Highlights from SVP Mark LaRow’s Keynote at MicroStrategy World 2011

The final section of the general session keynote at MicroStrategy World 2011 on Day 2 featured our fearless speaker and Senior Vice President, Mark LaRow.  It seems quite odd not having him on the stage until the middle of Day 2, but it’s always good to see him.  He kicked off his section by introducing two customer keynote speakers.  It’s always great to have customers in the keynote, as that really brings validation to the message.  Today, we had Tony van der Hoek from Coca-Cola and Bruce Yen from GUESS?, Inc.

Tony presented details of Coca-Cola’s Bottler and Customer Analytics Dashboard and iPad App.  He stressed how important it was to have as close to real-time data as possible on retailers and activity so that the decisions and workflow in the field could really move forward.  And he mentioned that being able to easily compare current year information to previous year stats was really essential for goal-setting and actions.

Bruce presented details of GUESS? Inc.’s now infamous product and buyer’s analysis dashboard and iPad App.  Bruce has spoken at many of our events and always leaves the audience wanting more due to both his dynamic nature and, more importantly, to the great work product they have.  They’ve built an application first in Flash and now on the iPad that allows merchandisers and buyers to view results and trends by product and store to identify problem and opportunity areas.  It is a beautiful dashboard filled with product photos.  It had the audience and the Twitter stream buzzing for sure.

After they completed, Mark took the stage to update the audience on the state of MicroStrategy products, focusing on two big themes…

1. High Performance – Mark stressed how high performance BI remains a CRITICAL theme to MicroStrategy, and that we will continue to focus on it with all of our new features and new product releases.  Specifically, he pointed to how:
   1. Mobile BI is driving performance requirements higher and higher
   2. MicroStrategy Health Center gives better visibility to issues, problems, and solutions in their BI environment
   3. MicroStrategy delivers 6x the capacity and 3x faster response in latest releases, due to lots of specific enhancements
   4. Incremental Refresh on in-memory cubes is coming soon and will make them even higher performing and more usable
2. Visual Exploration – The last big product announcement at MicroStrategy World 2011 is the launch of Visual Exploration.  This offering enables business users to explore their own data via much more visual techniques and really makes self-service with MicroStrategy even more powerful.  Product Marketing Director Brian Brinkmann assisted Mark with some great demonstrations of the new product.  Some of the highlights included:
   1. Visual exploration gives business users many of the strengths of OLAP and Dashboards (ad-hoc investigation, on-screen selectors, graphical visualization) without many of the weaknesses
   2. Visual exploration enables business users to become even more powerful and publish even more analytics without having to rely on IT or other analysts to do the work for them
   3. It is all done with drag-and-drop, click and select, easy-to-use functionality
   4. Great visualizations like interactive heat maps, area-selecting maps, and graph matrices make visual exploration quite powerful to an end user

It’s a shame that the announcement of Visual Exploration had to get moved to the end of the Day 2 keynote (due to the other great announcements on Mobile, Transaction Services, and Cloud Intelligence), because it really is a fantastic new offering.  The Twitter stream was buzzing with how useful this will be to business users and I personally had at least 4 conversations after the event with account executives and customers who were very impressed and definitely wanted to use it.  Graphical, easy-to-use features are ALWAYS a success with customers.

Finally, Mark closed today’s keynote with a review of the “top things” everyone should do in BI when they leave this conference.  He focused on four big topics, basically telling the audience to “get prepared” for what is coming and what they’ll have available to them.  Specifically he discussed:

1. Release of MicroStrategy 9.2 – This is the release that will include visual exploration, transaction services, and all of the new mobile features, so the crowd needs to start getting ready!
2. Mobile BI – As mobile intelligence from MicroStrategy keeps getting more useful, more powerful, and easier to use, everyone needs to start building their plans and storylines for their mobile apps
3. High Performance – With 64-bit and many performance enhancements available, everyone should be looking into making their implementation even faster, to ensure that Mobile BI and Transaction Services can thrive in their environment.
4. Transaction Services – The release of transaction support will open up new doors for organizations, and everyone should start looking around for where this will make sense

As with Day 1, it was yet another content-packed two hours with product announcements, customer success stories, and demonstrations.  We probably need to start thinking about three-hour keynotes moving forward…

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Tags: 2011, business intelligence, events, keynotes, las vegas, MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy World

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 27th, 2011 at 2:49 pm and is filed under events, MicroStrategy World, Product News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.