroStrategy enables centralized administration, operations and operations maintenance in a unified interface and unified backplane. This enterprise-caliber infrastructure allows for data scalability and user scalability with a zero footprint web product, where business intelligence can expand across and grow with the enterprise.

 

Five Styles of Business Intelligence.    With the five styles of business intelligence on an integrated backplane, users are no longer bound to departmental reporting or solutions that offer only one style of business intelligence or combine individual styles of business intelligence. The need for multiple business intelligence or reporting tools is minimized when users have access to all five styles for their enterprise business intelligence needs.

 

Easy-to-use Interface for Business Users.    MicroStrategy exposes all the sophisticated business intelligence applications to end users through easy to use intuitive what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) web interfaces. This enables deployment to large user populations with minimal training required. The user interface includes an array of “one-click” actions embedded throughout the interface. It uses dialog boxes, mouse-over tool tips, and undo/redo buttons to make it easy for business people to explore the software without prior training.

 

Interactive Reporting.    MicroStrategy 8 has extended the MicroStrategy reporting capability by making all reports and scorecards fully interactive. Business users can rearrange the organization of any report with simple drag-n-drop actions or by clicking on the toolbar icons to get views of the data, all from the same report and without requiring assistance from IT.

 

Integration of Analysis in Every Report or Scorecard.    MicroStrategy 8 makes the same powerful analytic capability available directly from enterprise reports or scorecards automatically. MicroStrategy 8 delivers analytic integration to reporting users in two ways. The first way is by providing OLAP capabilities directly to tables embedded within report documents, allowing business users to analyze the data within the table while staying within the bigger report document. The second way allows users to “drill” from a report document to a dedicated analysis view that is optimized for conducting detailed analysis. In both cases, the integration of reporting with analysis is automatic.

 

Direct Access to SAP® BW.    MicroStrategy 8 incorporates a dynamic data access engine in its architecture. This engine is designed to access multi-dimensional databases (MDDBs or OLAP Cube Databases), such as those from SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW). MicroStrategy 8’s Dynamic MDX Engine generates MDX syntax that is fully certified with SAP BW using SAP’s high performance BAPI interfaces. Because MicroStrategy’s MDX is dynamically generated using the multidimensional models implicit in SAP InfoCubes, QueryCubes, and ODS, users can automatically and transparently drill back into SAP BW for more data, without any prior programming or prior design of drill paths. MicroStrategy 8 can also join data across SAP BW Infocubes and QueryCubes as well as access multiple instances of SAP BW at once.

 

Direct Access to Operational Data (From ERP Systems).    MicroStrategy 8 extends the MicroStrategy metadata architecture to include attributes and facts accessed directly from non-modeled databases, instantly on a query-by-query basis. MicroStrategy 8’s Operational SQL Engine enables MicroStrategy reports to include data from any operational system using completely free-form SQL, including stored procedures and views. Since the attributes and facts from operational database sources are managed by the MicroStrategy metadata architecture, MicroStrategy’s security architecture and other reusable objects such as prompts can be applied automatically.

 

Heterogeneous Joining of Data From Across the Enterprise.    MicroStrategy 8 extends the MicroStrategy data modeling flexibility to include integrated views of data across heterogeneous data stores. By mapping conforming dimensions from different sources within the MicroStrategy object model, MicroStrategy 8 can automatically join data from multiple different sources in the same report document. Data can come from any

 

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source accessible by MicroStrategy 8, including the data warehouse, data marts, SAP BW, and any number of operational system databases.

