MicroStrategy World 2022 Analytics Keynote Address

Experience how MicroStrategy reimagined its platform to become the tool of choice for the builders, the makers, and the agents of change across the enterprise. Plus, hear from industry leaders—including Sainsbury’s, NICE, and Schwarz Group—transforming their businesses by empowering their people to unleash innovation and build modern applications that change everything with Intelligence Everywhere.           

Welcome to a new era. Your developers are now free to transform your business—and change the world.

Watch this session to see how:

• MicroStrategy empowers developers to quickly build and deploy applications 
• Developers can serve as a force multiplier for intelligence across your business
• Global enterprise customers are turning data into a strategic differentiator 

Speakers:

• Phong Le, President & CFO MicroStrategy
• Hugh Owen, EVP and CMO MicroStrategy 

[0:22] President & CFO Phong Le introduces MicroStrategy's 2022 vision

[2:00] 2022 Global Business Impact Award Winner: Schwarz Group

[2:51] 2022 Innovation Award Winner: NICE

[3:48] 2022 The Intelligent Enterprise Award Winner: Sainsbury's

[7:28] MicroStrategy President & CFO Phong Le & Sainsbury's CTO Helen Hunter

[22:28] MicroStrategy is a leader in both a BI platform built for developers as well as Bitcoin for corporations

[24:34] How MicroStrategy's innovation provides an efficient and secure analytics platform to organizations at scale

[27:18] MicroStrategy: The Platform for Developers—exemplified by how it powers NICE CXOne

[33:10] MicroStrategy SEVP & CTO Tim Lang talks to NICE Workforce & Customer Experience Division President Barry Cooper

[47:14] MicroStrategy EVP & CMO Hugh Owen details why MicroStrategy is the platform built for modern analytics

[48:34] Move from Dashboards to Applications with MicroStrategy to Run Your Business Better

[55:43] Expand Intelligence from Analysts to Everyone with MicroStrategy HyperIntelligence

[1:00:30] Integrate MicroStrategy into Your Systems and Workflows to Change from Development to Composability

[1:05:20] Experience MicroStrategy's Trusted Platform that Takes You from Vertical to Horizontal Integration

[1:17:42] Schwarz Group talks about their analytics journey with MicroStrategy

[1:21:45] MicroStrategy EVP & CMO Hugh Owen talks to Schwarz IT's BI, AI, & Data Analytics Managing Director Holger Schell

Hi, everyone. I'm Phong Le. And welcome to MicroStrategy World 2022. We're excited that you've joined us, along with thousands of executives, developers, makers, technologists, futurists, and hodlers around the world. We're here today to unveil a new way of thinking about analytics and business intelligence. There's a chasm growing in the global economy between companies who understand the power that can be unleashed from the waves of data that their businesses generate each and every second. And those that are struggling to keep up. Successful organizations over the last year have leveraged analytics as a vital strategic differentiator, leveraging it to safeguard and empower their employees, delight their customers, and seamlessly navigate supply chains. Most important, these organizations understand that the key to unlocking their data is to empower their developers with great tools to build amazing applications. This enables developers in the organization to act as change agents, weaving information into action for thousands of their colleagues by building solutions that are rich with insight, action-oriented, and accessible to anyone. There's no better way for me to begin today's address, than by sharing with you some incredible stories of MicroStrategy customers who've done just this. The winner of MicroStrategy's 2022. Global business impact award, one of the largest retailers and most vertically integrated companies in the world. Schwarz Group, with its brands, lead on Kaufland redefine what global business should look like using analytics with operations spanning 33 countries, tens of thousands of employees regularly use the company's intelligence apps to make smarter, faster decisions. We know that we have to rely on strategic and strong partners and looking at MicroStrategy. I'm very proud and happy to have such a strong partner. NICE, our Innovation Award winner is a worldwide leader in Cloud Customer experience solutions. 

They revolutionize their product offerings in order to better serve their clients' companies. The world's largest brands in financial services, health care, retail, and travel. Their suite of customer experience apps uses advanced analytics and artificial intelligence. That's so smart it can predict why a customer wants to speak with a representative at a contact center. Even before the call patches through. This is innovation that we've never seen before. Our users love the enhanced UI and authoring experiencing in strategy Library. It allowed us to build these incredible experiences into 6:1 and bring more value to our customers. You're going to hear more from Schwarz and NICE and the journey they've been on this year. Later in today's keynote, but now I want to spend some time with this year's intelligent enterprise award winner. Sainsbury's, another MicroStrategy customer that's achieving brilliant results in one of the most competitive industries, retail. Let's look at what they've been able to accomplish. As the leader of the data and analytics organization at Sainsbury's, I'm most proud of the fact that we are putting real time, highly reliable information in the hands of decision makers up and down the organization. 

A strong data analytics function is so important because the sources of differentiation for a retailer like Sainsbury's have changed. Used to be stored, it used to be distribution, it used to be products. You can pretty much buy anything, anywhere. So now it's about the experience we can create for customers. And again, data analytics is absolutely central to our ability to create differentiated experiences. So without a strong data analytics foundation, you don't have a business. Sainsbury's cares about data as we need to understand everything moving through our stores. It could be any product going through the back doors up to how do we sell that product to our customers? What do our customers want next? And data enable us to get that insight about how we will serve you better. We've embarked on a journey to centralize all of the reporting and visualization efforts into one holistic team and to build up a new scalable platform that will meet the business needs. So it's a single platform for insights and reporting, which we call aspire as we thought about the outcome we wanted from aspire. We needed the business to recognize the problem. It had. Data was siloed in legacy on-prem warehousing. 

It was inflexible, structured, it was under governed. I think it was far less streamlined, and we probably had an element of distrust within the data landscape. So we still had the same aspirations to be doing brilliant things with data and bringing data into the heart of our decision making. It's a substantial project, which looks to surface up data to our business functions to get it to the heart of decision making throughout the business and our transformation. One of the things we have done is ensure that our business understands that data is a product in and of itself. It has value as an asset. It doesn't just exist as the byproduct of what we do. I think we wanted to partner with technology partners like MicroStrategy that we could work with now and in the future. 

MicroStrategy offers a unified and trusted data model, rapid deployment scale, exceptional mobile capability, and the ability to curate information by role and location. MicroStrategy plays an important part of that ecosystem within Aspire. It effectively is the vehicle in which we can share our reporting through our multiple channels. It provides a holistic view on an enterprise-scale, but where it gets excited when you can look forward, where you can plan, predict, underpin all of your strategic decisions from a really strong bedrock of powerful information. It really elevates everything that we can do. It's all about customers and the outcomes you can create for customers, and the only way we can be sure that we're creating the right outcome. The personalized outcome the customer wants is by really understanding them through the lens of data and turning that into action. Isn't that an amazing journey? I had the pleasure of sitting down with Sainsbury's CTO Helen Hunter recently to discuss how her team worked to make this all possible. 

