MIAMI, Jan. 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence software, today recognized six companies for achieving outstanding business performance with their MicroStrategy-based business intelligence applications. The "Best Practices in Business Intelligence" award recipients for 2012 are eBay, Edmunds.com, GUESS?, Optum Rx - a UnitedHealth Group Company, Sonic Automotive, and Staples. The awards were announced at MicroStrategy's 15th annual user conference, MicroStrategy World 2012, in Miami, Florida.

By deploying MicroStrategy for their BI applications, these organizations are sharing information across their enterprises to enhance corporate performance, improve efficiency and productivity, and strengthen customer relationships. "We congratulate these organizations for their achievements in using business intelligence to support organizational goals," said MicroStrategy Chief Operating Officer Sanju Bansal. "Each of these companies has demonstrated remarkable results with their BI applications."

Following is a brief description of this year's award recipients and their business intelligence applications:

Sonic Automotive, Inc.: Sonic Automotive is the award recipient in the Mobile Business Impact category. Sonic corporate executives and regional vice presidents rely on the iPad app to evaluate sales performance at its 100-plus dealerships in 26 major U.S. metropolitan markets. Sonic's MicroStrategy-based iPad app helps 700 employees monitor internal sales, service, finance and insurance, and external market data. Executives leverage the app to analyze daily operating costs and month-to-date results, and can access scorecards about each dealership that reveal insight into sales effectiveness across automotive brands, product categories, and geographic regions. In addition, app users can conduct monthly financial reviews and compare performance against that of other dealerships across regions. With this app, Sonic replaces large binders of spreadsheets and saves significant time by eliminating the need to perform manual analysis of the data. Sonic Automotive, Inc., a Fortune 500 company based in Charlotte, N.C., is one of the nation's largest automotive retailers.

Edmunds.com: Edmunds.com, the premier online resource for automotive information, is the award recipient in the Mobile App of the Year category. In May 2011, Edmunds.com launched their Web Metrics app, which is a highly intuitive and visually appealing sales analysis app for the iPad. The app provides a solution to easily compare make, model and segment leaders in the automotive marketplace. A user community of automotive manufacturer executives and Edmunds.com management and account directors use the MicroStrategy Mobile app to analyze key site metrics, such as Consideration, Purchase Intent and Cross-Shop data. Using the Web Metrics app, executives can instantly pull up information to make data-driven business decisions related to marketing and advertising plans. Edmunds.com Inc. publishes websites that empower, engage, and educate automotive consumers, enthusiasts, and insiders.

GUESS?, Inc.: Guess is the award recipient in the Social Intelligence category. Guess has deployed MicroStrategy's latest social products, including MicroStrategy Gateway and MicroStrategy Wisdom, to create a compelling, customer-friendly m-commerce and CRM mobile application for Guess List, the Guess customer loyalty program. These applications enhance the customer experience while driving profitability, and enable Guess to better understand, segment, and reach out to its customers via iPhone and iPad devices. Guess designs, markets, distributes, and licenses a lifestyle collection of contemporary apparel, denim, handbags, watches, footwear, and other related consumer products. As of October 29, 2011, Guess directly operated 495 retail stores in the United States and Canada and 232 retail stores in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

OptumRx - A UnitedHealth Group Company: OptumRx - A UnitedHealth Group Company is the award recipient in the Advanced Analytics category. OptumRx created an easy-to-understand graphical dashboard that provides its 1,200 employees and clients with extensive drill-down capabilities for evaluating client pharmacy benefit trends. The innovative dashboard capitalizes on MicroStrategy's powerful analytical capabilities, employing more than 1,000 metrics, yet it delivers critical business intelligence in a clear, understandable format. The MicroStrategy-based implementation involves extensive use of analytical capabilities, including advanced statistical analyses, data mining, and predictive analytics. The broad user community runs reports and analytical analyses against a 26-terabyte IBM DB2 database of claims data to produce detailed, easy to understand dashboards. OptumRx specializes in the delivery, clinical management, and affordability of prescription medications and consumer health products.

eBay: eBay is the award recipient in the High Performance and Scalability category. Thousands of eBay employees access numerous MicroStrategy-based BI applications for operational intraday reporting, monitoring and alerting, content delivery and complex analytical reporting. In 2011, on average, eBay processed hundreds of thousands of MicroStrategy report and document jobs per month and retrieved tens of billions of result rows with MicroStrategy against its multi-petabyte Teradata enterprise data warehouse. eBay extensively uses MicroStrategy in-memory technology to improve performance. More than 60 in-memory cubes are deployed in production, allowing users to view summary data and explore details in seconds. With more than 100 million active users globally, eBay is the world's largest online marketplace, where practically anyone can buy and sell practically anything.

Staples: Staples is recognized in the Enterprise Deployment category. Staples has deployed 19 MicroStrategy-based BI applications, including a Store Performance Dashboard, Sales Rep Dashboard and Daily Product Performance Interactive Grid. They are currently used by more than 5,000 associates globally. With MicroStrategy reports, interactive grids, and dashboards, Staples employees from finance, merchandising, sales, and many other functions are able to track sales trends, identify profitable areas, perform root cause analysis, monitor customer activity, and analyze promotions. The MicroStrategy BI environment runs against numerous data marts and a 35-terabyte data warehouse. With 90,000 associates worldwide and annual sales of $25 billion, Staples is the world's largest office products company and operates in 26 countries throughout North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

About MicroStrategy Incorporated

Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a leading provider of enterprise software platforms for business intelligence (BI), mobile intelligence, and social intelligence applications. MicroStrategy's BI platform enables leading organizations worldwide to analyze the vast amounts of data stored across their enterprises to make better business decisions. Companies choose MicroStrategy BI for its ease-of-use, sophisticated analytics, and superior data and user scalability. The MicroStrategy BI platform delivers actionable information to business users via the web and mobile devices. MicroStrategy's mobile intelligence platform helps companies and organizations build, deploy, and maintain mobile apps across a range of solutions by embedding intelligence, transactions, and multimedia into apps. MicroStrategy's social intelligence platform includes a number of applications that help enterprises harness the power of social networks for marketing and e-commerce, as well as a suite of free "friendly" consumer apps that use MicroStrategy's enterprise technologies. MicroStrategy's social intelligence platform helps companies leverage the value of social networks to better understand and engage their customers and fans. The MicroStrategy Cloud offering combines MicroStrategy and third-party software, hardware, and services to enable rapid, cost-effective development of hosted BI, mobile, and social applications. To learn more about MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR), visit www.microstrategy.com and follow us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/microstrategy) and Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/microstrategy).

MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform, MicroStrategy Cloud, MicroStrategy Mobile, Cloud Personal, MicroStrategy Transaction Services, Wisdom, MicroStrategy Wisdom and Emma are either trademarks or registered trademarks of MicroStrategy Incorporated in the United States and certain other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

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Contact:

Warren Getler
MicroStrategy Incorporated
703-744-6258
wgetler@microstrategy.com


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