 

Integrating Data Mining into Mainstream Reports & Analyses.    MicroStrategy 8 extended its analytic engine by allowing reports and analyses to include predictive capabilities in every MicroStrategy report or analysis. MicroStrategy 8’s analytic engine can calculate four of the primary data mining functions including neural network algorithms, clustering algorithms, regression algorithms, and tree algorithms. Hand-in-hand with this calculation capability, MicroStrategy 8 also includes the ability to import data mining models directly from data mining products from vendors like IBM®, Teradata®, SAS, and SPSS using the predictive modeling mark-up language standard. With this capability, data mining models can be imported through a single click and automatically converted into a standard MicroStrategy metric. After that, MicroStrategy’s Data Mining Service extension enables these metrics to be used freely and calculated quickly in reports, analyses and alerts.

 

Support for Large Data Volumes and All Major Relational Database/Hardware Combinations.    The MicroStrategy platform supports systems with very large data volumes and is specifically optimized to support all major relational database platforms commonly used for business intelligence systems as well as multi-dimensional databases like SAP Business Warehouse (BW). Important features of our solution in this area include:

 

    Structured Query Language (SQL) optimization drivers that improve performance of each major database;

 

    The ability to support very large user populations;

 

    Highly reliable up-time, even in high volume applications; and

 

    The ability to work with and support nine languages for international applications.

 

Powerful Analytics to Customer- and Transaction-Levels of Detail.    We believe that the MicroStrategy 8 platform incorporates one of the most sophisticated analysis engines available today, capable of answering highly detailed business questions. It offers support for information beyond the summary level to include information at the customer- and transaction- levels. This capability is critical to a wide range of applications, including highly targeted direct marketing, e-commerce site personalization, customer and product affinity analysis, call detail analysis, fraud detection, credit analysis forecasting, trend metrics and campaign management. The MicroStrategy 8 platform allows the creation of highly sophisticated systems that take maximum advantage of the detail available in a company’s databases.

 

Powerful Personalization Engine.    The MicroStrategy 8 platform includes a customer- and transaction-level personalization engine. The underlying architecture is designed to generate personalization parameters based on data gathered by an organization from a variety of sources, including past customers’ transactions, customer clickstream information, stated user preferences and demographic information. In addition, the MicroStrategy personalization engine is able to determine when and under what circumstances a person is automatically provided with a set of information that proves useful in fraud detection and homeland security applications.

 

Powerful Narrowcast Server Distribution Engine for Information Delivery.    Our technology offers a high performance personalized narrowcast engine for delivering periodic and alert-based information to users via Internet, e-mail, wireless devices, printer and fax. The narrowcast engine includes drivers for all major device types used in both domestic and international markets, enabling the delivery of information to users when and where it is needed.

 

Highly Stylized and Consolidated Reporting and Formatting Capabilities.    MicroStrategy Report Services technology delivers a wide range of enterprise reports via the Web, including production and operational reports, managed metrics reports and scorecards. The design capabilities provide the precision

 

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necessary to deliver reports with boardroom presentation quality, without any programming. By dragging and dropping report components, users can create high quality reports with complete formatting flexibility. Unlike other popular reporting products, the modern architecture delivers both traditional hierarchical banded reports and newer, Web-oriented zone-based reports.

 

Strategy

 

Our business objective is to become the leading provider of business intelligence software and related services to the largest enterprises, governments and the largest databases and data providers in the world. The key elements of our strategy to achieve this objective are as follows:

 

Marketing Strategy.    Our business intelligence platform marketing strategy is designed to increase our footprint in the business intelligence market by increasing awareness of the MicroStrategy 8 platform. In the business intelligence market, our marketing programs target five principal constituencies:

 

    Our historical base of corporate technology buyers and departmental technology buyers in Global 2000 enterprises;

 

    Corporate and departmental technology buyers in mid-sized enterprises, with annual revenues between $250 million and $1 billion;

 

    Government technology buyers and the vendors to the government community;

 

    Independent software vendors who want to embed analytical tools in their solutions; and

 

    System integrators who have technology relationships with the largest 2,500 enterprises, governments and information intensive businesses.