Welcome, Helen. Congratulations to you and your team and all of your accomplishments, we're so glad to have you come. Share your story with us today. It's such a thrill and privilege to be with you all. Thank you for having us. So you've really emerged as a thought leader in the space of data and analytics through the success of your vision and execution to establish data at the heart of the business at Sainsbury's. I'm sure many people here today when I know where you started and how you went about your transformation, set the stage for us a little bit. The safe space is a very significant multi-brand and multi-channel retailer. We have a very large food business with the second largest, largest general merchandise and clothing business in the UK. We have a bank and the Uk's largest loyalty scheme and I think not unusual and not unusually for large enterprises. Our data has been locked away in the different divisions and operating companies of our business. So the task really became one of how to co-mingle those assets to the benefit of all breaking down those silos and those barriers to really democratized access to information satisfying everybody's curiosity about how our business worked. Great, thank you for that. What goals do you set out to accomplish? What challenges did you set out to meet and what were the business drivers behind some of these goals? 

I think when we started out on our transformation, the number one message I would hear loud and clear from colleagues across the business and in our operations teams was this concern with many versions of the truth. This idea that we don't have well mastered golden facts and dimensions believability in the data on which we were trying to make decisions. And therefore drive better outcomes for customers and colleagues. So that was mission number one. Mission number two was this idea that the data was too siloed. An idea number three was the data and tooling used by individuals to get our information was just too complicated for people to use well. So really, really focused on those three problems, as articulated by my stakeholders in the organization. And for an organization of your size, I could imagine having the right data to drive decision making is critical. And obviously having data that is governed and secure, and everybody sort of believes it is critical to tell me a little bit about how MicroStrategy is the tool that helped with that. And generally, how did you look at your problem from a technology stack perspective? 

Yeah, so I'm packing that a little bit. Why MicroStrategy is nested within an ecosystem of capability that we call aspire, and it sits alongside our selection of s and Snowflake as being really leading capabilities in really underpinning the future of decision intelligence of an enterprise of our scale. MicroStrategy, for us, absolutely nails from what you've just referred to, which is robust governance. It's really important for us that we can rely on a scaled, highly performant platform. The office is the discrete and choice for ability to curate information predicated on role, job title and location in the business, but that's drawing on a common store such that everybody in the business is accessing the same concept of what a sale is, for example, and it's for us, it's MicroStrategy semantic layer that is incredibly powerful to that mission, as I say, in an enterprise of our scale with our varied brands and channels to market great. My understanding is you have a suite of about 30 different MicroStrategy applications running your end-to-end Sainsbury business. Do you have a few that you'd like to share that have particular business impact and a little bit of background on how you're using them and what their driving value in your organization? 

Yeah, I think I want to talk about one of our first wins on the board because in that transformation that is still ongoing in our business, I think it's very important to try and secure early reasons to believe, particularly amongst stakeholders for whom data is not their first language. So one of the first and earliest places we went to was to the heart of our retail operation. We have something like 190,000 colleagues in Sainsbury's, and the vast majority of them are in our stores serving our customers every day. So in the very early days of our transformation, we identified a very critical piece of information that is at the heart of the retail operation, which is our concept of what our daily sales and waste are. And we took that as our first use case to predicate and give reasons to believe for the speed and resilience and automation that we could. We could use the Microsoft. She solution to provide, if I fast forward to today, we're in a really exciting place where that retail reporting platform has grown. We have seen something like a 400% increase in usage in that platform by virtue of it being secure and resilient compared to the old legacy. And excitingly, it's not the store managers who are using the platform, it's what we call our customer and trading managers. Those are the individuals and each shop who really influenced the experience of our customers by virtue of their focus on every step of our operational journey. So to see the usage rocket amongst that population with very little training, very little explanation, because the platform is so intuitive. And of course, because it's mobile, right? It has released those colleagues from having to go to back of shop to the manager's office to access reporting that static really enables them to interrogate information about the performance of their stores in the moment on the shop floor as they're trading the business day to day. 

So I'm really proud of that one because I think it speaks to what we are as a retail business. The other thing that's very top of mind at the moment is what we're doing in terms of reporting on our value index. Do I say that? Because price position goes to the heart of retail, the UK market is intensely competitive. It's very low margin and agility and managing price position is critical to the customer's experience and to our and to our performance. So we've done all sorts of intriguing things there which really speak to Aspire as an ecosystem. So we are using algorithmic decisioning to match our products to our competitors' products across the whole UK grocery sector. And then we're using the MicroStrategy platform to service that data to our cheese buyers, our confectionery buyers, our meat buyers, giving them very, very real, intuitive, easily accessible ways to get their hands on their price position information. And the feedback has been phenomenal. I mean, I've seen verbatim ads like this used to be a 2 out of 10 solution. Now it's a 9 out of 10 solution because it's really putting business critical information into the hands of the people who need to access that to drive better decisions. So that to top of mind ones that really, really are a brilliant example of what the business AUDIO OUT I think we're in this space, which is driving decisioning for better outcomes. 

The both evidence that in spades. Yeah, there's two examples to your point. Taking technology, taking analytics, driving actual business outcomes and changing the way people work day to day, it just must be amazingly satisfying to see the results in the fruits of the labor of you and your team. What does that mean to you? I think I've got one of the best jobs in the world, I'm not going to lie, it is a thrill and a privilege every day. We in the data analytics organization and I suspect this is true for other MicroStrategy partners. We have this unique perspective on the business, don't we? Because we're organized on the horizontal, we see the threads of information flowing across the organization. We see how decisions get made and to be able to inflect performance to improve decisions for customers and colleagues and ultimately our shareholders that is a reason to get out of bed every morning. And that is why I think the team and I have so much energy to continue the transformation that we're on because it's not done. Of course it's not. But we I think three years into this transformation can see the seeds of change really starting to cascade now. And yeah, it's very, very exciting. That's fantastic. You know, it's as technologist, I think we all come from a place where we believe that technology and software can change. The world can change our jobs, change our organizations. I firmly believe that. But incumbent upon that is the ability to organize and execute to your customers' needs. There are a lot of folks sitting here saying, oh, all right, Helen, well, you did it, but I'm just getting started or I'm in the middle and I'm really struggling to accomplish what Sainsbury has accomplished with MicroStrategy. What advice would you give to them? I would really encourage the adoption of agile principles and decomposing the transformation. 

