Strategy Inc (MSTR) Earnings Call Transcript

Hello, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to today's webcast. My name is Saurabh Abhyankar. I'm the Head of Marketing here at MicroStrategy, and I'm super excited to introduce you to MicroStrategy 2020. Before we get started, though, I'd like to take a step back for a minute and talk a little bit about our vision. As you probably know, we've been in the business now for about 30 years. MicroStrategy was actually founded in 1989. And since that day, we've been on a mission and vision to bring intelligence to every corner of all of your organizations. We fundamentally believe that if we can bring intelligence to every employee and every process out there that we can improve customer engagements, we can make -- we can help you make better products, we can help you deliver better services to your customers and, ultimately, help the world deliver better solutions for everybody. And so we've been doing this for a long time, and we actually asked ourselves, well, what is the impact that we've had on the world, right? Because all of us who wake up every day, we're super excited about our jobs, and we asked ourselves, what impact do we actually have? And so what we did is we actually took a look at the S&P 500 to see if customers that have purchased MicroStrategy and used MicroStrategy have different business outcomes than customers that potentially have not purchased MicroStrategy. And we were actually really stoked by the information that we found. So first of all, 24% of the S&P 500 are MicroStrategy customers. And actually, the more successful you are, the more likely that you are a MicroStrategy customer. So 45%, so 45 of the top 100 in the S&P 500 are MicroStrategy customers. And it gets even more significant if you get up to the top 25, or 60% of the top 25 companies out there, that are the most successful, tend to be MicroStrategy customers. And that applies today, but it also applies when we look back at the past. Over the past 5 years, these companies tend to have higher EPS growth rates. They tend to have higher return on investment capital. They have higher revenue growth. And if you look at just the last year, the numbers are even more impressive. So we're really happy about that. Now of course, I need to make a point as a data guy between the difference between correlation and causation. I'm not going to sit here and say that you buy MicroStrategy and all of a sudden, you start growing at a higher rate or anything like this. But the main point really is that companies that tend to buy MicroStrategy tend to be data-driven companies. And what we see is that if you are a data-driven company, you tend to outperform your peers and you tend to deliver better products and services to your customers. So we're really proud of that, and we're happy about the last 30 years of our history. But as we look forward, there's still a lot of work left to do. We actually commissioned a study last year, where we tried to figure out what are the number of decisions out there that are actually being driven by analytics and data? And the results actually shocked us. We didn't realize, I don't think anybody realizes that the vast, vast majority, in fact, almost 100% of the decisions that people are making every single day are data-deprived. They're not actually using data to make those decisions. And it sounds like a crazy number. And the -- but the reason for this is that analytics has done a really good job of helping people make strategic decisions. So if you're making a big decision about where to build a factory or how to optimize revenue, or something like this, you'll invest in building dashboards, you'll invest in analytics, and the world has changed a lot. We've been able to actually empower business people with strategic decision-making with analytics. So that's definitely worked out quite well, and the industry has been growing massively. The problem becomes for everybody else in your organization. Think about all the e-mails that happen where you just us give a gut feel answer, you give a response without looking up the data. Think about every action that a retail employee takes or a factory worker takes. And what you realize is that the vast majority of those decisions are not actually being driven by data. And so there's a huge opportunity in front of us to take the learnings of the strategic decision-making that we've empowered with data and bring that to the operational decision-making to really change the world in a more significant way than we already have. And so with MicroStrategy 2019 that we released last year, we really asked ourselves, what can we do to empower this other group of people? But to do that, you have to ask yourself an even more fundamental question, which is, why, why are they not empowered with data? What's going on? As we asked ourselves that and we looked at what a lot of our customers and their employees are doing, and as it turns out, the reason that they're -- these people are not using data is because, number one, they don't have time. Right? They get an e-mail, they give a response. They're in front of a customer, they have to do something right now. They don't have time to go and build dashboard, right? They don't have time. And the second thing is they don't really even know that the data even exists. They wouldn't know where to go if they wanted to. They wouldn't even know where to go ask the question. And so we challenged our engineering team to try to figure out how do you solve that problem? Or how do you get data to people that aren't even looking for it? How do you get data -- the right data to people that have no time to search for it or even ask the question? And that's where we invented a brand-new paradigm in analytics that we call HyperIntelligence. And the whole premise of HyperIntelligence, the whole revolutionary thing about it is that it brings analytics to people with no time in the moment that they need the analytics. And so what is it? It's a plug-in to Google Chrome. It's a plug-in to Edge. It works on iOS. It works on Android. It works in e-mail because those are the places that these users actually live, right? They're out there in the world with mobile devices, they're sitting in front of computers responding to e-mails, they're in Salesforce, they're in Workday. They're doing all these things in their everyday business lives, and we need to find a way to inject the intelligence right then when they need it. As we built the plug-in to the web, because a