 

We continually seek to increase our brand awareness by focusing our messaging on the possibilities for value creation with our business intelligence platform, the benefits of using our platform and competitive differentiators. The channels we use to communicate with these constituencies include:

 

    Print ads

 

    Online ads

 

    Direct e-mail

 

    Industry events

 

    User conferences

 

    Strategic partners

 

    Word of mouth and peer references

 

    Industry awards

 

    Our website

 

    Coverage in print and broadcast media.

 

Technology Strategy.    Our technology strategy is focused on expanding our support for large information stores, enhancing our analysis and segmentation capabilities, strengthening our personalization technology and enhancing our report delivery and alerting functionality to all commonly used devices. We continue to enhance our technology for use with a broad range of operating systems and databases to enable our customers to leverage their existing technology investments to achieve faster query times with fewer required resources. In addition, we continue to develop our platform for easy integration with a wide spectrum of enterprise resource planning (ERP)

 

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systems. As part of this strategy, we are developing technology that further differentiates our product offerings by increasing functionality along the following key dimensions:

 

    Capacity—the volume of information that can be efficiently analyzed and utilized;

 

    Concurrency—the number of users that can be supported simultaneously;

 

    Sophistication—the range of analytical methods available to the application designer;

 

    Performance—the response time of the system;

 

    Database Flexibility—the range of data sources, data warehouses and online transaction processing databases which the software is capable of efficiently querying without modification;

 

    Robustness—the reliability and availability of the software in mission critical environments;

 

    Deployability—the ease with which applications can be deployed, modified, upgraded and tuned;

 

    Personalization—the quality and sophistication of a one-to-one user experience;

 

    Content Flexibility—the range of content, both structured and unstructured, that can be efficiently utilized; and

 

    Media Channel and Interface Flexibility—the range of media channels, interface options and display features supported.

 

Sales Strategy.    Our sales strategy focuses on direct sales through our dedicated sales force and relationships with indirect channel partners in order to increase market share in both domestic and international markets. We also seek to increase sales to our existing base of customers by offering a range of software and services utilizing our integrated business intelligence platform. Finally, we offer a comprehensive set of educational programs that enhance our potential customers’ and channel partners’ understanding of the power of our platform.

 

Products

 

We offer an integrated business intelligence platform, known as MicroStrategy 8, which is designed to enable businesses to turn information into strategic insight and make more effective business decisions. Revenues from sales of product licenses accounted for approximately $97.0 million of total revenues during 2004.

 

MicroStrategy 8.    MicroStrategy 8 was released for general availability on February 1, 2005 and includes a number of major enhancements from its predecessor, MicroStrategy 7i. MicroStrategy 8’s major enhancements include a redesigned web interface, interactive reporting in Report Services, improved integrated analysis to facilitate drilling into more-detailed analysis, WYSIWYG report design over the web, direct access to SAP BW metadata, direct access to operational data, improved reporting by joining heterogeneous databases, and improved predictive reporting and analysis including enhanced integration with third party data mining products.

 

MicroStrategy 8 is designed for business executives, report consumers, and business managers, as well as power users and analysts with simplicity and high productivity in mind. MicroStrategy 8 integrates a full range of reporting, analysis, and monitoring capabilities into a single platform—providing central management of security, administration, development and deployment.

 

MicroStrategy 8 is designed to integrate the two leading business intelligence approaches, ad hoc query and reporting (ROLAP) and cube analysis (MOLAP), delivering quick response time against almost any size data set, full access to transaction-level data and a myriad of options for complex analysis. MicroStrategy 8 is enabling organizations to consolidate business intelligence applications onto a single platform, resulting in reliable and maintainable solutions with a low total cost of ownership.

 

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The MicroStrategy 8 platform consists of the following product components:

 

MicroStrategy Intelligence Server.    MicroStrategy Intelligence Server is the foundation for our business intelligence platform. We believe that MicroStrategy Intelligence Server is the most advanced business intelligence server available in the market, capable of answering highly sophisticated business questions. Its robust ROLAP technology enables organizations to conduct large-scale product affinity and product profitability analyses, research customer preferences through sales, contribution and pricing analysis, and compare present and historical customer retention data with forecasting and trend metrics. MicroStrategy Intelligence Server generates highly optimized queries through its very large database drivers, enabling high throughput and fast response times.