So in Sainsbury's, we are obsessed with outcome realization and the necessity of delivering value early and often. So we did not approach the build of a spire in the usage of MicroStrategy in a monolithic way. We went first to those stakeholders we suspected would be most open minded of the kind of decision and data transformation we wanted to engineer. And we proved a spire through thin slices. So, for example, in the very early days where we were scraping our grocery online delivery website to identify the availability of slots, and we were scraping that data and pumping it into and through a spire into MicroStrategy dashboard to show the digital operations team what their slot availability was end-to-end in 10 minutes. And that was a real proof point for us that there was value in the ecosystem we were building and it had meaning for those stakeholders because that was a business problem they were trying to unpack. So we, we started by proving value. And then in year two, we moved into some of the hard yards territory of mastering gold of facts and dimensions and establishing the governance forums with my peer set to, I agree entity boundaries definition of objects that was made possible because stakeholders could understand why that mattered. 

They could understand there was direct business value in the effort in mastering facts and dimensions to their business objectives. So I would just really reiterate be customer colleague, shareholder outcome, realization focused, not tech focused in the build. Helen, today you are receiving the Customer Award as the intelligent enterprise for 2022. We asked your team what this recognition meant to them. Let's take a quick look. Well, first of all, thank you for the award. MicroStrategy is a business that works with everyone, so I hope you know what good looks like, and therefore I'm delighted that you have us in that category. It's really humbling to be recognized by your peers having the right vision and the right solution. It's really nice to have that third party reassurance that what we're attempting to do here is correct. 

It's amazing, isn't it, to get that level of recognition. I think Sainsbury's and the team, we've tried to be very brave with the level of disruption that we're driving through. I think it's outstanding and we assure everyone that we are on the right solution, on the right track and we give probably a stride in everyone's footstep going to work, knowing that they've been part of that journey. And I'm really delighted for my team. My team put, you know, many, many hours and lots of blood, sweat, and tears into transforming Sainsbury's. So to get the recognition that they're getting today, I'm delighted for them and the team have been at the forefront of that in terms of the execution, the tenacity that they are putting into their every day. So I'm pretty hopeful that they feel exceptionally proud of what they've achieved and the recognition that they're getting with this. 

This is an acknowledgment on the fact that we're on the right track and further gives me pride in what we do, and it's brilliant. I'm very grateful. See your team's reaction, Helen, what does this mean to you? We're incredibly proud of the partnership we have with MicroStrategy. Your expertise, the capability of your platform, your innovation mindset, the way you work with us to drive better outcomes for customers and colleagues is phenomenal. Knowing some of the other MicroStrategy clients around the world, I am overwhelmed on behalf of myself and the team to be in receipt of this award. Everything you have said is absolutely true. It's very humbling because the work still isn't done and really want to say thank you again for being with us on every step of this transformation. There is a lot still to go and many more better decisions to be made. I'm absolutely sure of it. Well, congratulations, Helen, to you and your team and to the Sainsbury organization for all that you've accomplished in the last few years with data, with analytics, with business value, with MicroStrategy. 

It's a pleasure talking to you and Thanks for being here today. Thank you, NICE Phong. Thank you, Helen, for taking the time to join us and congratulations again on the award. If you want to hear more from Helen and her team at Sainsbury's, they'll be presenting an interactive session later as part of MicroStrategy world to learn more about their transformational story. Visit MicroStrategy, Sainsbury's. What do all these customer examples have in common? Few understand this, but it wasn't just analytics, but using analytics to unleash the power of developers. Be a developer in the modern world comes with higher demands, including beautiful, modern mobile design, seamless data integration, actionable analysis, military grade security and fast speed to value. Developers now are in the middle of business strategy, delivering value fast, being a source of change. Someone who can create new realities and experiences for thousands of others. MicroStrategy has always been about enabling the developer. And this year we are focused on lowering the learning curve for application development. So that all you need to build groundbreaking new products for your users is creativity and an understanding of data and your business. Let me tell you a little bit more. About our company and why we are the platform of choice for those ready to go beyond conventional limits and change the world. For those of you new to MicroStrategy, we're not only the largest publicly traded independent analytics company in the world, we're also the largest publicly traded holder of Bitcoin in the world. And since we last got together, MicroStrategy has added an additional 53,312 Bitcoin to our balance sheet for a total of 124,391 Bitcoin. 

We believe that every organization can benefit from putting Bitcoin on the balance sheet. That's why we're hosting our second annual Bitcoin for corporations event later today and tomorrow. We've curated a two day experience packed with the knowledge corporations need and the professional network they can trust to plug into Bitcoin and transform their business for the next 100 years as the industry leader and cloud-based enterprise grade analytics. We're always looking at ways the platform can have the greatest possible impact for our customers. This year, MicroStrategy released a brand new reference architecture for cloud native deployments based on containers and microservices. This empowers our customers to deploy, integrate, scale and secure their analytics with greater flexibility than previously possible. 

Thanks to these changes, we've been able to increase the velocity of our R&D and innovation, bringing our release cadence down from 12 weeks to four. So on a go forward basis, customers operating in the cloud will receive updates to their systems every month to expand their application libraries, get the latest query and performance optimizations and protect against the latest security threats. And speaking of security, this year, MicroStrategy doubled down its position as a leader in data protection, integrity and trust by initiating the certification process under federal guidelines. The gold standard for the US federal government for enterprise software in the cloud. Why did we do these things because as our customers know, MicroStrategy with this 30 plus years of focused software innovation and refinement is built to solve problems that can't be solved by conventional departmental analytics tools. The world's best brands don't rely on us for charts and graphs built off one or two data sources and access by only a handful of individuals. MicroStrategy, unique in the market, is built to power high volume, high value intelligence applications delivered a sport Tens of thousands of users with subsequent response time and designed to create a common, insight driven language for real time decision making. One final point to touch on from the past 12 months is our continued investment in partnership with our customers. 

Health care leaders on the front lines fighting COVID 19. Financial services firms powering global commerce. Retailers transforming the customer experience for the digital age. Software companies infusing analytics into every workflow and experience in government agencies, delivering an essential public service. It's MicroStrategy's great privilege to be a part of these organizations' respective journeys. That's why we're so incredibly proud that in 2021 we were honored by our customers with the ultimate compliment the customer's Choice Award from Gartner's peer insights platform. So what's the bottom line? We build a platform and you build the apps that change the world. This is fundamentally core to what MicroStrategy is as we expand the very definition of what it means to be a developer or a maker in the modern world. This year, we've invested in our various API layers to give you not only more tools than ever to embed analytics, but also advanced software integration tools built on CI/CD workflows that support the most sophisticated multitenant architectures for OEM. Analysts investigate the world, developers change it. We are here for the developers. There's no better example of this than our customer, NICE. Let's take a look at their story. Nice is in the business of making experiences flow. We do that by helping organizations manage and optimize all interactions with their customers. 

