The annual VIP Awards recognizes exceptional collaboration between vendors and retailers. “By celebrating good partners and innovative solutions, we are changing how vendors are valued and setting the standard for transformative retail partnerships,” explains Vendors in Partnership & the VIP Awards Founder Vicki Cantrell. 

This prestigious awards program is co-sponsored by the National Retail Federation, the world’s largest retail trade association. NRF hosts Retail’s Big Show each year in New York City, the marquee conference where this year’s winners will be announced.

Why Your Vote Matters

While many awards programs focus on the accomplishments of leading retailers, the VIP Awards shine the spotlight on the solution providers that drive innovation and impact behind retailers’ success. We’re honored to be recognized as a 4x VIP Award Nominee—and we’re asking for your help in securing a spot among the finalists!

Public voting is open until November 22, 2024. Use your work email to register here and cast your vote for MicroStrategy in all 4 categories:

• Partner of the Year
• VIP Challenge: AI Innovation & Application
• Best Business Intelligence & Analytics Platform
• Best Kept Secret

We’re proud to be a technology partner and trusted advisor helping hundreds of leading retailers worldwide do more with their data—and here’s why we think we deserve your vote.

Our Commitment to Retail Customer Success

We know our success is solely rooted in that of our customers, so each nomination featured our retail customers’ success. Here’s a sneak peek into some of the many stories that helped MicroStrategy earn VIP Award nominations in 4 categories this year.

Partner of the Year

The Partner of the Year award celebrates companies that set the gold standard in the industry by delivering exceptional service, fostering a positive workplace culture, and maintaining a strong commitment to customer success—even in the face of challenges.

MicroStrategy’s ongoing collaboration with The Warehouse Group is a testament to this commitment. Keryn McKenzie, a data leader from New Zealand's largest non-food retailer, joined us at our annual user conference this year to share how our partnership helps The Warehouse Group Catalyze Growth and Agility in Retail with AI Analytics.

Keryn also accepted our customer innovation award at the event, expressing her pride in the collective team effort and noting that “we’re truly innovating to shape the future of AI in the BI world” together. Her team earned this coveted recognition in part due to our successful collaboration in launching a custom generative AI “Budget Bot” that gives traders the answers they need to shift strategies and hit at-risk sales targets “on-the-fly.”

The Warehouse Group’s success is among the many inspirational stories behind our Partner of the Year and other VIP Award nominations. Long-time customer GUESS uses MicroStrategy to get the right information where and when they need it—on mobile apps, embedded in third-party systems, or as custom-built applications.

Often on the cutting-edge of technology innovation, GUESS is also among the many customers we’ve partnered with to launch GenAI bots this year. Using "game-changing" technology like MicroStrategy AI, they continue to break down the last remaining barriers between end users and access to data, allowing them to get data-backed answers to the questions they ask conversationally in natural language.

Two GUESS leaders will join us at NRF 2025 to share their success at our Exhibitor Big Ideas season on Monday, January 13. Together, we’ll share how their supply chain and customer insights bots are accelerating access to meaningful insights for the business.

VIP Challenge: AI Innovation & Application

This year’s VIP Challenge theme celebrates AI’s transformative impact on retail. Our nomination stems from the fact that data is the fuel powering AI—and no one knows data like MicroStrategy.

In October 2023, we became the first BI platform to offer fully integrated generative AI. Our comprehensive capabilities make insights from each company’s trusted data fabric available to everyone, with customers around the world reaping the benefits ever since.

Federated Co-Operatives joined our NRF panel discussion in January 2024 about the promise of generative AI with data. In May, they were among several customers who shared their GenAI success stories at our annual user conference with an event session explaining how they’ve improved supply chain service levels with data and AI. We’ve since also released a customer testimonial video sharing their overall success story.  

Best Kept Secret

The Best Kept Secret award celebrates exceptional solutions that, despite remarkable customer success stories, may not receive the widespread recognition they deserve.

Many technologists at leading retailers intrinsically understand how MicroStrategy empowers pervasive insights for broad-ranging business value. Often, many more frontline workers don’t know they’re relying on MicroStrategy apps each day to understand and mobilize the data that runs their business.

MicroStrategy is the powerful analytics engine that you might think you know, but we’re than just a dashboard for the retail giants we serve worldwide. We’re behind everything from retailer-branded, experience-driven mobile apps, to custom portals empowering the retail supply chain, and the embedded analytics capabilities within your third-party tech solutions. And it's our all-new, cloud-native MicroStrategy ONE platform acting as a catalyst for retail innovation, efficiency, customer loyalty, and growth.

The ONE platform also packs more punch than ever before with first-to-market generative AI chatbots that make data easily accessible to everyone: in stores, on the factory floor, and woven throughout the vendor and partner ecosystem. No matter the need, retail employees and partners often “don’t know they’re using MicroStrategy, but they are,” as noted by GUESS Retail Applications VP Bruce Yen in the video above.

Best Business Intelligence and Analytics Platform

Our last category likely won’t surprise any long-time customers… We’re also nominated for the Best BI & Analytics Platform award recognizing interactive, intuitive, real-time solutions equipping retailers with the insights needed to adapt swiftly to change.

Victoria’s Secret recently shared how they use MicroStrategy “to plan our promotions, deliver the best assortments, and ensure that the right product is in the right place at the right time for our customers” at our annual user conference. Their testimonial video recorded at the event summarizes some of the benefits of our ongoing partnership.

During their event session, Carl Baxter demonstrated how they used MicroStrategy to seamlessly embed product images into custom iPad apps for store operations. Their solution accelerates assortment changeovers in-store by “allowing store associates to execute inventory updates quickly” so they can ultimately “spend more time helping customers.”

Our platform also empowers leading retailers at an unprecedented scale. Sainsbury’s and the Schwarz Group both received customer awards in recent years because they exemplify how pervasive data analytics can be in partnership with MicroStrategy—whether spanning dozens of retail use cases or at the scale of tens of thousands.

Join Us at NRF 2025

MicroStrategy is a proud exhibitor and presenter at Retail’s Big Show: NRF 2025. Conference attendees can visit us at Booth #5467 to see firsthand how our AI + BI solutions help retailers thrive from January 12-14 at the Javits Center in New York City.

Attendees also won’t want to miss our co-presentation with long-time customer GUESS. Revolutionizing Retail with Data and AI That Helps You ‘Look Up!’ will explore how this premium brand empowers employees worldwide with instant answers—helping them "look up" from screens to focus on providing exceptional service. This session pairs GUESS leaders with Chief Product Officer Saurabh Abhyankar to share how they transform data and AI into real-time insights with MicroStrategy ONE.

Many Thanks to Our Customers and Partners

Our continued gratitude goes out to our many customers and partners around the world. Thank you for your continued trust and support. And to our inspirational retail partners, we look forward to seeing you—and hopefully celebrating our success together—at NRF 2025!