Event
Summary
"M2 PRESSWIRE-5
October 1999-ORLANDO, Florida -- NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR) and MicroStrategy
Incorporated (NASDAQ: MSTR) today announced that the two companies have signed
a comprehensive, multi-year $52.5 million licensing and technology agreement.
The agreement includes an investment by both companies in technology infrastructure,
integration, and marketing - spanning e-business, business intelligence, and
customer-centric data warehouse applications". Under the agreement NCR will
re-market MicroStrategy's entire suite of Intelligent E-Business products and
services. MicroStrategy will purchase NCR's TeraCube OLAP business for $14 Million
in MicroStrategy stock, and purchase an NCR Teradata Warehouse worth $11 Million
to power their Strategy.com network. Under the terms of the agreement, MicroStrategy
will provide the development effort for TeraCube 2.0, and optimize it for the
NCR Teradata database.
Market
Impact
The agreement
between MicroStrategy and NCR signals another overlap in the data warehousing
arena. Once again, a business intelligence vendor and a data warehouse vendor
have joined forces to provide an integrated solution for data warehousing. MicroStrategy
will be able to leverage NCR's customer base and provide additional marketing
muscle for the Teradata database. NCR will be able to provide improved OLAP
solutions, since under the terms of the agreement, MicroStrategy will license
new technology it develops back to NCR.
The release
of MicroStrategy 6 indicates the vendor's strong commitment to e-business, customer
relationship management, and web-based strategies, and is designed to "turn
customer interactions into relationships". The product also includes publish/subscribe
("push") technology, and a new, XML based Web interface that acts as a subscription
server. This focus should give MicroStrategy a distinctive marketing message
that will set them apart from many of the other OLAP vendors.
The stock market
has reacted favorably to MicroStrategy's market strategy, as their stock price
has tripled over the last two months, and made very strong moves in the last
two weeks.
Fig. 1
User
Recommendations
Companies engaging
in technology selection for OLAP tools should investigate MicroStrategy's offerings.
Microstrategy has placed a strong emphasis on E-Business offerings, and MicroStrategy
6 is designed to be a "platform that empowers organizations to understand the
interactions surrounding their customers, suppliers, and business". The MicroStrategy
6 offering should appeal to customers designing e-commerce applications, and
be especially appropriate if the data warehouse underlying the application will
grow to be extremely large, as the NCR Teradata database is designed for multi-terabyte
implementations and supports massively parallel processing.