Years ago, this meant mostly optimizing calls, chats and emails handled by the contact center. But today this means managing all of the different ways that consumers interact with their service providers from the digital doorsteps of the Google search website or mobile app to the human and virtual agents. All of us, as consumers, have increasing expectations for the level of service we expect from our service providers. This is due to what we call expectation transfer expectation transfers where we, as consumers take our best experiences with, say, an online retailer, and that becomes our baseline expectation when dealing with all of our service providers, be it our bank, our utility company or travel provider. So our mission is to provide all organizations with the platform and solutions that they need to Excel in their interactions with their consumers. It's a space we call CSI or customer experience interactions in order to deliver that mission. We've created 6:1 and Native cloud open platform SDKs. One is an AI-powered self-service and agent assisted cloud solution that manages all customer experience interactions from the digital entry point to the contact center agents. Over 25,000 organizations, including many of the world's largest in more than 150 countries, partner with NICE to transform and really to elevate every customer interaction. 

One includes thousands of capabilities that enable customer service leaders to ensure that their organization meets consumers from the moment they start their journey, say if the Google search or from within their app. This ensures that their experiences aren't siloed so that they don't have to repeat requests, and that the organization is able to predict what the consumer is looking for. Cdk1 also provides self-service capabilities with bots and IVR that are smart rather than procedural, and they're trained based on the actions of the best human agents. It connects consumers with agents using enlightened AI decision making to get the best outcome. It correct and guides agents to demonstrate the optimal behaviors based on real time feedback from enlightened AI monitoring the interaction, and ultimately, it optimizes human and virtual agents to minimize costs while providing the highest quality service. Given the scope of one and the sheer volume of data that we collect, sophisticated data visualization is absolutely critical. We partnered with MicroStrategy in order to provide the most sophisticated and advanced data visualization available in our market. My particular favorite is the time utilization report that allows our customers to anticipate business demands and optimize their workforce with the industry's most intelligent and accurate omnichannel forecasting engine. 

This report provides managers with a past and future view into agent scheduling activities before publishing their schedules. With these insights, they can make sure that future scheduling meets their business and employees' needs. Our partnership with MicroStrategy has really enabled us to accelerate how we visualized data in. Allowing us to focus on our core MicroStrategy technology allows for fast development. We used REST APIs for streamlined integration between the platform and our solution, which allows us to stay aligned with our development process. Our users love the enhanced UI and authoring experience in MicroStrategy Library. It allows us to build these incredible experiences into 6:1 and bring more value to our customers. At the same time, MicroStrategy allows us to maintain a streamlined DevOps function through seamless integration to our native platform and deployment processes. That kind of operational punch. Combined with application flexibility, makes a huge difference for us. I've personally found the partnership with MicroStrategy very productive. Their technology does what we want it to do, and it does it in the way we need it to. Our customers tell us that our data and analytics visualization that we achieve with MicroStrategy is out of this world. But beyond that, I'm also happy with our business partnership. I know that we can be a very demanding partner. It's part of who we are. But MicroStrategy have stepped up to our requests every time, and for that, I'm very grateful. MicroStrategy CTO Tim Lang recently sat down with Vice President Barry Cooper to discuss how they revolutionized the contact center experience with enlightened AI. Barry, welcome, Thanks so much for speaking with us today and for your team's participation in World 2022 as fantastic, your powerful one platform is essential to the customer service missions of Tens of thousands of organizations around the world, and our audience really gotten a nice introduction to the leadership position you all maintain in the space from the video we just saw, which I thought was great. For those who like to know a little bit more about NICE and 6-1, why don't we fill them in a little bit? So who is NICE and what's been your underlying vision and strategy in how you've approached transforming the customer service experience? Sure and thanks, Tim. I'm really happy to be here and to share our story. 

As you heard, NICE's the leader in the space called CSI or customer experience interactions, helping organizations manage and optimize all the ways that they interact with their consumers. Our mission is to remove the friction between companies and consumers, creating extraordinary experiences that build brand loyalty and create unbreakable bonds. We enable organizations to address today's consumer and employee expectations by delivering effortless, consistent and personalized digital first experiences with kicks one, the world's leading cloud platform. Wow, that's great. From one technologist to another. Your focus areas are incredibly relatable to us. Effortless, personalized, consistent. All ways we think about it at MicroStrategy, too. Building on the vision and strategy you all take to market at NICE. Tell us a little bit more about 6' 1. How does it enable organizations to deliver differentiated best in class experiences to their customers? Yeah so one is an AI powered cloud solution that manages all customer experience interactions between organizations and consumers from the web search or mobile app all the way to the AI assisted contact center agents. So one features many Native applications, including capabilities such as a knowledge projection for search engine optimization, customer journey orchestration, smart virtual agents or bots, agent guidance, Workforce Management and quality management. All of these seamlessly incorporate AI decision making natively using our very own enlightened AI. 

Enlightened AI includes hundreds of pre-built models such as agent behaviors, customer sentiment, complaint detection, and even models such as vulnerable customer detection. We were able to create all of these models as we've been in the sex industry for many years, over which time we've gained access to huge amounts of labeled training data for all of those major processes. You know, we're unique in our market for a few reasons. From the vast breadth of Native applications that we have on 6/1 to the massive scale and robustness that our platform supports, and all of this is underpinned with our specific deep domain expertise and customer experience. Yeah, that really is fantastic. Thanks for those out of details about the one. I'm sure people appreciate knowing it. One drives customer value on behalf of organizations that adopt it, and I think that's awesome. Why don't you tell me a little bit more about who is some of the key personas that your solution really serves and what are the types of really challenges that they face? Sure so given that the x1 manages all of those interactions between consumers and service providers, you can probably imagine that we serve many different stakeholders. The traditional personas are in the contact center, starting with the contact center manager, but extending to supervisors, quality managers, data analysts and of course, the agents themselves. It would probably take me quite a bit of time to cover all of those, so I'll give a couple of examples. Agents need the simplest, lowest friction experience with the ability to seamlessly move between voice calls to chat to other channels, and now with the growth of social media and asynchronous channels such as WhatsApp. They also need an easy way to manage concurrent ongoing communications. 

