M+E Connections

MicroStrategy CTO Tim Lang highlighted the latest enhancements to the company’s platform for 2021 in a Feb. 4 keynote during the virtual MicroStrategy World conference.

“2020 was a difficult and challenging year for all of us,” he said, noting it was a “transformational year in terms of how we work remotely.” What we saw was a “virtual wave” that “washed over technology, shifting the vast majority of our working model to being much more remote,” he told viewers.

Meanwhile, “challenges in scaling and adapting our applications to support the scale requirement and  the security interfaces fundamentally put a lot of pressure on many organizations,” he pointed out. “2020 taught us the importance” of security and scalability – whether one is working at the office or remotely, he said.

Among the company’s achievements, “MicroStrategy Cloud has grown in leaps and bounds this last year, and we’re super excited to see the number of customers – particularly in the last half of 2020 – that have moved to the MicroStrategy Cloud platform,” with adoption strong even late in the year, he said, adding: “We’ve had many, many customers take advantage of our cloud migration in the last six months and we see an acceleration of it happening in the first half of this year.”

His comments came only a few days after Phong Le, MicroStrategy CFO and president, said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call that a “growing portion of our product bookings” are “related to our managed cloud platform” that had a strong Q4.

MicroStrategy 2021

The 2021 version of the MicroStrategy platform, meanwhile, “represents the most richest release of MicroStrategy to date,” Lang said in the keynote, noting it offers “great scalability and performance to allow you to deploy rich applications across your organization.”

While “data is one of the most important assets that exists in your organization,” he pointed out, “the largest amount of data for organization is largely hidden – it’s  embedded in the custom applications and the workflows of your organization.” Most of that data is “unreachable by teams and individuals in your organization who need it and rely on it for their day-to-day work,” he said, noting it tends to be “trapped in silo stores and applications, trapped in close loop systems held by data scientists, and it’s also trapped in fragmented platforms.”

With MicroStrategy 2021, the company has “made large investments in the open architecture” and the firm’s application programming interface (API) layer, he told viewers, adding: “This API-driven approach allows and fosters greater embeddability into your applications.”

The platform software development kit (SDK), meanwhile, “unlocks and simplifies a powerful way to modernize your applications,” he said, noting “you can embed infographic-style dossiers into your financial systems, or you can take advantage of HyperIntelligence cards integrating into core business systems and allow your users to have zero-click access to the most relevant data.”

MicroStrategy has also “invested in containerization and modern cloud deployment to make it even easier for you to deploy those applications to all of your users,” he said. “Whether you’re on-premise or in the cloud we want to transform how you deliver insight to all of your users while reducing the overall total cost of ownership.”

The 2021 release’s Hyper SDK, “in a couple of lines of code, will allow you to transform any application you have to be hyper-ready and to bring insights from other parts of your organization [and] outside data into the systems where your users live and breathe it,” he told viewers.

Hyper.Now Launches

HyperIntelligence “has transformed many amazing workflows for our customers, and we’re excited to further extend and broaden out the ability for us to deploy Hyper to many, many more customers more broadly,” Lang said.

To that end, he announced the official launch of its Hyper.Now technology. “We did the soft launch in December and now it’s fully available for customers to take advantage of,” he said, noting it “reimagines what it takes to deploy and build and share Hyper content embedded into your applications and make it accessible to all of your business, independent of the size of the department, the group or the business.”

Hyper.Now is a fully managed MicroStrategy 2021 environment, hosted on the MicroStrategy Cloud service, he noted.

Other MicroStrategy World Keynotes

In an earlier keynote at the conference, MicroStrategy CEO and founder Michael Saylor said: “What we found in 2020 and our response to the pandemic is a lot of business as usual was no longer practical and eventually found it was no longer necessary.”

Amid the global shift to remote work and education, “2020 saw a certain a certain crystallization and conversion to a much more efficient economy,” he said, adding: “I think you can say it’s the end of the commute and the end of business travel as we know it.” What we saw was the “virtualization of entire segments of our economy,” he pointed out.

Noting MicroStrategy sells business intelligence software, he said: “We streamlined the operations of the software so as to deliver that in a more automated and more virtualized fashion. That has resulted in a dramatic increase in cash flow at the company.”

MicroStrategy has also “streamlined the product itself so that we can actually grow the business without using a lot of manual labor and without throwing a lot of cash at the business,” he said.

In the first keynote, Le said: “Corporations and entities who already digitally transformed going into 2020 and were truly embracing the virtual wave throughout the course of 2020 – those are the ones that survived and thrived” – especially the ones that “surrounded themselves” with partners and customers that “already digitally transformed” and “embraced the digital wave.”