lot of those applications exist on the web, we also built a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook because a lot of the people live in Outlook, and we also built a mobile application for iOS and Android. And what HyperIntelligence does is it looks at what you're doing, right, whether you're responding to an e-mail or you're in sales force or whatever, and it quickly overlays the information that you need to make a better decision. And these cards that you see here on the screen are that information. You build these little cards and you get the information out to the people. The best way to really describe it to you is to show it to you in action. So I want to give you a couple of quick examples. The first is HyperIntelligence in an e-mail. So this is the Outlook version of HyperIntelligence. As you can see here, I'm reading my e-mail. And what HyperIntelligence is doing is it's scanning your e-mail and is looking for keywords. It's looking for things like your customers, your employees, maybe your stores, maybe your product, whatever it is in your business that matters to you, it's looking for those things. And when it finds it, it's instantly giving you the information that you need coming from pretty much any system. So this can actually federate information from 20 different systems in the back end and just transparently and magically make it available right there when you're responding to your e-mail, in this particular example. Another example I want to show you is HyperIntelligence on the web. So this is a plug-in in Chrome that's now also available on Edge. And again, what it's doing is as you're browsing the Internet, maybe you're in Gmail, maybe you're in Slack, maybe you're in a web application and it's looking again for those things that matter to you. And in this case, it's products, right? And here we are in amazon.com. And what we're actually doing is we're injecting and overlaying a third-party website, in this case, Amazon, with corporate information that matters to you. And so for example, if you have products that you sell on different websites, whether it's Amazon or something else, you can actually overlay those experiences for our users with that corporate information that matters to them and give them a completely different perspective into the data. One of the most useful examples, though, is when you're overlaying enterprise applications. So here is HyperIntelligence in Chrome, working on top of Salesforce. And Salesforce is really just one example. It works across pretty much any web publication out there, whether it's SAP, Workday, some of the older systems that you maybe built by hand on your own. And again, it can bring information from anywhere in your organization and overlay those critical things in those applications. So a good use case of this is, let's say, you're in Salesforce, you're looking at a customer and HyperIntelligence can give you the information coming from Salesforce, of course, but it can give you information coming maybe from your support system, ServiceNow and a number of different places as well, giving your users a full 360 view very, very easily. We can actually even go beyond just overlaying information. We asked ourselves, well, what is it that the user wants to do next, right? And many of these users, what's really important to them is the ability to look at something, get an insight in the context in the application that they're in and then link over to another application or link over to an action that they want to take. So for example, if I'm looking at an employee, I might want to click on them and go over to Workday and take some action in the Workday. If I'm looking at a customer in Salesforce, I might want to click on that customer and take an action in support system or something like this. And so we designed HyperIntelligence to be able to federate any enterprise data that you have out there into the cards, right, but also then overlay that on any enterprise application and take action in those enterprise applications as well. What does that all mean? What it really means is, if you think about all of the business applications and tools you have out there, and the amount of intelligence you're delivering across your enterprise, HyperIntelligence gives you an opportunity to turbocharge all of that. So here, just for illustration purposes, you can see we're talking about all the different business applications out there processed in the web. It can be SAP, it can be IBM stuff, it can be Oracle, Workday, Salesforce, so the list goes on. Most of those applications have been designed for transactional scenario, right? They're fantastic for operational procedural things. And the amount of intelligence and insight that they have in them has actually been growing over the years, which is great, but it's varied, right? Some of them are really great in delivering some level of insight, some of them are poor, but in every case, they tend to only deliver intelligence within their scope of data, right? They tend not to deliver intelligence coming from other places. And so many of you have deployed a number of BI tools to try to solve some of that problem. And actually, as it turns out, most customers that we have and most prospects that we have, actually have 3 to 5 and sometimes 8 or 9 different BI tools deployed in their organizations. Those BI tools do deliver more intelligence, but again, they tend to be siloed. They tend to be -- you bought this particular tool, maybe it's Power BI for marketing, and you bought Tableau for your sales team, and you've got something -- you've got Business Objects as your enterprise standard or something like that, there's all these BI tools out there delivering intelligence. The question we asked ourselves is, how do we fill in these gaps and deliver intelligence to all of your existing business applications, all of your existing BI tools in a very simple and consistent way. And so what HyperIntelligence does is, because it's a plug-in at the browser level and at the OS level, what it does is it actually overlays any of those applications with additional insights. And so this is a really powerful thing for all of those systems that you have out there, and most enterprises have 20, 30, 50 different systems, you really have 2 choices, right? You can go in and do surgery on each one of those and try to add more insights and try to make each of them independently better, which is extremely costly and, in some cases, not even possible, some of these systems are pretty