ACADEMIA

MCLEAN, Va. -- MicroStrategy Incorporated, a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence software, today announced that the fifth-largest global retailer, METRO Group, has successfully deployed the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform enterprise-wide. "MicroStrategy meets the METRO Group's demanding requirements for a highly flexible, stable and scalable business intelligence platform," said Silvester Macho, Division Manager, METRO Group Information Technology. "The MicroStrategy-based system enables our employees to track the performance of the entire company, optimize product assortment and make decisions that increase revenue and profitability." Approximately 1,500 employees across the METRO Group organization utilize the MicroStrategy platform as its business intelligence standard to perform analyses against a 20-terabyte Teradata(R) data warehouse. MicroStrategy is the anchor of numerous business intelligence applications, including merchandising, marketing, customer, market basket analysis, and category management. "In today's competitive global economy, a real-time understanding of a company's business performance has never been so important," said MicroStrategy COO Sanju K. Bansal. "MicroStrategy's industrial-strength platform lets companies the size of the METRO Group gain a holistic view of their business performance and make decisions that can increase revenues." End users can run reports to track sales trends and margins as well as perform ad hoc analyses to understand the drivers behind product-line performance. The company also uses MicroStrategy technology to provide its suppliers with scorecards on product planning, forecasting and replenishment. METRO Group is a platinum subscriber of MicroStrategy's Technical Advisory Services, a comprehensive program of advisory services, knowledge capital and corporate support. "MicroStrategy is well-known for its user-friendly reporting features, data scalability and its ability to be Web-deployed to thousands of users securely," added Bansal. "A large number of the world's top 200 retailers have standardized on MicroStrategy for business intelligence. Our capacity to provide insightful reports on critical data -- drilled down to the customer-transactional level -- has proven invaluable to our retail clients."