In addition, they need smart AI based assistants, enabling them to understand the context of each customer's journey, as well as real time guidance to alter their behavior to achieve the outcome that the business is looking for. Now, supervisors, they need to monitor what's going on in real time. And given it's not feasible to see what 10 or 20 agents are doing, they rely again on enlightened AI to bring to their attention when an agent's getting into trouble. In those cases, they need to be able then to join the interaction over whatever channel is taking place and help fix it. Now, supervisors also need access to extensive reporting and dashboards to monitor the performance and KPIs of all interactions those involving agents or bots both in real time and periodically. They need to be able to use that data to create actions such as coaching programs or bot training or schedule changes. And all of that needs to happen at the click of a button. But outside of the Contact center, there are even more personas from the IT or digital transformation lead that owns the search engine optimization or bot strategy to the marketing head that runs campaigns. And again, data visualization is key for those personas, you know, to track the degree to which bots are able to successfully resolve interactions with high sentiment. It's what we call containment to the success of engaging consumers more proactively via the web or mobile. 

Speaking about these personas, it makes me wonder about how customer expectations and needs have really changed, especially in light of the new operating model due to the ongoing pandemic. You know, we've produced this segment remotely, and I'd love to have chatted with you in person. And while some of the business dynamics will go back to normal in time, there are others that have been completely changed by COVID 19, by social distancing and how so many aspects of our lives have ever increasingly digitalized as really a result. Thinking about that, how did work from home and other operating realities that shifted during the pandemic affect some of the key personas that your six solution serves? And how in turn, did you at night evolve to help organizations you serve navigate these shifting dynamics? Of course you're absolutely right, Tim. There are some dynamics that have fundamentally changed and likely forever. And on top of that, as I mentioned in the video, we've got this thing called expectation transfer this everywhere now, and that's where our service experience is raised by one organization. And then we expect the same level from every other provider. So with the onset of the pandemic, we saw a big increase in demand for. Almost all organizations sent their service staff home, and the legacy communications technologies they had been using from the office simply couldn't move with them. So as a result, they adopted cloud based platforms, including one. Now, some of these organizations had to do this transition actually overnight, since the premise solution is just did not work, and this is where a cloud platform really shows its strength. We have many examples of organizations adopting in a week or even a matter of days. The other interesting thing we saw is that with the closure of many in-person service points, a lot more of the complex interactions also move virtual. And so to see one. 

We have hundreds of our customers now managing much more sophisticated requests, with consumers now key to NICE in. All of this was being able to move extremely quickly, and having a partnership with companies like MicroStrategy was very helpful in order to get to the market fast with comprehensive, robust and advanced data visualization that helped our customers adopt the platform and those more complex business processes that used to be in person. Yeah, that's fantastic. And it's for sure, very relatable experience to many. And I'm sure in the audience today throughout the pandemic, we also experience an increased need for speed to market accumulating in with enhanced releasing releases each month to really help our customers keep pace. Now, in my experience, there's always one fundamental decision that OEM providers have to grapple with, often early in their journey that is really can prove essential to the overall success of a solution that they do bring to market the essential paradigm of build versus buy. You've shared NICE chose to partner with MicroStrategy. Talk to me a little bit about why you would you opted for that technology route and why you chose MicroStrategy. Sure, it's a great question. I actually remember the internal meetings we had. It's now a few years ago when we did the analysis to compare the cost benefit of either building our own. 

Data visualization or adopting an OEM solution. In the end, we went down the OEM path in order to get to market fast. We evaluated the buy solutions that were out there and came to the conclusion that it would take us too long to build it ourselves, and we were confident that we'd be able to find an OEM that could do it for us at the price that we needed. So with the CSI opportunity in front of us, we decided that the best use of our internal development teams was to focus them instead on building all these applications out as quickly as possible. So then we embarked on a comprehensive selection process. Now my chief architect, she's going to share some more about that in the session tomorrow. But I'll say, from my perspective, the most important things we looked at were, of course, first. First, of course, having all the capabilities that we needed at the proven scale that we needed. Secondly, you know, having a solution that align with our native cloud architecture align with our UX and our data model. And finally, a global presence that lined up with our global needs operating like we do in all the major markets around the world. Also, I have to say that we already had a long history of working with MicroStrategy, so we knew what we could count on your technology for. And we knew it wouldn't let us down, but also that your company's approach to innovation was very similar to our own in terms of velocity, openness and collaboration. So we knew what we were getting into and we knew we'd get a true partnership in this next chapter with MicroStrategy. 

Yeah thanks, Barry. Thanks so much for sharing your perspective and for being with us today. As you know, today we're announcing NICE, this year's Innovation Award winner for how you've revolutionized the customer experience journey. Congratulations to you and the team. Thank you. That's great news and we're very, very happy to be recognized for this. And again, thank you for the partnership. Yeah, we obviously have a long history of working with each other. It's really been fantastic and this is really just another impactful milestone on our partner journey together. When you tell me a little bit, what does this recognition mean to you and to the team specifically? Sure, it's actually it's actually really, really significant. We pride ourselves actually on innovation. So having an award like this that recognizes that innovation really hits home. I just actually kicked off the year with many of the teams working on these solutions, and we talked in that kickoff about the importance of innovation, how we use that to differentiate our company and our solutions. So getting this recognition around innovation with a partner like MicroStrategy , it really, really is great and we're very happy for that. So Thanks again. Yeah, Thanks so much. Barry and I look forward to numbers presentation tomorrow. Thanks, Tim. Thanks for having us. If you'd like to emulate the success of Sainsbury's NICE and some of the other customers. 

You'll hear about today, we created a packed agenda for you over the next two days full of networking opportunities, customer stories, industry experts, new product demos and hands on workshops designed to help you make 2022 your best year ever. What makes all the organizations you'll hear about today and tomorrow stand out is that they understand what it means to embrace a modern BI and analytics approach. Stick around. Explore the platform and discover how you can empower your team all the way to the moon in 2022. Everyone needs to modernize. If you haven't done this yet, you have some catching up to do. For more on this in the four transformations to unlock modern analytics, here's MicroStrategy chief marketing Officer Hugh Owen. Thank you, Phong. Good morning, everyone. What an incredible start to world Sainsbury's and NICE are prime examples of modernized analytics, and they are the perfect segue into what we have for you this morning. Over the next few minutes, I'd like to tell you a story of how your organization can modernize its analytics and its user experiences. And just like Sainsbury's, just like NICE, get the full value out of your enterprise data. Let's start with something we all have a relationship with. Our smartphones, if you open up your phone, you're greeted with the warm glow of all the apps you use every day to live your life. Fitness apps like Strava, trading apps like Coinbase, social apps, entertainment, apps, the list goes on. The simple fact is that we use apps to run our lives better. 