old. Or you can deploy something like HyperIntelligence, build a card, and literally within hours or maybe days, be able to overlay all of those applications with the insights that you need coming from all the different systems that you already have. And so this is why we think HyperIntelligence is revolutionary, and it really allows us and allows you to bring analytics to a whole audience of users that simply don't have time to go to an analytics on their own. So we talk a lot about HyperIntelligence because it really is a game changer. Nobody else has it, and it embodies our vision for bringing intelligence everywhere and to everybody. It sort of magically showcases a lot of the underlying technologies that we've been building for a long time. But it's really just the tip of the iceberg. MicroStrategy 2020 is a lot more than that, and HyperIntelligence sits on top of the MicroStrategy 2020 platform that brings analytics to a broad audience and a broad spectrum of use cases. So for any of you that have been around with us for the last couple of years, when we think about our platform, we fundamentally believe in 3 principles. The first principle is that we have to deliver engaging, simple user experiences that are modern, right? Today's consumer is used to Netflix, they're used to amazon.com, they're used to very simple metaphor, they're used to apple iOS. And so the analytics have to also be simple, easy to consume and very easy to work with. So it's extremely important to have modern experiences for your different end users. That's our first principle. The second principle is that we believe that you need to have the flexibility to deploy analytics in the most open possible way. I mentioned before that you have tons of different applications. You have multiple BI tools already. You've got things like Excel, you've got data science tools coming along. And so you need a partner and a vendor that can give you a fully open architecture so you can plug in and interact with all of the different tools and processes out there. This is really important because without that, it's really hard to innovate. Right? There's a lot of things going on in the industry, and some of it's our competitors, to be frank with you, but there's a lot of innovation happening. And so we believe that you should have that flexibility to adopt that innovation and that innovation can sit on top of the MicroStrategy 2020 platform, even if we didn't build it. And the third principle that we believe in is truly scaling to every corner of your organization. It's easy to talk about pretty user experiences. It's easy to say the words, "We want to empower everybody," but the hard part is actually building a system that can scale to thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that can do it securely, that could do it with very low response times and it's easy and simple to manage. And so we fundamentally believe that if we want to enable you to deliver intelligence to everybody, it has to be enterprise-grade. As so with MicroStrategy 2020, we've taken big strides in each of these 3 areas, and I'm proud to introduce those to you right now. Let's start off with modern analytics. As I mentioned before, modern analytics is all about delivering consumer-grade experiences for every role, for every person in your organization as well as every device, laptop and so forth in the organization as well. There's a number of things that we've done in MicroStrategy 2020. But you should remember 3 things: number one is HyperIntelligence; number two is dossiers; and number three is documents. On the HyperIntelligence front, we've expanded HyperIntelligence since 2019 to now include HyperIntelligence for Office; HyperIntelligence for mobile, both iOS and Android. We've expanded HyperIntelligence for web to also now support Edge, and we've added a number of new formatting options based on the feedback that we've actually gotten from customers over the course of the last year. The second major thing, and probably the one thing that's part of MicroStrategy 2020, that makes it a huge leap forward from 2019, is we've turbocharged the Dossier experience. There's a number of features that our customers have been asking for: number one, the ability to lay out and build really beautiful dossiers. I'm going to show you some examples of that. But we've added what we call free-form canvas. We've also added a lot of additional interactivity with the ability to link between dossiers, to add selectors on the dossiers. We've reinvented the grid. I'll talk about this in a few minutes, but we've built a brand-new grid that we call the compound grid, which is fantastic for building more sophisticated financial reports and layouts that have multiple levels of aggregation. And we also had the ability to embed surveys from SurveyGizmo and SurveyMonkey. And the third major area of modern analytics that really is by popular demand, I mean, our customers have been asking us for, for the last 3 or 4 years, is to reinvest in documents and modernize documents. And so what we've done with MicroStrategy 2020 is bring document into Workstation. We've modernized the UI, and we've also added some new functionality around graph properties that I'll show you in a couple of minutes. So this is an example of the kind of dossier that you can create now with MicroStrategy 2020. They're beautiful. And the main functionality that allows for this is things like transparency, overlays, free-form layout, that allows you to build the dossiers just as you could potentially imagine them in your head. Let me show you really quickly how you build one of these. So there's a number of features that we needed to add to make this possible. One is around, what we call, free-form canvas. And free-form canvas is what it sounds like. It basically allows you to lay out all the different elements on the screen just the way you'd like. You can put them exactly where you'd like. You can overlay them, so you have transparency. That allows you to do things like create compound visualizations, right? Visualizations have multiple elements to them. And we also have things like alignment so that you can very easily align different parts of the dossier layout just the way you'd like. And so this demo shows you really briefly just how easy it is now to build a free-form layout, and a dossier that looks just the way that you would like. The second major functionality that we've added is considerably more interactivity. One of the things I'm really proud of is that we run customer