 

MicroStrategy Intelligence Server has been built with the scalability and fault tolerance required for sophisticated analysis of multi-terabyte databases and can be deployed to thousands of users through complete user, object and data security and management. It contains thousands of specific optimizations for all major relational databases and multi-dimensional databases like SAP Business Warehouse (BW) and includes the load distribution, prioritization and system tuning capabilities demanded by large-scale implementations.

 

MicroStrategy Intelligence Server contains an analytical engine with over 240 different sophisticated mathematical, financial and statistical data mining functions with the flexibility for further function extensions. MicroStrategy Intelligence Server combines the power of its analytical engine with the scalability of a relational database to perform complex data analysis with maximum efficiency. All of the other products in the MicroStrategy 8 platform integrate with the MicroStrategy Intelligence Server and benefit from its broad functionality.

 

MicroStrategy Intelligence Server is designed to be fault-tolerant to ensure system availability and high performance. Through an enterprise management console, MicroStrategy Intelligence Server provides a sophisticated array of enterprise management tools, such as caching and query prioritization to streamline performance and batch job scheduling, which helps to maintain disparate and diverse user communities. Administrators can automate the dynamic adjustments of system and user governing settings, such as user thresholds and database thread priorities, in order to smooth the database workload and ensure the high performance that large user communities require.

 

MicroStrategy Intelligence Server is designed as a services oriented architecture (SOA) to easily augment functionality and capabilities throughout the platform. MicroStrategy Intelligence Server Universal Edition uses an optimized 64-bit architecture and runs on a 64-bit Unix platform for even greater performance. MicroStrategy OLAP Services and Report Servicesemploy this services-oriented architecture design.

 

MicroStrategy Report Services.    MicroStrategy Report Services is the enterprise reporting engine of the MicroStrategy business intelligence platform that delivers an entire range of enterprise reports, including production and operational reports, managed metrics reports and scorecards. The WYSIWYG design capabilities on the Web provide the precision necessary to deliver these reports with desktop publishing quality and drag-and-drop simplicity. Users can create reports using intuitive design features without programming or outside help.

 

MicroStrategy 8 OLAP Services.    MicroStrategy 8 combines the speed and interactivity of multi-dimensional OLAP analysis with the analytical power and depth of relational OLAP. MicroStrategy 8 OLAP Services is an extension of MicroStrategy Intelligence Server that allows MicroStrategy Web and Desktop users to manipulate Intelligent Cubes. End users can add or remove report objects, add derived metrics and modify the filter—all with “speed-of-thought” response time against Intelligent Cubes. MicroStrategy 8 OLAP Services enables full multi-dimensional OLAP analysis within Intelligent Cubes, while retaining the ability of users to seamlessly drill through to the full breadth and depth of the data warehouse.

 

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MicroStrategy Web and MicroStrategy Web Universal.    MicroStrategy Web is a patented zero-footprint, browser independent web interface providing query, reporting and analysis through a platform independent architecture. MicroStrategy Web’s interface provides a familiar look and features drag-and-drop report creation, one-click tool bars, dialogue boxes, spreadsheet formatting, advanced printing and exporting, and right-click menus for drilling, pivoting and sorting. All of this is accomplished without ActiveX, Java Applets or client side installations or downloads, helping to ensure the highest levels of security.

 

MicroStrategy Web provides users with a highly interactive environment and low maintenance interface for reporting and analysis. Using this intuitive HTML-only web solution, users access, analyze and share corporate data. MicroStrategy Web provides ad hoc querying, industry-leading analysis, quick deployment and rapid customizability, making it even easier for users to make informed business and management decisions on virtually any web browser.

