Woah! What next?

Well, we've seen this story before. The moment I saw the headline I remembered where I was when Hyperion, Cognos and BO got gobbled-up in 2007. 12 years later, every one of my customers has been finding (if not already found) a way out of their deployments of Hyperion, Cognos and BO. Did any of those customers realize the value of their investments in any one of those tools? Maybe for a few years, but when Oracle, IBM and SAP decided to maximize the return on their investments (in the multiple billions of dollars at that time - considered high and perhaps, overpriced), innovation stopped, the platform stagnated, Support suffered, the best talent left and these tools became another SKU on a long list of products that Corporate Account Managers (who had little expertise in the nuances of Business Intelligence) were asked to sell.

Think about the aggregate conversion cost of all the Hyperion, Cognos and BO implementations in the world. What if those costs could have been avoided?

Given the way technology companies are incubated these days, there are only a few Enterprise Software companies that aren't beholden to activist shareholders with controlling interests or those which are tightly managed by Private Equity and Venture capitalist firms looking for a lucrative exit. However, customers who invest in the long-term, value long-term vision and long-term stability, appreciate the benefits of partnering with an Analytics provider like MicroStrategy. To them, success isn't about aligning with the vendor that has raised the most VC money, finding the shiniest new object, or discovering the next company with double digit growth rates; it is about partnering with a mature, global provider that specializes in one discrete area of focus across a broad set of integrated capabilities, has the means for continuous innovation, whose commercial success is purely a function of uncompromising customer success.

Business Analytics is no easy business. 100's of software companies in this space have come and gone over the last 30 years.

When companies like Looker and Tableau are acquired for silly multiples, the investors in the acquired company may be happy, but the acquiring companies must show a meaningful return (and fast). Despite the flowery press announcements and well-intentioned commitments to preserve the acquired entities, mounting management and investor pressure invariably comes at the expense of the existing customer-base. Mergers are messy and technology integration is even messier. There will be 12 months of deciding how, who and what survives the acquisition amid a flurry of departures and a great deal of uncertainty.

I think we all just observed the peak of the Visual Discovery Market. As Visual Discovery becomes exceedingly commoditized, the value of governance and scale coupled with a cloud-agnostic, data source-agnostic approach across a much broader set of functional capabilities becomes the most transcendent value proposition.

Fortunately as acknowledged by Gartner in their May 2019 Business Intelligence Critical Capabilities Matrix, MicroStrategy is a stable, profitable, pure-play analytics provider which offers the highest diversity in functionality across a single platform and has, once again,been rated the:

#1 overall platform in Gartner's Critical Capabilities report: https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-6OG5OQI&ct=190514&st=sb

For the benefit of our customers, we play the long-game here. In the context of what has transpired in less than one week, as MicroStrategy continues it's long-term focus, I welcome the opportunity to partner with my customers to drive consistent innovation and long-term success within the Business Analytics and Intelligence functions of their organizations. Looking forward to working with you to bring stability and focus with a dose of innovation during these uncertain times.

Peter