councils multiple times a year. And during those customer councils, our customers tell us the things that they would really like us to add. And this example and the one after it, the next feature I'll show you in a couple of minutes, are both examples of 2 features that were the top requested features from our customer councils. So this is what we call attribute metric selectors. And the whole goal here is to give you a way to put selectors on the screen so that your users, the end users that actually interact with these dossiers, have much more interactivity options. For example, you can put controls on the screen that change the metric that you're looking at in a particular visualization or break down a grid or something like this from one attribute to another attribute or you can select the attributes that you want. It allows you to create simpler dossiers because instead of having to give every option visually on the screen, you can give the users selector so they can select what they want to see. So it makes the dossiers simpler, but then it also gives your users a lot more flexibility and choice as well, which is really nice. The second functionality that we added in 2020 that also came from our customer council, and in this case, it was actually our OEM council, was the ability to link from one dossier to another and past context between dossiers. This is really important for a couple of reasons. The first is, oftentimes, you already have existing content, right? You might have a detailed report or something like this, and you want to build a summary dossier that then you can link from the summary dossier into the detailed report. So it allows to reuse content that you already have. The second reason is it actually helps you with simplifying the dossier you're building and also ensure they perform really well. So you can build a summary dossier and have that linked to the multiple detailed dossiers, each of which is optimized for that level of detail, and so every screen that the user actually interacts with can be optimized to run as fast as possible. So this was actually the #1 requested feature from our OEM council, and also a very, very popular feature that was asked for in the customer councils as well. So we're really happy to deliver that for you. Honestly, I never thought I'd get excited about a grid, certainly not before joining MicroStrategy. And sometimes when you really care about something, you have to go back to first principles. Sometimes those first principles are actually what matter in terms of layering on more and more stuff. And so what we did is we actually looked at how our customers use grids. And as it turns out, they were trying to use grids in much more sophisticated ways than we had originally designed. And so what we saw over and over again was people essentially stitching grids together. They build multiple grids and try to like align them next to each other to give the effect of a sophisticated compound grid. And we said to ourselves, well, we can make that easier. So how do we do that? And what we did is we actually invented a new concept that we call column sets. And what column sets allow for is for you to basically have a grid with multiple sub-grids inside it, and that allows you to actually build something that's quite sophisticated but it's really easy to build and allows you to actually have multiple levels of aggregation in the grid as well. So I'm just letting this demo play a little bit. You'll see here the concept of column sets. So we've added a couple of column sets. You're writing a third column set. That allows you to create multiple levels of aggregation in the grid. But then once you've done that, you get all the great functionality that you would expect in a dossier, right? So you can do thresholds, you can do filtering, you can do layout and formatting to really build sophisticated grids that are powerful and interactive, but also look really beautiful as well. So that is the compound grid. The last thing I'd like to show you in the modern analytics section of this presentation is something that a lot of our customers have been asking for, for a long time. And it's the ability to edit documents in a much more modern way and with some additional functionality. And so what we've done is we've taken the document editor, we've integrated it into Workstation, and we've actually enhanced it by making it much more modern in terms of look and feel and added some new features as well. So here, you can see in this demo, we're in Workstation, and we've got this area that we call documents. You can click on new document, and from there, you can actually create a document in Workstation, right? You got all the features that you would expect. But one of the things that we've done is we've actually updated the toolbar, so it looks and feels more like a modern editing experience. And then we've actually enhanced the ability to set graph properties as well. So you can go in here and you can see this. You can go in and you can edit the graph properties, you can edit the axes and so forth. This is probably the #1 document enhancement requested in our idea exchange and our community as well as the customer councils over the past 3 or 4 years. So we're really happy to bring that to you finally. So that is modern experiences, HyperIntelligence, brand-new set of capabilities with dossiers that allow you to build really beautiful interactive dossiers, and finally, modernization of documents and bringing that into Workstation as well. The second major area that I want to talk about is our open architecture. As I pointed out before, it's really important as you're choosing a BI platform for your entire enterprise that, that platform allows you to flexibly interact with everything else that you want to be able to choose. And in some cases, some of those things will be our competitors, and that's okay. And so we fundamentally believe in an open architecture. And there's a number of things that we've done in MicroStrategy 2020 to continue enhancing on our open strategy. The first is what we call Federated Analytics. Back in 2019, a little bit earlier than that, actually, we built and shipped connectors to Power BI, Tableau and Click. With 2020, we've expanded on that in a few very, very important ways. The first is we have a brand-new connector for Microsoft Excel. As you probably know, Excel is actually the #1 BI tool on the planet. It's not going anywhere. All your users use it. The problem with Excel is that, oftentimes, it becomes