So in 2022 the first transformation for analytics modernization. Is taking your organization's legacy dashboards and turning them into business applications. So you can run your business better. Engagement with an app encapsulates modern workflows, information driven engagement with the world. These aren't weekly reports or grids delivered on paper or in spreadsheets. They are interactive, loaded with intelligence, fostering collaboration and have a bias towards action. And with apps, every experience is about data, but data is never a stand alone item. It's always part of a bigger picture or set of actions. The user experience is completely natural, and you know that you can trust this information because the apps you use every day are built on a governed semantic layer. MicroStrategy serves as that enterprise semantic layer for your business, empowering developers to quickly build and deploy the apps faster than you think. And we have a trifecta of products to get you there. For more, here's Holly and Amy. Thanks, Hugh. All right, so if you haven't heard by now or maybe you're new to MicroStrategy, here's what you need to know. Library is our modern viewing client created with our business users in mind. You can view your data wherever you are in a browser, on the desktop or on the go with mobile. You can filter down data and save personal views, share content or directly collaborate with other users. You can even organize your content in a way you think best. Totally and over the last couple of years, as users switched over to the modern Library, we noticed many of our customers wanted to add their own personal spin to the experience and brand it for their organization. And the question was how easy can we make this? How can we design a flexible, manageable, no-code way for our customers to modify, Library, and create unique viewing experiences tailored for specific users? So what's our answer? Applications with the new applications feature in Workstation organizations can now create their own suite of analytics viewing portals with specific user groups in mind. So, for example, I can take the Library home screen and add a few tweaks to the same Library interface that we know and love. Or what's really cool is that I can just select my favorite dossier to take over that initial home page experience, essentially giving the user what they need right away with no clicks or searching. So look at how sleek this looks. 

The dossier has been designed with specific action items embedded in the canvas, and users can focus in on all KPIs that they might need all within one dossier. Exactly what I like best about this, as someone who designs a lot of dossiers, is the way it allows me to think about the entire user experience. Now, more than ever, you can think about dossiers as true applications that your users access to explore their data stories with ease. We've added a ton of new capabilities for content creators this year to make that a reality. Let's take a look at this example analyzing store performance this dossier has an intuitive button bar to seamlessly navigate to and within each page notice a variety of visualizations, all helping to analyze your data in the most meaningful way. Interact directly with visualizations to uncover data insights. Take a look at the Financial Times series, business-critical KPIs, quarterly analysis, the flow of your data, and more. 

Dive more into your data by investigating areas that are relevant to you. Personalize your experience by curating your view. Uncover instant insight and next level information directly with a single click. And the best part is it looks amazing on mobile, too. When you're designing a dossier as an application experience, you want to think about the user workflow when they get to the homepage of an app. What do they want to see? What KPIs are important? Where should they link to? All of this leads to providing a seamless application. 

Yes, so it's actually fantastic. So it's super easy, and you can be really creative with these dossiers and determining which components you want to enable in the application. So you can definitely use a dossier as home screen as we did for the sales team. But you might have a team, let's say it's finance that still wants that content portal. Look, so let's keep them with Library home as the main screen behind a few components. Libraries typically allows end users to personalize and organize content themselves. By default, users can add favorites. They can also place content into their own groups. But let's go ahead and toggle my groups off. I went to limit the content portal to specific content groups my organization needs, but we will still have collaboration and sharing to make sure that they can interact with teammates. Now, the finance team has the exact content that they need. And can collaborate with the team. You can see in that specific finance application with that limited content to look at that new default group for the app and note it's an entirely different experience than what we built for the sales team. We can view multiple dossiers and let me go ahead and just share a bookmark really quick with Amy. 

So I want her to have year end review. And I'm going to see if Amy gets it. Amazing Library has so many capabilities that keep our teams connected. As you just saw Holly shared a bookmark or personal data view with me regarding sales numbers. Let's take a look. I'll click on the link in my email, and I'm taken directly to the dossier in that sales app to see the exact data view. This is super helpful to keep the team on the same page because now I can monitor this view as the data updates. I can share this view with others at some users in a discussion and with this year's release, I can even subscribe to this data view to have a PDF or Excel delivered right to my inbox on a timely schedule. And remember, applications and all these features are available across clients. Yes, I'm really excited for the future of the viewing experience. All right, so stay tuned and let's see what we come up with next. Back to you, Hugh. Thanks, Amy. Thanks, Holly. To learn more about Library, dossier and Workstation, here are several sessions we're hosting today and tomorrow that can help your organization modernize. Now we can all agree that to modernize and organization needs to adopt an app driven mindset. But the fact is. It's not enough because not everyone will be using an app all the time. 

There may be a killer app that creates an incredible impact on your bottom line, but whatever your business is that they're sure to be individuals working in other systems that don't have immediate access to your apps information. Now, if we're being honest, you want to invest in analytics for. Everyone, for any decisions, why would you want to limit intelligence only to the analysts or the data savvy individuals that an organization? Enter MicroStrategy, because we have the only proven solution in the marketplace to solve this universal challenge. Three years ago, we realized a completely different approach was required and that's when we invented HyperIntelligence. It's a new class of analytics that pushes data and insights to the edges of any organization. It's information for everyone. It's the perfect tool for developers because it's essentially an out of the box application. A single application now has the ability to provide custom experiences for all of your stakeholders working across multiple clients and interfaces because one size doesn't fit all. Let's hear how this is now possible, starting with HyperIntelligence from one of our product experts. Take it away in order. Thanks, Hugh. You are absolutely right. The urge to deliver insights to every single user in the organization has grown larger over the last year. We believe that everyone should have access to trusted data and that they shouldn't have to navigate between multiple applications in order to get the answers they need to make fast and well-informed decisions. The first way to do this is to deploy HyperIntelligence. HyperIntelligence allows you to instantly augment any application or website with context rich zero click intelligence without any coding or custom development. In less than 30 minutes, you can design and deliver a full Library of lightweight, intuitive mini dashboards, which we call cards into each and every interface and workflows your users rely on. That's applications, email, mobile devices and any website. In 2021 we've added the ability to customize HyperIntelligence to include your own branding. Customers can generate a white labeled version of Hyper web through Workstation. Users can customize the name icon descriptions and even set up their default environment for the extension in advance. 

