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MicroStrategy Inc., Tysons Corner, VA: B2B Products

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2014 American Business Awards

Company: MicroStrategy Inc.
Company Description: MicroStrategy was founded in 1989 and has grown to become a leading independent public business intelligence software vendor. With direct operations in 26 countries It is a leading global provider of enterprise software platforms for business intelligence (BI), mobile intelligence, and network applications. MicroStrategy recently launched Express, it's first Software as a Service BI offering.
Nomination Category: Products & Product Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Business-to-Business Products

Nomination Title: MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop

1. Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 525 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date:

MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop is a free self-service business analytics tool that empowers business people to analyze data without specialized expertise.

It introduces a paradigm shift in Business Intelligence, by placing enterprise-caliber analytical capabilities, traditionally the domain of specialized IT operations, in the hands of decision-making executives.

It enables any business person, regardless of technical skill, to access and analyze data on their own, and to collaborate with an unprecedented number of users, creating a new breed of decision-makers; self-reliant business people who know how to leverage technology to analyze information on their own.

With the ability to deliver timely access to essential information, Analytics Desktop dramatically accelerates executive’s decision-making, ultimately helping companies gain a formidable advantage over competition. Despite unlocking powerful analytical capabilities, Analytics Desktop remains very accessible and can be downloaded and setup, in minutes, without any assistance. Analytics Desktop makes instant and secure access to a variety of data sources possible, from personal spreadsheets and Salesforce.com reports, to Big Data Hadoop distributions and cloud or on-premises databases. There is no need to architect a data model or write SQL scripts, making the process of implementing Business Intelligence deployments faster and more cost-effective than ever before. Renowned industry analyst Cindy Howsen commented, “The new data blending feature 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”.

Analytics Desktop offers a large library of unique and insightful data visualizations that enhance information comprehension and support decision-making. Any user can build professional dashboards with a suite of intuitive and interactive data discovery tools. It allows users to easily discover trends, and relationships hidden in the data by defining new metric calculations, zooming into details with filters, color-coding the results with thresholds, among other intuitive actions.

A big advantage with Analytics Desktop is that dashboards can be created offline locally, and later shared with other users. Coupled with its ability to analyze large scale data, Analytics Desktop also incorporates a strong, robust set of analytical functions ranging from data summarization to trend analysis, benchmarking, relationship analysis and projections. Over 300 rich analytical functions are readily available to business users, offering easy to use ways to embrace sophisticated analytical approaches. The product also integrates with R, the world’s most popular advanced analytical package, through which intelligent and complex decisions can be made faster than ever before.

For the first time in visual data discovery, Analytics Desktop provides a seamless migration path to governed Business Intelligence. Users can easily export dashboards into Analytics Enterprise®, to experience the power of mobile applications, enterprise dashboards, predictive analytics, and much more, combining self-service productivity with the security, scalability, and governance of a trusted BI solution.

Analytics Desktop is a revolutionary product in the business intelligence industry. Launched late in 2013, in just a little over 3 months, there are over 25,000 Analytics Desktop users across more than 80 countries.

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2. Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed this nominated product or service:

Douglas Everhart, Vice President of Technology Programs for Web & User Experience has been the driver behind MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop. In his role he is responsible for product design and direction and leads the program management division responsible for this newly launched self-service analytics product. Kevin Spurway is Senior VP at MicroStrategy, Inc. and responsible for all product management related activities around MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop. Prior to this, Spurway has also been CMO at Altosoft, and VP of Marketing for Appian Corporation. In his role, he is responsible for all marketing activities, including product marketing, demand generation, alliances, and marketing communications. Mr. Spurway is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School.