a silo. People export data to excel. The moment they do the export, that data becomes insecure potentially, and it also becomes out of date that same second that they hit the export button. And so with the new connector that we have, people can connect directly from Excel into MicroStrategy. And I'll show you a demo of that in a couple of minutes. We've also enhanced our Power BI and Tableau connectors based on feedback from our customers. We've improved things like data throughput and other things, I'll show you a quick demo of that. And the thing that I'm most excited about is that we further opened up our platform for all the data scientists out there that are using Jupyter Notebook and RStudio, and again, I'll get into that in a few minutes. Those Federated Analytics connectors are actually built on top of some of the most open rest APIs in the industry. Again, to be open, it's not just about providing connectors, it's about providing APIs that can integrate with pretty much anything out there. So as we've enhanced our connectors, we've also continued to enhance the underlying APIs to power those connectors. We've also continued to optimize the data connectivity that we have for things like Google BigQuery and other areas. And perhaps one of the best kept secrets of MicroStrategy is we're actually really good on top of OLAP sources, and we continue to enhance that as well. So we've continued to enhance our offering on top of MSaaS and on top of Essbase. So if you're looking for a self-service solution on top of either of those, we actually have a very, very solid solution on top of OLAP as well. And finally, one of the big debates in analytics over the past 5 years has been on-premise versus cloud, and the level of functionality between cloud analytics solutions and on-premise analytics solutions. And not to go too far back into history, but the way the industry evolved is that, a bunch of companies built some really great on-premise offerings, right, companies like MicroStrategy and Business Objects and Cognos and a few others, and then the cloud came along. And many of those companies decided, "Well, we're just going to build something else. We're going to build something new in the cloud." And what they ended up with is a relatively fragmented product offering, right? On one hand, you've got this 20-year-old architecture with all this feature and functionality on-prem. And then on the other hand, you've got this thing in the cloud that it's easy and simple to deploy, but isn't necessary -- doesn't necessarily have all the same functionality as a thing that you have on-prem. And so a few years back, we challenged our engineering team, and we said, "Listen, can you deliver a solution in the cloud that is as easy and simple as a cloud solution should be, that's scalable, that's elastic, that's easy to get up and running and all of those kinds of things, without sacrificing the years of innovation that we built into our platform. Can you do that?" And the engineering said -- team said, yes, we can do that, and they then proceeded to go and do it, which is awesome. And so a couple of years ago, we released MicroStrategy on AWS, which is our AWS offering. You press a couple of buttons, it gets up and running. It's super-fast to deploy, but it has all of the functionality of the core MicroStrategy platform. So we did that a few years ago. And with MicroStrategy 2020, we're proud to let you know that we've also added Azure to our offering. So now our customers can deploy MicroStrategy on AWS, they can be deploy it on Azure, they can do that in hours or days, super-fast, it's an elastic, it's great. Or, if they want, they can do it on-prem. Whatever choice you make, you're not stuck. We will allow you to go from on-prem to AWS, from AWS to Azure, from Azure back to on-prem, right? We want to give you full flexibility, and so when we talk about our cloud offering, it's really important that it's about deploying anywhere you'd like without compromise. So with that, I want to show you a couple of examples. Here is the new connector for Excel. As some of you might know, Microsoft revamped their Excel infrastructure and foundation when they released Office 365. And so when they did that, we started working on a brand-new Excel connector that we built from the ground-up, that leverages all the new services and capabilities of Office 365. And it also gives us an opportunity to rethink the user experience. And so now with the new connector that we've shipped for Microsoft Excel, it's brand new. The look and feel is brand new, and it allows you to quickly connect to MicroStrategy, select the data sets that you want to bring in, but you can go further on that. You've got our enterprise semantic graph with all the attributes and metrics and filters and prompts and so forth. All of that is supported, so you can fill all that in, select just the information that you want, bring it into Excel. And now once it's in Excel, you really have the best of both worlds. On one hand, you get all the Excel functionality. In this case, for example, we're going to create a cross-tab. You can -- that's a very popular thing that all Excel users like to do, so we're going to do that. So you get all the Excel functionalities, but the data is not siloed and it's not out of date. It's connected to MicroStrategy. You can click the refresh button and get the latest data. And importantly, it's also secure. So for the user that's currently logged in with that Excel data, when they hit refresh, they see the data that is pertinent to them. So you can also secure the data and make sure that people only see what they're supposed to see. So that's our brand-new Excel connector, and we're going to continue moving forward and enhancing it over the course of the next few years. As you may know, we released the first Power BI and Tableau connectors a couple of years ago. And as customers have begun to adopt those, they've given us lots of great feedback. And so we've been improving those significantly as well. The look and feel of the Power BI and Tableau connectors is very similar to the Excel connector. So we've learned some of the lessons of how to make it really easy to navigate MicroStrategy to fill prompts, to pick the objects that you want, all that kind of thing. But the really powerful thing is, just like with the Excel connector, if your users really love Power BI or they love Tableau, maybe they don't even love them, but they're trained on it, they just know it, right, and they don't want to relearn