Andrea Delvò, 42 years old, with a degree in Information Science, has successfully led the Italian branch of MicroStrategy since its inception in 1998, where he now holds the positions of Vice President and General Manager. Delvò has gained solid experience in the IT sector, first at Mate, then at ESA Software. In 1992, he joined Oracle as an Account Manager, responsible for building the start-up of the OEM channel, which he then managed until 1994. Before joining MicroStrategy, he worked at Informix as Sales Director.
What is meant by Business Intelligence (BI)?An effective BI is defined by a continuous cycle of three distinct activities: – Monitoring: evaluation of indicators to inform and alert users about business developments and actions to take – Reporting: production of detailed information on current and historical performance, to provide users with a comprehensive business overview – Analysis: presentation of business insights from different viewpoints, to indicate to decision-makers the causes of problems and potential opportunities, or to predict future outcomes.How is the Italian BI market presented and what are the prospects?The Italian market still shows interesting growth margins. Many large companies have experimented with various Business Intelligence solutions and are considering the opportunity to standardize all applications on a single platform. The main driver of this process is the management costs of different solutions/providers. Medium-sized companies, the backbone of our economy, prefer to rely on a local partner and in this MicroStrategy has made a clear choice: not to develop applications. This choice has positioned us in a complementary role with Italian BI application developers. The public administration deserves a separate chapter. The last two years have recorded cases of excellence. For all, I would like to mention the “super dashboard” created by Consip for the State General Accounting Department and the applications developed by the Sardinia and Puglia regions for monitoring healthcare spending.What is the relationship between Italian companies and BI?A study conducted by SDA Bocconi in 2005 on a sample of medium and large companies highlighted how Business Intelligence systems are very present within companies. In fact, except for a few cases, they are applied in at least four business functions and in 30% of the surveyed companies they are used across all areas and business functions. The same research, led by Paolo Pasini, tells us that “the distribution of users in the various BI functionalities shows the absolute predominance of reporting; an average number of users comparable to those of reporting is involved in using OLAP analysis and query tools; a slightly smaller average number of users uses specific and highly focused tools, such as analytic applications, modeling and simulation tools, and data mining. An average figure somewhat higher regards users of dashboarding and scorecarding tools, corresponding in different companies to managerial positions to which extremely summarized forms of information are addressed.”What is MicroStrategy’s vision?In the last decade most companies have used BI applications as departmental solutions, consequently accumulating a wide variety of different BI technologies. Each technology supported a different population of users and a database, within a well-defined “BI island.” Initially these islands satisfied business needs, but the early success of departmental structures generated new problems related to the growth of applications. This can be defined as the first era of BI. In the second era successful applications continuously expanded. The second era is characterized by BI applications that have grown to the point of no longer being isolated islands. On the contrary, they overlap in user populations, data access, and analytic domain. The situation becomes unsustainable for CIOs. The company faces conflicting versions of the truth. Users, whose population is growing, are decidedly unhappy to have to use multiple different BI tools. Departmental BI applications hit scalability limits. The CIO fights against an ever-increasing maintenance burden to synchronize all these different systems. The new era, the third, of Business Intelligence is one where a single BI architecture offers a single version of the truth to all employees through a single user interface. It can access all data, uniformly administer all users, eliminate repetitive data access, reduce administrative effort, and speed up delivery of new applications. Such a BI architecture must show three main features to fulfill this new role. First, it must be a truly integrated architecture to achieve economies of scale. Second, it must offer the full range of BI functionality currently provided by a myriad of different products, so it can properly replace them. And, finally, it must be robust and scalable so companies can confidently use the applications enterprise-wide and at corporate scale. The MicroStrategy architecture offers all 5 BI styles, while other technologies provide only one or two styles. The MicroStrategy architecture operates at the corporate level and can support thousands of users with efficiency even greater than that of supporting hundreds. MicroStrategy was designed to operate effortlessly, with reliable 24/7 performance, even on a global scale if necessary.Who are your competitors?Our “natural” competitors are those who, like MicroStrategy, play the role of pure players in the BI market: Business Objects, Cognos, and Hyperion.What does MicroStrategy offer more than the competitors present in Italy, why choose you?MicroStrategy’s advantages stem from investments in research and development and, again this year, are confirmed by user opinions collected by The OLAP Survey 5. The OLAP Survey is the most comprehensive and independent survey in the Business Intelligence market and is conducted annually by Survey.com (http://www.survey.com/olap) and sector analyst Nigel Pendse. This is the fifth edition of OLAP Survey and without doubt the most extensive, with BI experiences from 2,100 customers across 95 countries and 31 different market sectors. Among many data points, three fundamental indicators stand out; three indicators that trace the path of BI product use: the selection process, after-sales support, and loyalty index. OLAP Survey 5 examined the proportion of customers who purchase a product after a comparative evaluation. The three main criteria leading to choosing a product are: functionality, ease of use, and performance. OLAP Survey 5 data indicated that 60% of companies that evaluated MicroStrategy purchased it. Conversely, the selection percentage for Business Objects OLAP Intelligence sharply fell from 46.6% in 2004 to only 31.1% in 2005. This reduction may be a consequence of the Crystal Decisions acquisition and the significant effort required to integrate Business Objects and Crystal product lines. OLAP Survey 5 also found major differences in the quality and timeliness of product support by vendors. Product support for MicroStrategy was rated “Excellent” more often than competitors. For three consecutive years, Business Objects customers have been the least satisfied with the quality of support received. MicroStrategy believes this low support quality rating for Business Objects products may derive from an acquisition strategy rather than the development of ETL and reporting solutions. As an inevitable consequence, for the second consecutive year, MicroStrategy achieved the highest customer loyalty of any BI vendor in the survey. OLAP Survey indicates MicroStrategy’s overall loyalty score of 81.1 is higher than Business Objects’ 51.3, which ranked eighth in the survey. Nigel Pendse, OLAP Survey 5 author, stated: “Results confirm that well-known vendors pursuing growth through acquisitions aiming to cover the entire BI scope have achieved poor customer loyalty, while MicroStrategy, focusing on a single product architecture and growing organically, ranked first for the second consecutive year.”How was the past year and what are your future goals?Italian revenue in 2005 grew by more than 15% compared to 2004, rising from 9 to 10.4 million euros. Growth was in line with the corporation’s 16% growth. MicroStrategy also achieved notable financial and operational efficiency across all business lines, with an operating margin of 35% for fiscal 2005, reaching 38% in the last quarter. Objectives include increasing market share.
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