 

MicroStrategy Web Universal features the same powerful functionality that users are familiar with in MicroStrategy Web with the added benefit of working with all major operating systems, application servers, and web servers.

 

MicroStrategy Narrowcast Server.    MicroStrategy Narrowcast Server is a proactive report delivery and alerting server that distributes personalized business information to recipients via e-mail, printers, file servers, portals, wireless devices, fax and phone. MicroStrategy Narrowcast Server delivers targeted information to individuals on an event-triggered or scheduled basis through the communication device that is most convenient. It provides an engine for implementing targeted messaging to acquire and retain customers and a platform for distributing information to corporate departments, the entire enterprise and other stakeholders including customers and suppliers.

 

MicroStrategy Narrowcast Server has a web-based interface that can be used with existing web applications. Users can subscribe to information services by providing personal information and preferences, enabling them to receive personalized information relevant to them.

 

In addition to proactively delivering reports from the MicroStrategy 8 platform, MicroStrategy Narrowcast Server’s open information source modules enable it to deliver information from a multitude of information sources to the business user. The multiple information sources can be combined to provide users with requested information in one personalized e-mail, message or document.

 

MicroStrategy Office.    MicroStrategy Office lets every Microsoft® Office user run, edit and format any MicroStrategy report directly from within Microsoft applications such as Excel, PowerPoint and Word. MicroStrategy Office is designed using Microsoft .NET technology and accesses the MicroStrategy business intelligence platform using XML and Web services. MicroStrategy Office gives business users open and straightforward access to the full functionality of the MicroStrategy platform—all from familiar Microsoft Office applications. MicroStrategy Office serves as a Microsoft add-in, with MicroStrategy functionality expressed as a single tool bar in Microsoft.

 

MicroStrategy Desktop.    MicroStrategy Desktop is a business intelligence software component that provides integrated query and reporting, powerful analytics and decision support workflow on the personal computing desktop. MicroStrategy Desktop provides a rich set of features for online analysis of corporate data. Even complex reports are easy to create and can be viewed in various presentation formats, polished into production reports, distributed to other users and extended through a host of ad hoc features including drilling, pivoting and data slicing. The interface itself can be customized to different users’ skill levels and security profiles. MicroStrategy Desktop comes in two versions:

 

    Desktop Analyst.    A simplified version that provides interactive slice and dice required by managers; and

 

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    Desktop Designer.    A full-featured version that lets users design complex and sophisticated reports.

 

Applications developed within MicroStrategy Desktop can be easily deployed throughout the MicroStrategy architecture bringing integrated query and reporting capabilities, powerful analytics and decision support workflow to analysts, quantitative users and end users throughout the enterprise and beyond.

 

MicroStrategy Architect.    MicroStrategy Architect is the MicroStrategy 8 product in which applications are modeled through an intuitive graphical user interface. MicroStrategy Architect provides a unified environment for creating and maintaining business modules and their relations to underlying data for business intelligence applications. MicroStrategy Architect is highly automated and is based on an open, flexible architecture, which can greatly reduce the cost and time required to implement and maintain systems.

 

MicroStrategy Administrator.    MicroStrategy Administrator enables administrators to efficiently develop, deploy, monitor and maintain small and medium systems as well as enterprise-scale systems supporting thousands of users. Project migration utilities help administrators develop, test and deploy systems. Performance analysis enables administrators to monitor and tune systems for maximum performance and availability. MicroStrategy Administrator has been designed to ensure easy management of application objects and users across multiple development, testing and production environments. MicroStrategy Administrator eases the burden of maintaining users and security by using textual commands that can be saved as scripts. These commands and scripts can be executed from either a graphical interface or from the command line giving system administrators the flexibility and ease-of-use necessary for efficient systems management. MicroStrategy Administrator tools consist of Object Manager, Enterprise Manager and Command Manager.

