Exclusives

MicroStrategy used the opening keynote at its MicroStrategy World 2022 virtual conference on Feb. 1 to explore how it re-imagined its platform to become the tool of choice for “the builders, the makers, and the agents of change across the enterprise,” it said.

During the keynote, “No Limits,” executives from companies including NICE, a provider of artificial intelligence-powered self-service and agent-assisted customer experience (CX) software for contact centres, discussed how they transformed their businesses by empowering their people to unleash innovation and build modern applications that change everything with MicroStrategy’s Intelligence Anywhere solutions.

After the COVID-19 pandemic started, NICE “saw a big increase in demand” for its CXone customer experience software,” according to Barry Cooper, president of Workforce Engagement & Customer Experience at NICE. “Almost all organisations sent their service staff home and the legacy communications technologies they had been using from the office simply couldn’t move with them,” he said.

As a result of that, many companies “adopted cloud-based platforms, including CXone,” he noted. “Some of these organisations had to do this transition actually overnight… and this is where a cloud platform really shows its strength,” he said, pointing out companies were able to adopt CXone “in a week or even a matter of days.”

The ”key to NICE in all of this was being able to move extremely quickly and having a partnership with companies like MicroStrategy was very helpful in order to get to market fast with comprehensive, robust and advanced data visualisation that helped our customers adopt the platform and those more complex business processes that used to be in-person,” he added.

NICE chose to turn to an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) instead of developing its own data visualisation solution “in order to get to market fast,” he said. After a “comprehensive selection process,” NICE selected MicroStrategy based on multiple factors, including its solution “having all the capabilities that we needed at the proven scale that we needed,” MicroStrategy’s global presence “in all the major markets around the world” and the “long history” his company had working with MicroStrategy, he said.

HyperIntelligence Update

MicroStrategy introduced HyperIntelligence to its platform in 2019 as a new addition to MicroStrategy Workstation that allows analysts to create objects called cards to inject “one-click” analytics and intelligence directly into every user’s experience.

HyperIntelligence solved the “universal challenge” of being able to make analytics available to everyone, Hugh Owen, MicroStrategy EVP and CMO, said at MicroStrategy World 2022. It was a “new class of analytics” that he said “pushes data and insights to the edges of any organisation” and is the “perfect tool for developers because it’s essentially an out-of-the-box application.”

Thanks to HyperIntelligence, “a single application now has the ability to provide custom experiences for all of your stakeholders working across multiple clients and interfaces because one size doesn’t fit all,” he added.

The company continues to invest in HyperIntelligence, Phong Le, MicroStrategy president and CFO, said later the same day on an earnings call with analysts for its fourth quarter (ended Dec. 31).

Q4 Results

MicroStrategy Q4 total revenue grew 2.4% from Q4 the prior year to $134.5 million. Product licenses and subscription services revenue jumped 15.1% to $44.4 million. But product support revenue decreased 3.8% to $69.1 million. Other services revenue was about flat at $21 million.

The company had a “solid sales year, returning to positive year-over-year revenue growth for the first time since 2014,” Le told analysts.  Product license revenue for the year was up 17%, “growing for the first time since 2013” and subscription revenue was up 30% for the year vs. 2020, he noted.

The company’s “focus on term license sales contributed to the material growth in license revenue and subscription revenue,” he pointed out.

“We also made important progress in our shift towards our cloud offering, which drove annual subscription billings up” 39% from a year ago to $55.4 million, which is the “highest level in our history,” he noted.

The company’s “pioneering decision to make Bitcoin our primary treasury reserve asset has made MicroStrategy a thought leader in the cryptocurrency market and generated great interest in MicroStrategy as a corporation,” he went on to say.

He added: “In 2021, we added a total of 53,922 Bitcoins to our balance sheet at an average price of $48,710 per bitcoin, net of fees and expenses. We believe that our brand value has benefited significantly because of our investment in Bitcoin.”