MicroStrategy announced its license replacement program for customers and OEM partners of Cognos and Business Objects.
As a result of the recently announced acquisitions of Cognos by IBM and Business Objects by SAP, customers of these two BI vendors may have concerns about ongoing product support, product direction, and migration efforts. The MicroStrategy License Replacement program enables customers of Cognos and Business Objects to trade in their existing BI licenses for MicroStrategy licenses at little or no replacement cost.
“The big three former independent BI players have fallen like dominos this year, aligning themselves with application/database vendors and trading market heft for independence,” said Wayne Eckerson, Director, TDWI Research. “This obviously presents a great opportunity for remaining independent players to capture the sizable segment of customers who prefer best-of-breed tools versus an all-in-one stack pushed by aggressive account teams selling everything from servers and databases to applications and services.”
Customers of other BI vendors often switch to MicroStrategy to benefit from the increased performance, scalability, and data visualization that MicroStrategy offers. Several examples of MicroStrategy customers that have switched from other BI vendors are Corporate Express, La Poste, and Dick’s Sporting Goods.
Corporate Express selected MicroStrategy as its enterprise BI standard and replaced its existing installation. By migrating from its previous solution to MicroStrategy, Corporate Express was able to achieve greater efficiencies and faster access to the information they needed. Corporate Express recently expanded its use of MicroStrategy to provide more than 10,000 customers with an online reporting application, enabling them to run reports and analyze data related to their office supply purchases.
La Poste, which operates the postal service of France, replaced its BI provider and chose MicroStrategy to support its sophisticated Human Resource (HR) application. With MicroStrategy, La Poste monitors data for 280,000 employees. Managers and operational staff use the HR application to report on and analyze data to efficiently manage personnel objectives across key indicators.
Dick’s Sporting Goods replaced its existing BI installation with the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform(TM). Dick’s Sporting Goods’ employees, including store managers, merchandising analysts, and senior management, use MicroStrategy software to analyze a 2 terabyte Oracle(R) data warehouse. End users are able to perform sales, category, and inventory analyses to more effectively track product sales, product mix, and inventory levels.
“Historically, companies have switched from Business Objects and Cognos to MicroStrategy when they ran into scalability roadblocks,” said MicroStrategy COO Sanju Bansal. “MicroStrategy 8 delivers high scalability with high performance. We have talked with companies who have been dissatisfied with their Business Objects or Cognos systems and want to avoid the turmoil of the transition and migration that will result from the acquisitions of these vendors. This replacement program is intended to ease the adoption of MicroStrategy by lowering or eliminating the acquisition cost of MicroStrategy licenses.”