anything, you can give them the trusted data, the scalable trusted data coming from MicroStrategy, but in those tools that they're comfortable with, so in this case, Power BI and Tableau. A couple of the key improvements that we made with user experience improvement. We improved the amount of data that you can actually bring into Power BI and Tableau, and we've also improved the throughput, so it brings data in faster. And all of those improvements apply to the Excel connector, apply to the Jupyter notebook and RStudio connectors, I'm going to talk about in a couple of minutes here. And importantly, they also apply to our APIs. So if you want to build something on your own, if you want to connect MicroStrategy to some application that you're building, all of these benefits also benefit you in a bespoke scenario as well. So a few minutes ago, I talked about one of the best-kept secrets of MicroStrategy, and I talked about it being our OLAP functionality. Well, actually, there is an even more best-kept secret of MicroStrategy. And it is the fact that MicroStrategy is probably one of the best platforms out there for data science. Let me explain. If you think about what a data scientist does every single day, they fundamentally do 3 things. The first is they connect the data. The second is they build data models. And the third thing, if you're lucky, is that they need to operationalize and share the output of those data models with the rest of the organization, right? But if you were to interview any of those data scientists, they would tell you that they're not very good at 2 of those things, and they don't even like doing 2 of those things, but they're really great at one of those things. As it turns out, the 2 things the data scientists don't like to do and aren't great at, our platform is actually fantastic at. We're really great at giving you trusted data, right? And the MicroStrategy platform is also great for distributing information, whether it's via HyperIntelligence card, dossiers or other things. And so what we've done with MicroStrategy 2020 is we've built brand-new connectors for Jupyter Notebook and RStudio. That's the tools that the data scientist lives in pretty much every single day. And what the data scientists can now do is they can use those tools to connect the MicroStrategy to start with trusted data that's already there coming from our enterprise magic graph. So that saves them one big step, right? Instead of writing SQL against the database, they can go to MicroStrategy and get at least some of their data from there. They may still have to go to other places to get other data, but that's a big savings for them, and it's trusted data that they can depend on. They can then bring that data into Jupyter Notebook or RStudio, and that's where they can now do what they love, right? That's where they can build their data models, they can train their models, they can run and experiment with their models. And once they have output from those models, maybe it's a classification algorithm, maybe it's a forecast or something like this, now comes the time for them to find a way to get that out to the world, or at least get that out to other people in their organization. And that's actually traditionally been one of the hardest things for data scientists to do. Because what are they going to share their Jupyter Notebook thing? End users have no idea how to deal with that, right? But with MicroStrategy what they can do and with these connectors, they can push that data back into MicroStrategy, right, enrich data in those enriched models. Those then just become objects in MicroStrategy in our semantic graph. And then anybody, whether it's a business user or a developer or somebody building a HyperCard, HyperIntelligence card, or using a HyperIntelligence card, that data science work is now available to the masses across your enterprise. And this is a huge opportunity for data scientists to save a bunch of time in terms of getting to really great data, but also an opportunity for you to leverage those very scarce and sometimes expensive skills much more impactfully across the organization as well. So with that, let me show you a quick demo. This is the new connector that we've built for Jupyter Notebook. The connector that we have for RStudio is actually very similar as well. It's a plug-in into the tool. And again, you click the little connect to MicroStrategy button, you log in, so now you're authenticated, you only have access to the information that you should have access to. You pick the data sets that you'd like. And here, you can search for them and so on and so forth. And once you pick the data set, you can then pick the objects in the data set that you really want to work with, and then that will be imported as a data frame, in this case, in Jupyter Notebook. Once it's a data frame, your end users or your data scientists know how to deal with it. Data frames are very common object models they know how to deal with. They can then train their models. And once they've done all of that, they can then push the output, maybe it's a new column of data called forecast or classification or cluster or something like this. They push that back into MicroStrategy, and then all of your business users that potentially are building a dossier or are building a HyperIntelligence card or a document can take that object, drag and drop it into their dashboard and make use of it. So it really connects the dots between the data scientists that are really valuable in the organization and the rest of your enterprise as well. So that's an overview of our open strategy. Again, if you remember, a few key things from that. It's our Federated Analytics strategy, right, making sure that you can connect to all the different tools out there. We have a ton of open APIs to allow you extend MicroStrategy and integrate MicroStrategy into all the different workflows that you know and love. And importantly, MicroStrategy is a fantastic platform for data science as well. So I've gone through much of the functionality of MicroStrategy 2020. And as I mentioned before, it's easy to get distracted by functionality. But what's really important, and as we build every line of code that we build and every button that we add, we think every single time about how do we make sure this can scale, right? Because giving you functionality that doesn't scale out to everybody in the organization actually ends up being a liability, right? It's something that the users love, but they can't use because it doesn't