Assai Atacadista, Banco Itau Holding Financeira, and Serpro Honored at the MicroStrategy Symposium in Sao Paulo -- MicroStrategy, a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today honored three companies for demonstrating best practices in their business intelligence deployments. The MicroStrategy Honors Award recognizes organizations for outstanding corporate performance improvements as a result of their MicroStrategy-based BI applications. The MicroStrategy Brazil Honors Award winners for 2006 are Assai Atacadista, Banco Itau Holding Financeira, and Serpro. The awards were announced this week at the MicroStrategy Symposium in Sao Paulo, Brazil. By deploying MicroStrategy business intelligence applications, these companies are sharing information across their enterprises to enhance corporate performance, improve efficiency and productivity, increase revenues, and strengthen customer relationships. "Our customers are taking advantage of the opportunities that business intelligence can deliver, and we are delighted to recognize these leading companies for their achievements," said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy COO. "Each company has taken a unique approach to delivering business intelligence throughout their organization and has demonstrated best practices in business intelligence to significantly enhance corporate performance." Assai Atacadista: Assai Atacadista, a food distribution company for pizzerias, restaurants, and buffets, uses business intelligence to support its goal of providing customers with fair prices and quality products. The company's BI applications deliver operational insights into areas, including financial analysis, logistics, restocking, and quality standards. Managers and administrators use the information to enhance the management and performance of 13 stores across the Sao Paulo region. Banco Itau: Banco Itau Holding Financeira is one of Brazil's largest private banks. The bank has increased its productivity by using MicroStrategy to extract strategic insight from its data warehousing environment. Banco Itau analyzes customer retention and product evolution to improve its corporate marketing goals and activities. Banco Itau Holding Financeira has 16 million customers and 4,558 units, such as branches, bank service points, ATMs and Taii companies and outlets. Serpro: The Federal Data Processing Service (SERPRO -- Servico Federal de Processamento de Dados) is Brazil's largest state-owned IT service provider. Serpro provides BI solutions to customers to assist them in tracking operations and supporting decision-making in multiple areas, including human resources, purchasing, national real estate assets, transportation, taxes, national active liabilities, ground infrastructure, and national accounts audit. Over 3,300 users perform analytic queries and run reports for a wide range of customers.