 

MicroStrategy SDK.    MicroStrategy SDK is a comprehensive development environment that enables integration of MicroStrategy 8 features and functionality into any application on multiple platforms, including UNIX-based systems using a Java-based Web API. Through sample code, documentation and reference guides, the MicroStrategy SDK enables an application developer to quickly learn to use the APIs to implement easy-to-use web reporting and powerful business intelligence applications.

 

All API interfaces within the MicroStrategy SDK reflect XML architecture. MicroStrategy SDK’s Portal Integration Kit includes pre-built samples for embedding MicroStrategy 8 analysis into a corporate portal. The Web Services Development Kit provides sample code that enables MicroStrategy 8 functionality to be accessed via standard Web Services.

 

MicroStrategy BI Developer Kit.    MicroStrategy BI Developer Kit is a package of products that includes MicroStrategy Desktop Designer, MicroStrategy Architect and modular analytic applications. The analytic modules are starter kits designed to streamline business processes through the use of business intelligence. Each of the modules ships with a sample data-model and numerous reports and key performance indicators. The analytic modules are designed to enable portability and the ability to work against existing data warehouses without the need for additional data extraction and loading concerns. The modules are easy to extend and modify and reflect a decade of business intelligence implementation experience and best practices of the most common business analysis applications.

 

MicroStrategy MDX Adapter.    MicroStrategy MDX Adapter opens the analytical power and scalability of the MicroStrategy 8 Platform to other business intelligence reporting tools. With MicroStrategy MDX Adapter, reporting tools that use the OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO) standard created by Microsoft can connect through MicroStrategy Intelligence Server and access any major relational database.

 

Unlike MicroStrategy’s product offerings, many business intelligence applications depend on replication of pre-calculated data into multidimensional, physical cubes. These proprietary cubes can reach data storage limitations quickly. Furthermore, the process to build and load cubes uses valuable time and resources. MicroStrategy MDX Adapter helps companies that have reached the data scalability and analytical limitations of

 

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their current business intelligence solution by eliminating the need for physical cubes and giving users access to terabytes of data in any major relational database without costly modifications to the physical cubes or expensive data replication.

 

MicroStrategy MDX Adapter allows organizations to standardize on a reporting and analysis platform, while still enabling users to access the platform from a variety of user interfaces. Companies that have hit scalability, administration, security and analytical limits with their existing analysis tools can continue to provide users with their interface of choice, while replacing the underlying business intelligence engine with the more robust and reliable MicroStrategy 8 business intelligence platform. This leverages investments in databases, software and training and removes some of the traditional burdens of cube-based architectures.

 

MicroStrategy Transactor.    MicroStrategy Transactor is a workflow server that allows users to turn insight gained from their MicroStrategy business intelligence applications into actionable decisions. MicroStrategy Transactor directs and manages the workflow required to take business intelligence information from a web report, email, wireless message or voice alert and complete a closed-loop transaction with all major back-end information systems.

 

Product Support and Other Services

 

MicroStrategy Technical Support.    MicroStrategy Technical Support provides a diverse set of support options to meet the needs of customers and projects and offers product upgrades when available. Our product experts help support MicroStrategy implementation across the development, deployment and production environments. Our support offerings include access to our highly skilled support team during standard business hours, around the clock access to our online support site, and options to secure dedicated technical support at any time of the day. Technical support services are provided to customers for a maintenance fee, which is charged in addition to the initial product license fee. Revenues from technical support services accounted for approximately 39.4%, 36.7% and 34.7% of total revenues during 2004, 2003, and 2002, respectively.

 

MicroStrategy Consulting.    MicroStrategy Consulting offers customers a broad range of business intelligence and data warehousing expertise gathered from helping thousands of customers across diverse industries implement departmental, enterprise and extranet applications across various types of databases. Our Consulting staff identifies the optimal design and implementation strategy that includes detailed business requirements, user interface requirements and performance tuning. By leveraging our best practices, strategic visioning, project planning and platform expertise, we assist customers’ technical staff in completing projects and developing solutions that business users will adopt. Revenues from Consulting services, including Technical Advisory Services, discussed below, accounted for approximately 13.6%, 14.0% and 17.1% of total revenues during 2004, 2003, and 2002, respectively.

