The award categories and the winners are: -- Data Scalability: U.S. Postal Service -- User Scalability: Ace Hardware Corporation -- Extranet Deployment: Watkins Motor Lines -- Corporate Portal Deployment: Brazil's Internal Revenue Service -- Enterprise Deployment: Lowe's Companies, Inc. "Each of these organizations is a leader in its industry and we congratulate them for their exceptional use of business intelligence to streamline and enhance their business performance," said MicroStrategy COO Sanju Bansal. Following is a brief description of this year's winners: -- U.S. Postal Service: A MicroStrategy customer since 1997, the U.S. Postal is the winner in the Data Scalability category. The USPS is using MicroStrategy to analyze over 20 terabytes of product, market and customer data stored in a 96 node Teradata(R) data warehouse. Over 70 data sources are currently feeding an enterprise data warehouse that supports twelve MicroStrategy applications. Approximately 20,000 employees including financial and account analysts, service delivery analysts, budget coordinators, retail managers, and postmasters working in nearly 10,000 locations across the USPS run thousands of reports daily to monitor and analyze financial performance, on-time delivery performance, network efficiency, in-plant operations and retail outlet performance. Approximately 15,000 reports are run daily, with an average response time of 20 seconds per report and with 95% having less than a 60 second response time. "This award recognizes the hard work of our Information Technology team in reaching the goals of the Postal Service Transformation Plan, our blueprint for the future," said Chief Technology Officer and Vice President, Bob Otto. "It is also about constantly innovating to accelerate the Postal Service's productivity and profitability so we can continue to provide affordable service to everyone nationwide." The U.S. Postal Service delivers more than 46 percent of the world's mail volume - some 206 billion letters, advertisements, periodicals and packages per year, and serves seven million customers each day at its 37,000 retail locations nationwide. With annual revenues of more than $69 billion, it is the world's leading provider of mailing and delivery services. -- Ace Hardware Corporation: The winner in the User Scalability category, Ace Hardware has adopted MicroStrategy as its enterprise business intelligence standard for reporting and analysis to help more than 8,000 business people across Ace Hardware's global organization make proactive decisions that improve corporate and retail performance. Ace Hardware's employees in the loyalty marketing, category management, pricing, market research and inventory management groups use MicroStrategy to perform targeted customer promotions, determine optimal product mixes and establish product pricing. As a result, Ace Hardware cites process improvements, cost reductions, and additional revenue opportunities. Headquartered in Oak Brook, Ill., Ace Hardware Corp. is the largest retailer-owned cooperative in the industry and currently operates 15 distribution centers in the United States, with stores located in all 50 states and 70 countries. Ace's annual retail sales from its more than 4,800 hardware, home center and lumber and building materials retailers top $13 billion. -- Watkins Motor Lines, Inc.: Watkins Motor Lines is the winner in the Extranet Deployment category. A leading transportation company, Watkins provides its customers with up-to-date information about shipments, delivery times and schedules via its extranet website, mywatkins.com. MicroStrategy powers the customer web reporting application, which supports approximately 12,000 Watkins customers and 250 account executives. End users receive custom shipment schedules and real-time freight shipment reports, from data in an IBM UDB DB2 database. The application produces over 20,000 on-demand or scheduled emails and faxes each month. With annual revenues approaching $1 billion, Watkins Motor Lines is the nation's largest privately held less-than- truckload (LTL) carrier and currently has more than 10,000 employees and contractors, and operates approximately 2,900 company and contractor-owned tractors and 10,000 trailers. -- Brazil's Internal Revenue Service: Brazil's Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the winner in the Corporate Portal Deployment category. Brazil's IRS developed and deployed a corporate portal on their intranet allowing several thousand end users, including secretariats, superintendents, agents and inspectors, to monitor, report, and analyze taxpayer activity information. End users run more than 300 distinct reports against a 6-terabyte Oracle data warehouse that provide insight into the auditing, tax levy, inspection and administration of taxpayer activity. With MicroStrategy, Brazil's IRS is able to identify parties with possible filing irregularities, analyze taxpayer activity for the purposes of uncovering fraud, monitor payments made to the IRS, and supply information to prepare the nation's budget forecast. Brazil's Internal Revenue Service is the government department responsible for collecting taxes and controlling the customs operations, fulfilling and requiring the fulfillment of applicable legislation, promoting tax improvement and customs policy, offering Brazil's society excellent service and stimulating the voluntary fulfillment of tax obligations. -- Lowe's Companies, Inc.: A MicroStrategy customer since 1998, Lowe's Companies is the winner in the Enterprise Deployment category. Lowe's has more than 2,500 users accessing ten applications providing insight into a 16 terabyte Teradata data warehouse. Lowe's Companies has deployed MicroStrategy products across their business, and their users include 2,000 employees and approximately 500 vendors. Employees from Logistics, Merchandising, Marketing, Store Operations, Finance, Human Resources and Distribution manage inventory, improve margin, review market specificity and identify sales opportunities using MicroStrategy. Lowe's vendors review performance specific to their products and locations to manage inventory performance. Approximately 55,000 reports are run each week. Lowe's also uses MicroStrategy to power their merchandising and executives dashboards; both these projects were deployed in under ten weeks. With fiscal year 2003 sales of $30.8 billion, Lowe's Companies, Inc. is a FORTUNE 50 company that serves approximately 10 million customers a week at more than 1,050 home improvement stores in 46 states. In 2004, FORTUNE named Lowe's America's Most Admired Specialty Retailer for a second consecutive year. Based in Mooresville, N.C., the 59-year old company is the second-largest home improvement retailer in the world. This year marks the 4th annual MicroStrategy Best Practices in Business Intelligence Awards, a program created to recognize successful and innovative MicroStrategy customers. Last year's winners were TRX, Inc., KPMG, METRO Group and FleetBoston Financial. Background: Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a worldwide leader in the business intelligence software market. Leading Fortune 2000 companies are increasingly integrating MicroStrategy's business monitoring, reporting, and analysis software into their operations. The MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform distills vast amounts of data into vital insight to help drive cost-efficiency, revenue-generation, and productivity. Top companies are using MicroStrategy to cost-effectively empower thousands of employees, partners, and suppliers with the business insight they need to make better business decisions everyday. MicroStrategy has over 2,800 enterprise-class customers, including Aventis, eBay, General Motors, Lowe's Companies, Pfizer, Sprint, Telecom Italia, U.S. Postal Service, Visa International, Wells Fargo, and Yahoo!. MicroStrategy also has relationships with over 300 systems integrators and application development and platform partners, including HP, IBM, PeopleSoft, Sun, and Teradata, a division of NCR. MicroStrategy is listed on Nasdaq under the symbol MSTR. For more information or to purchase or demo MicroStrategy's software, visit MicroStrategy's Web site at http://www.microstrategy.com/.