perform well enough. And so we spent a ton of time and energy thinking about how do we make everything that we do enterprise-grade? And there's a few key aspects of this. The first is, ensuring that you have a single version of truth with the enterprise semantic graph. And one of the big improvements that we've made with MicroStrategy 2020 is we started to bring editing of the schema object into workstations. This gives you a single place to go to start editing things like metrics and other -- and ACLs and properties on the schema object and then to go ahead and build, whether it's HyperIntelligence card or dossiers or documents, Workstation now really brings that one place where you can manage all of that. The second thing is, we've done a number of things to improve security and compliance. So a lot of our customers need us to be able to specify very precise user roles and privileges. We've done certification for AWS and Azure SSO and a number of other things that make it easy for you or easier for you to manage ACLs, to manage roles and privileges and also the Platform Analytics that you need, truly understand what's going on in your system, understand who's accessing what data and so on and so forth. And I'll show you a couple of examples of that. And finally, scalability is something that we wake up and we worry about every single day. And so there's a number of optimizations that we've made in the back end to allow the system to scale further than it ever could before. This gets a little bit technical, but on one hand, we've looked at the code itself. We've looked -- we've done more advanced static and dynamic code scanning, and that allows us to identify any potential areas in the code that could potentially lead to crashes or memory corruption and things like this, that we can improve. So that's like a very technical behind-the-scenes thing that we've done, but the benefit of those kinds of things is a more stable system and a system that performs better. We've also given you more control over job level of memory governing. This allows you to ensure that there's no users out there that can cause a massive memory spike and take down the wholesale system, things like this. And we have done a number of other things like, for example, in dossiers, we've been able to improve performance, in some cases, up to 40% by actually ignoring some of the things that don't need to be processed when loading a dossier. And so a number of things that we've done across the board, whether it's governing or optimized compilation or caching that makes a system scale further and perform better. So again, I want to show you a couple of quick demos of this. This is a demo of the object and system telemetry with Platform Analytics. So we are in Workstation again. And we have a new system that we shipped for the very first time with MicroStrategy 2019 called Platform Analytics, and allows you to really understand what's going on in your system. You can see what objects are being used, you can see user activity, you can see error rate, memory usage, things like this. And this is really important because, if you think about how people actually manage their BI deployments, what we found is, often times, there's a lot of stuff happening in the system that's overhead, right? There's content perhaps that nobody's looking at anymore, or there's objects that are causing memory spikes that you need to deal with. And giving you full visibility of that, allows you to simplify your BI deployment to potentially get rid of things that people aren't using anymore, but also identify bottlenecks in the BI system, where, perhaps, there is a high error rates in a particular thing. Maybe something wasn't built quite right. So you can go in, you can optimize that and make it better. The second demo I want to do here is the ability to edit schema objects in Workstation. And so this starts to bring the power of our project schema into Workstation. This here in front of you is a new metric editor that we've added in MicroStrategy 2020, which, as the name implies, allows you to edit or create metrics right from Workstation itself. You can also right-click on any of the schema objects as well to set properties, do ACLs and things like this. And another thing that we've added that I'm actually not showing you a demo of, is you're actually able to now set intelligence settings, both environment settings and project settings, from within Workstation itself. So that's a quick overview. There's a lot of great things in MicroStrategy 2020. I didn't have the opportunity to go through every single feature. I do encourage you to look at the new document and other things to get all the details. But this does provide you a pretty good overview of the key new functionality that we've added in the last year. And we really believe that allows you to do 3 fundamental things: one, bring intelligence to all of the users in your organization as far and as wide as possible, whether that's HyperIntelligence or dossiers, the MicroStrategy 2020 platform helps you do that. The second thing is embracing an open strategy. As I said before, many of you have multiple BI tools, you have multiple things in your BI or analytics ecosystem, MicroStrategy 2020 allows you to be as open to those things as possible. It gives you a single place to model and manage your users and your metrics and your attributes and all those kinds of things, and then make that available to all the different tools and products out there in the ecosystem. And finally, it allows you to securely scale analytics further than ever before. MicroStrategy has always been known to scale further than most BI deployments. There's actually a great study done by BARC last year, that shows that the average MicroStrategy deployment is 3x larger in terms of number of users than the average in the industry. What that means is that you trust us to be able to scale further, and we're deeply across your enterprise than anybody else. So we're really proud of that, but we're not sort of sitting back on it. Every year, we're going to continue enhancing performance, we're going to continue enhancing scalability, and we're really proud of the improvements that we've made in MicroStrategy 2020. One other thing I want to talk about is, if you're on an older version of MicroStrategy, which is pretty much everybody, right, I assume that you're on MicroStrategy 2019, maybe something before that, and you're paying support to us, you are entitled to support benefits where we will come on-site and