 

MicroStrategy Education.    MicroStrategy Education offers goal-oriented, comprehensive education solutions for customers and partners. Through the use of self-tutorials, custom course development, joint training with customers’ internal staff or standard course offerings, MicroStrategy’s Education consultants develop an ongoing education program that meets our customers’ specific education needs. Our team of education consultants delivers quality, cost-effective instruction and skill development for administrators, developers and analysts. MicroStrategy offers the Perennial Education Pass (PEP) Program which allows customers to train named individuals through an unlimited number of public MicroStrategy instructor-led courses and online courses under this annual program. Revenues from Education services accounted for approximately 4.5%, 5.1%, and 5.5% of total revenues during 2004, 2003, and 2002, respectively.

 

MicroStrategy Technical Advisory Services.    MicroStrategy also offers Technical Advisory Services as an advisory service for enterprise customers seeking to maximize their investment in the MicroStrategy business intelligence platform. MicroStrategy Technical Advisory Services provides members with a comprehensive program of advisory services, knowledge capital and corporate support. MicroStrategy Technical Advisory

 

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Services has been designed to help provide the optimal opportunity to experience success and the highest return on investment on MicroStrategy’s business intelligence platform. MicroStrategy Technical Advisory Services delivers subject matter expertise, project management, strategic consulting and expedited resources to enhance the success of customer deployments. Revenues from MicroStrategy Technical Advisory Services are included within revenues from consulting services as discussed above.

 

We also have two development stage business units, Angel.com and Alarm.com, that are engaged in non-core business intelligence activities. The financial results of Angel.com and Alarm.com are not material to our worldwide financial results.

 

Customers

 

MicroStrategy has over 2,800 customers across a diverse group of industries, including retail (5 of the top 10 globally), telecommunications (all of the top 10 globally), financial services (4 of the top 5 global diversified financial services companies), insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies (9 of the top 10 globally), healthcare (5 of the top 10 globally), manufacturing (5 of the top 10 global manufacturers), technology, consumer goods and government and public services. International sales accounted for 40.7%, 34.0% and 36.0% of our total revenues in 2004, 2003, and 2002, respectively.

 

Below is a representative list of domestic and international firms that use the MicroStrategy business intelligence platform:

 

    Retail:    Ace Hardware Corporation, Albertson’s, eBay, Liz Claiborne, Lowe’s Companies, METRO Group, Michaels Stores, Office Depot, The Container Store, WH Smith PLC, Yahoo! Inc.

 

    Telecommunications:    AT&T, Cingular Wireless, Comcast Corporation, Interoute, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telephia

 

    Financial Services:    Bank of Montreal, Chela Financial, H&R Block, KeyBank, LaCaixa, Wells Fargo

 

    Insurance:    Grange Insurance, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, Nationwide Insurance

 

    Pharmaceutical and Healthcare:    Aventis Pasteur, Caremark Rx, Cardinal Health, IMS Health, NDCHealth Corporation, Pharmacia, Premier

 

    Manufacturing:    E.I. Dupont de Nemours & Company, Lexmark, Oakwood Homes, Pfizer Global Manufacturing, Shaw Industries, Waterford Wedgewood

 

    Technology:    TRX Data Services, Inc., Solucient, Sykes Enterprises

 

    Consumer Goods:    Amway Corp., Campbell’s USA, Estée Lauder, Revlon, Unilever Cosmetics

 

    Government/Public Services:    Kent Unified School District, National Institutes of Health, Ohio Department of Education, State of Tennessee, US Department of Education, US Department of State, US Postal Service.