Customers can also leverage the special optimized card templates for social media sharing and collaboration as well. HyperIntelligence also acts as a gateway to the rich analytic content that MicroStrategy allows you to build. Context rich links on your cards will take your end users to pre, filtered and bookmarked sources within your MicroStrategy Library, as well as any other web application. So the user never loses focus. HyperIntelligence will absolutely transform the way your organization thinks about and relies on analytics by making everyone an instant expert. The next thing you can do to bring intelligence everywhere to your organization is to embrace what we call Federated analytics. This means that analysts and business users mining data for insights should be relying on a single version of truth. Even if the tools they use to build reports and visualizations differ from team to team, MicroStrategy provides certified out of the box connectors to productivity tools like Microsoft Excel and allows users to connect to different self-service BI tools like power, BI and Tableau. Moreover, we provide connectors to advanced data science and machine learning tools like Jupiter and RStudio as well. This allows data definition and governance and security to be defined once for the whole organization, while embracing and accommodating the end user preferences of individual users. 

It increases trust, which means better decision making for the whole team. Back to you here. To learn more about modernizing your user experiences with HyperIntelligence and Federated analytics, here are the sessions you won't want to miss. So we've gone from dashboards to applications, from analysts to everyone. Well, how can we take this even one step further? We know that every business already has legacy applications and tools, so why not integrate MicroStrategy directly into systems and workflows, injecting intelligence directly into your business and completely eliminating the friction between your data insights and your people? Lucas Phong stated earlier, we've added the capabilities to quickly white label applications and solutions, whether you're a software engineer or just someone who understands your data and your business. We built and delivered the capabilities to supercharge your teams. Your people are now free to compose net new products and services for your customers. It's a blue ocean strategy that delivers new opportunities to pursue channels for revenue and new ways to interact with your people or your customers. For more, here's Antoine. Thank you. MicroStrategy offers a beautiful and intuitive Analytics Library experience for mobile and the desktop, which can now be elegantly personalized through our new applications object with no coding whatsoever. We also know our customers want to see analytics everywhere, not just in dedicated applications like Library. 

Maybe you've got your own employee portal that acts as a one stop shop for the organization. Maybe you want to include analytics on your website or in your own application for your customers or suppliers. What these use cases all have in common is that the end users don't have to go looking for the data they need. The answers come to them where they're already working. This is where MicroStrategy 's embedding SDK comes into play. It allows developers to connect the power and security of MicroStrategy semantic graph to their own applications, creating a seamless analytics experience that maximizes adoption and boost productivity. Most importantly, the SDK layer allows for directional communication with parents applications and portals. When you embed a MicroStrategy visualization into your website, the visualization will inherit context from the parent layer. What information has the user previously entered? What security rights do they have? What additional information is being presented to the user alongside the MicroStrategy data? All of this information is available to the developer so that the visualizations can be filtered and tailored in real time without having to code upfront for every possible scenario. Even more powerful than that, the MicroStrategy embedding SDK allows developers to create experiences where user interaction with their visualization results in communication back to the parent app, so users click on the alarming red bar. Inside the MicroStrategy object can trigger an external workflow prioritize a user in a contact center queue move inventory between warehouses, allocate additional funding to a new research project, all without leaving the application. Now this is what I call actionable insights, not just a pretty picture on the screen, but an integrated experience that connects information to results. We just released our new embedding playground on MicroStrategy community, a place to network and experiment with this technology. Our playground allows both developers and non developers to realize the power of embedded intelligence through a simple drag and drop interface. We've lowered the learning curve. So that anyone can get started to personalize their own analytics experience. Set your preferred user behaviors, select which visualizations are available and to whom evaluate and respond to user activity. 

Once you're happy with the experience, just generate a code snippet automatically, and you're ready for implementation in your portal or application. We're looking forward to seeing our customers experimenting and having fun in the playground. Q, back to you. Thanks, Antoine. Now to learn more about democratizing your development and achieving outcomes like NICE has been able to realize. Here are three sessions to help get you started. And now the fourth and final transformation going from vertical to horizontal. OK, we've talked about shifting our mindset from investigating the world to changing the world. By developing applications instead of dashboards, we've talked about extending the value of real time insight to every single member of the organization and beyond. And we've talked about lowering the learning curve for even advanced embedding and integration of business intelligence. So now it's time to talk about what makes all those intentions a reality. And that's embracing what we call horizontal integration. As Phong noted in his introduction, MicroStrategy customers don't rely on us just for our ability to generate pretty pictures, although we certainly do that and do it very well. Our 30 years of focused, relentless innovation and hardening of our platform enables us to provide our customers with the most valuable commodity of all. 

Trust and just like we heard from Helen at Sainsbury's, that trust comes from treating analytics as an enterprise wide requirement. You're breaking down the vertical silos between teams and departments and building a common unified data fabric the entire organization can reliably act on. To achieve horizontal integration, organizations need three things from their analytics platform. First a semantic layer that's built to support reusability and performance, so that attributes metrics, relationships not only have the same meaning for everyone, but there are also allowed changes to be distributed consistently and without user disruption a second. The ability to personalize analytics and experiences without sacrificing data integrity. Now, at the enterprise scale, a single version of the truth can't translate to a single experience of the truth. Everyone brings their own unique perspectives and motivations. And this requires limitless flexibility and experiences as diverse as the users whom you're trying to reach. You need infrastructure that puts a premium on flexibility without sacrificing scale. And finally, trust requires a tireless commitment to data protection and security. And MicroStrategy , this commitment is best illustrated in how we operate our fully managed MicroStrategy cloud service. Now to talk more about security and what sets this particular offering apart in giving our customers the ultimate peace of mind, I'd like to turn things over to two more MicroStrategy experts, Mike and Samuel. Awesome, and Thanks for the introduction, Hugh. Like you said, my name is Mike squires, product manager here for the MicroStrategy cloud, and I'm really happy to be here with MicroStrategy , CSO or chief information security officer and Samuel Petroski to speak with everyone today. 

So first, I'm excited because one, he's just a wonderful guy and it's been great to get to know him throughout his tenure here at MicroStrategy. And he's really been an excellent collaborator and leader in this tenure at MicroStrategy so far, but also because he and other information security experts are almost like rock stars in the industry these days. So really excited to be here. Welcome, Samuel. Thanks, Mike. I'm happy to be here today, too. As the overall global data footprint expands, the demands to synthesize that data continues to grow as the need to secure it. So I'm really excited to join you today to talk about how MicroStrategy and the MicroStrategy cloud delivers enterprise analytics with best in class security and governance to our customers. Great well, obviously the MicroStrategy cloud is certainly near and dear to my heart, so I'm really looking forward to more of our sessions and discussions on that throughout MicroStrategy world. So keep your eyes open for some of those sessions. But even before we dig into our managed service offering, let's first take a quick step back and talk about the robust data governance posture that's really been a key and foundational tenet of the MicroStrategy platform for many, many years. So this will be familiar to our MicroStrategy customers today, those who are with us in the audience today. But for those who may be new to MicroStrategy and may not know, a foundational focus on data security and governance and privacy has always been fundamental to and really a core differentiator within the MicroStrategy platform and its underlying architecture. 

