MicroStrategy Updates Business Intelligence For New SEC Requirements

MicroStrategy

Its goal is to help public companies meet new financial disclosure rules mandated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, enacted July 30. That legislation mandates much greater financial disclosure by executives of publicly held companies and requires them to certify their financial results.

The latest update to Microstrategy 7i promises to make it easier for companies and integrators to create data warehouses that deliver fast, accurate reports on financial information, the company said. MicroStrategy 7i, which first shipped last April, costs about $1,200 per user and $8,000 per developer.

"Organizations are hamstrung because data in transactional systems is optimized for posting transactions to the ledger, etc., but is not optimized for looking at the big picture or drilling down into detail. They need the ability to do real analysis fast," said Richard Skriletz, national managing principal for business intelligence and data warehousing at RCG Information Technology, an Edison, N.J.-based integrator.

In order for corporate managers to drill into pertinent details, companies need to move all of the data into one place so it can be looked at using statistical processes, trend analysis and correlations, he said.

Historically, companies have moved timed slices of their transactional data offline to separate data warehouses for running reports and analysis. But building those warehouses takes time, and the reports are not necessarily run against the most updated information, integrators said. The pressure is on to ease reporting so that nontechnical managers can run their own queries according to their own schedules get immediate results.

MicroStrategy has applied its business intelligence toolset to make corporate reporting systems more intuitive, said Doug Slemmer, president of IOLAP, a Dallas-based consultancy.

Slemmer and other integrators expect technology vendors to jump on the bandwagon to meet Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.

"This is sort of analogous to Y2K and even the new HIPAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act rules, where there's now real demand for change from ISVs as well as integrators," Slemmer said.

Another provision of Sarbanes-Oxley for example, requires corporations to better track and archive e-mail, including instant messaging applications, which crept into many companies without the consent or control of the IT department. Integrators said they expect to see a rash of tools that bolster IM archiving and tracking for corporations.

Until recently, many integrators and VARs steered clear of MicroStrategy, which had a direct-sales focus. But the company has noticeably changed its channel attitude, some integrators said.

"Two years ago they didn't give partners the time of day, but as they saw the trend in what is valued by companies, they recognized their forte is in the technical strength of the product," said Skriletz.

MicroStrategy still maintains a professional services organization, but it's "very specialized, and we draw on them" in joint projects, Skriletz said.

For example, RCG Information has worked with Microstrategy on tying applications into NCR Teradata systems, Skriletz said. "We're working with them in one client now, and the customer wants us to do 99 percent of the work," he said.

MicroStrategy currently derives 20 percent of its revenue via channel sales, but the company has said it hopes to raise that number to 40 percent in the next two years.