 

Customer Case Studies

 

Ace Hardware Corporation.    A customer since January 2001, Ace Hardware expanded its deployment of the MicroStrategy platform in 2004 for enterprise-wide reporting and analysis on marketing initiatives, retail pricing, category management, merchandising, inventory, wholesale pricing and customer loyalty programs like Helpful Hardware Club. Approximately 6,400 corporate employees, vendors and Ace retailers are using MicroStrategy to analyze and report on over a terabyte of data housed in a Teradata data warehouse.

 

Cingular Wireless.    With more than 25 million voice and data customers across the United States, Cingular Wireless is a leader in mobile voice and data communications. Cingular selected MicroStrategy for its ad-hoc analysis capabilities. Approximately 100 marketing users will perform customer churn analysis using customer

 

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and financial data stored in a Teradata data warehouse. Cingular will utilize MicroStrategy to track and analyze sales and marketing data to provide end users with greater insight into its customer acquisition and retention programs.

 

E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Company.    DuPont Crop Protection serves production agriculture with products for the grain and specialty crop sectors as well as forestry and vegetation management. DuPont selected MicroStrategy to anchor its Development Data Warehouse, a business intelligence tool that analyzes, summarizes, manages, and reports on global field development trials for crop protection chemicals. With over 150 users, DuPont’s business intelligence solution has several custom applications including Custom Dynamic Grouping, which involves consolidation and business decision management; Management Console, which involves warehouse management for Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) and maintaining global standards; and Enterprise Manager, which involves report usage statistics distributed via email. Using these custom applications, DuPont generates over 4,000 reports a month.

 

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).    The FBI will be using the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform to analyze and access data in the Bureau’s Investigative Data Warehouse. MicroStrategy technology will support information sharing among law enforcement, intelligence and homeland security agencies. Information sharing among these agencies—important to national security—will be enhanced by MicroStrategy’s ability to provide a Web-based, collaborative environment for hundreds of analysts to access vast amounts of data. This information sharing is intended to make it easier to respond and react to possible homeland security threats.

 

Sales And Marketing

 

Direct Sales Organization.    We market our software and services primarily through our direct sales force. As of December 31, 2004, we had domestic sales offices in a number of cities, including Atlanta, Austin, Carlsbad, California, Charlotte, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Denver, Edina, Minnesota, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa, Troy, Michigan and Washington, DC, and international sales offices located in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Cologne, Frankfurt, London, Lisbon, Madrid, Melbourne, Mexico City, Milan, Montreal, Monterrey, Munich, Paris, Rome, Sao Paolo, Seoul, Tokyo, Toronto and Utrecht. We are represented by distributors in several countries where we do not have sales offices, including Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, India, Ireland, Malaysia, Malta, Norway, Peru, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and Uruguay.

 

Indirect Sales Channels.    We have entered into relationships with nearly 300 reseller, value-added reseller, system integration, original equipment manufacturers (“OEM”) and technology partners who utilize the MicroStrategy platform for a variety of commercial purposes. Agreements with these partners generally provide non-exclusive rights to market our products and services and allow access to our marketing materials, product training and direct sales force for field level assistance. In addition, we offer our sales partners product discounts. Favorable product recommendations to potential customers from our partners, which include leading system integration, application development and platform manufacturers, facilitate the sale of our products. We believe that such indirect sales channels allow us to leverage sales and service resources as well as marketing and industry-specific expertise to expand our user base and increase our market coverage. In addition, we have entered into agreements with resellers who resell our software on a stand-alone basis.

 

Reseller/System Integration Partners.    Our resellers/systems integration alliances include partners who can resell our software on a stand-alone basis, value-added resellers who resell the MicroStrategy 8 platform software bundled with their own software applications and system integrators who deploy MicroStrategy solutions to their customers, including:

 

Adastra

 

Dataspace

 

Prithvi Information Solutions

Accenture

 

High Impact Technologies