help you upgrade your system to MicroStrategy 2020. We honestly believe that this is the best analytics platform on the planet, and we're willing to come and join hand-in-hand with you to help you get there. So please call us up, call your account rep, go to our website and request an upgrade advisory service today. Now before I end and we get to the Q&A, I've done a lot of talking. Obviously, I'm very proud of the team and very proud of the product that we've built. But obviously, I'm going to say that, right? So what I think is really important as you think about some of the customers that we have. As I said, we've got some of the best customers out there. We've got 3,600 customers at MicroStrategy. Some of the biggest brands in the world are powered by MicroStrategy. And I'd like to introduce you one of our great customers, The Co-operators, that's been using MicroStrategy to inject and bring intelligence across their organization and let them really just speak in their own words about the experience that they've have had and the partnership that they've had with us, with both MicroStrategy 2019 and early adopting MicroStrategy 2020. So with that, I'm going to play the video, and we'll come back after that for the Q&A. [Presentation]

I would like to thank The Co-operators for their continued partnership. And I'm really excited about what we're going to do together for next year, too, with MicroStrategy 2020. So with that, let's jump over to Q&A.

First of all, feel free to ask any of your questions in the Q&A box. We've actually already got a number of great questions that have come in over the course of the last 45 minutes or so. What I'm going to try to do is pick a few that focus on use cases. Instead of answering sort of nitty-gritty questions about feature functions, I'd like to focus a little bit on use cases. For any of the questions that we don't get to right now, we'll be responding by e-mail in the coming days as well. So let's start with this first question here. The question is, are there any examples that I have of MicroStrategy being used alongside data science platforms? So there's actually a number of different examples that we have. The one that really comes to mind, and I love it because it helps save babies. But the example that comes to my mind is a hospital that uses MicroStrategy to actually optimize a number of different things, but specifically, they're using MicroStrategy alongside their R environment to do optimization of hospital bed allocation. And the way that works is, it takes historical data from MicroStrategy via our R integration. They then give that to the data scientists. The data scientists merge that with real-time data coming from hospital beds, things like blood pressure and movement rates and things like this. They then feed that through models to try to predict whether somebody's going to overstay a hospital bed. They then push the output of that model back into MicroStrategy, and that's then made available via dossiers and documents to different medical staff. And the medical staff can then know whether if a certain bed is going to be prolonged or something like this. They can then change surgery dates and so forth. So it's a really great example actually of leveraging the data scientists what they're great at, which is building and training models, but then operationalizing that and having a much more significant impact on the world by bringing that data into MicroStrategy and making it available via dossiers to the hospital staff. Let me look for another example here. So another question asking if there's any examples of HyperIntelligence customers. So I'm actually really proud to tell you, I didn't mention this during the presentation, but HyperIntelligence is actually the fastest-growing product in our history. We have about 200 customers in the very first year, which is honestly quite shocking. We never even imagined it would be that successful. We actually got lots and lots of different use cases of HyperIntelligence. Maybe the one I'll talk about is Sonic Automotive. It's another great customer of ours. And what they actually did, that is interesting problem. They have buyers. They have people that buy and sell cars. They buy used cars and they sell those cars in different parts of the United States. And the way they do that is they actually go on to an auction website that they don't own, it's a third-party website, and they have a list of cars, and they need to bid on those cars and decide whether or not to buy the car, based on whether they think they can resell the car for a higher price in a different market, right? That's what they're trying to do. And one of the big challenges that those auctions end really fast. They have to make these decisions really fast, and they need to go to synthesize data coming from a bunch of different places and make that decision, which is actually really, really hard to do. And so one of the things that they did with HyperIntelligence, which actually was, frankly, quite shocking to me. It's a whole new use case of HyperIntelligence that I had never thought of is they've actually built 2 different cards. One card for cars that the buyers should buy and another card or another data set for cars that they should not buy. The first card is green. The second card is red. And so now when you turn those cards on and you go to the website, the auction website, it just lights up like magic. And all the cars that they should potentially buy turn green, all the cars that they shouldn't buy turn red. It doesn't mean that they should just kind of mindlessly buy the car, but it gives them some insight on the ones to focus on. They can hover over that car and see additional information coming from their proprietary data and make a decision really, really fast. So that's a use case of HyperIntelligence. I could probably name almost 200 others, but that's a really great one that I love. So with that, we're going to end this webcast. I'd like to thank you all very much for your time. As you can tell, we're super excited about MicroStrategy 2020. We think we've got something special here, and we hope that you'll join us in the coming days and weeks and months ahead, whether it's at one of our events or come to our website, read our blog, engage with us, sign up for an upgrade, sign up for a demo. We'd love to have you as a customer, if you aren't already a customer. And for those of you that are our customers, we, of course, appreciate that and welcome you to stay engaged. Thank you very much.