So Sam, can you tell us a little bit more about that and what it may mean for our MicroStrategy customers? Happy to Mike. And you're right, the way MicroStrategy manages data, the level of specificity it offers in terms of rules based governance and personalized insights is one of the most impactful and differentiating factors for our platform. Our customers trust the platform's robust security, performance and reusability because it helps avoid downtime, minimize development costs and maximize productivity. The efficiency and longevity of by implementation is also dependent on the robustness of the underlying metadata model. Most competing BI tools focus on developing individual reports as quickly as possible, neglecting the usability of the report components. This not only sacrifices the ability to create and maintain by development efficiently, but can also cause data singularity issues when deployed at scale. Yeah and Sam, you said something in there that I really want to key in on here, and that's trust as a solution and a product. MicroStrategy , and we really love to talk about this in product management is what we build it with a long term vision in mind. We design it to have an unmatched platform architecture to provide that single version of the truth through a centralized and secured metadata. So you can have all of your reporting, analysis and monitoring in one place. And really, that single version of the truth is what's going to give you that confidence or that trust to deploy intelligence everywhere? So I know in our previous discussions and we talk about this quite often, we not only talk about how important that Trusted Platform is, but also the fact that it's much more than just a good product. It's the marrying of product and process together. So you want to expand on that a little bit and give our viewers a little bit more on what that means. I think what we're really getting at here is how pervasive a trusted analytics platform has to be. It's way more than just encryption protocols and networking configurations. It's a holistic solution that marrying of product and process. 

You mentioned finding the right balance between simplicity and security within the process, procedures, encryption protocols and network isolation needs to secure. An enterprise platform is not a small Fiat. That's why we give you the flexibility to choose your preferred balance with enterprise grade security options out of the box or the peace of mind behaving. MicroStrategy manage all of those security and compliance standards in our MicroStrategy cloud platform as a service offering. Perhaps the pinnacle of this combination is federal authorization. The process and product security standard needed to host US federal government data, as announced near the end of 2021. MicroStrategy cloud is currently in process for federal authorization and expected to achieve the authorization to operate by Q3 of this year. With this advancement, all of our MicroStrategy customers can have 100% confidence knowing their data is accurate and secured under the highest grade controls and best practices the analytics industry has to offer. Yeah, no, really. That's a great point on that. And overall, I would say that 2021 was probably one of the best years that we've ever had between product and process in the collaboration that goes on between that and 2022 will obviously be much more of the same. And so for our viewers at home who were obviously looking at me and thinking that I'm completely biased in that statement, but the truth for it really is evidence, not just what we're saying and what we'll discuss in MicroStrategy world, but also in the data. In 2021 alone, we tripled our investment into security. And when we look back at what that helped us to achieve in 2021 the fruits of that investment can already be seen in MicroStrategy agility and resolving the Log4j or log4 shell issue that came up in the end of 2021. And I could spend too much time on the details as almost everyone here was affected by that issue and many, many more who are listening. But it really did send shockwaves throughout the industry, to say the least. And so I look over at Samuel. I see that he's sweating over there a little bit, probably just thinking about those first few days. But can you keep us in on what that was like as the c, so as the seesaw? 

The past few weeks have been pretty hectic, to say the least. And on that, a huge thank you to our technology, legal and cloud operations team who worked diligently to help mitigate and inevitably resolve this issue completely within the product and for supporting our customers through such turbulent moment in the technology industry. From the initial identification of the susceptibility. Within 48 hours, our teams had published official mitigation documentation and implemented that mitigation across each of our MicroStrategy cloud customers. Wow, that was certainly an unforgettable weekend, to say the least. But amazingly, it didn't just end there. I mean, from the product side, it seemed like almost everyone in the organization was all hands on deck to help us release two new generally available software updates by the end of that next week. And once again, kind of going back to that combination of product and process, we helped to upgrade all of our MicroStrategy cloud customers by the end of that very next weekend. So less than eight days after the initial vulnerability was discovered, we had upgraded all of our MicroStrategy cloud customers. Everything that we've mentioned this far and even in the recent past that we've seen with log j, it's clear that powerful, robust security has always been at the heart of the MicroStrategy platform. But Sam, I really think that he will probably be mad at us if we don't talk a little bit about the future before you hand it back to him. So, Sam, where does that continued investment in security going and what will that mean to our MicroStrategy customers? Well, like we've mentioned, data volumes continue to grow as threats in relation to compromising data. 

So the importance of protecting the data grows right along with it, and not just the sheer quantity of data, but the injection of data into organizations. Everyday decisions has accelerated data privacy compliance and protection concerns down to the end user levels. As you mentioned and we discussed to achieve a process with daily data driven decisions, the analytics platform must be built on a stable foundation. So going into 2022. And as we achieve federal authorization for our platform, look forward to even more agility in our security stance so we can continue to immediately remediate unexpected vulnerabilities like lock, forge and proactively protect our customers from broader trends in the market. Awesome I think there's definitely a ton to look forward to in 2022 and The whole rest of the world and all the sessions that we have planned. So back to you, Hugh. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Samuel. And to learn more about empowering the widest possible audience at your organization with the best available insights that are trusted and secured, here are three sessions you won't want to miss. Right, finally, now let's close with one last amazing customer story. This one has it all. An enterprise data fabric, a robust governance and security posture, a cloud based deployment and modern analytics for all of their users. The Schwarz it team is this year's winner of the global business Impact Award. They have partnered with Mike shut over the last several years. And today, the data fabric they've established unifies how renowned Schwarz group brands like little Kaufland, they empower tens of thousands of users across more than 30 countries with the insights they need to best serve their customers. Well, let's take a look. For us, it's critical to have a single source of truth for the enormous amounts of data our stores are producing every day. 

Currently operates around 11,550 stores in more than 200 goods distribution and logistics centers in 30 countries. Kaplan is an international retailer with over 1,250 stores and more than 139,000 employees across eight European countries. The site is near and Eppler and at the heartbeat of the digitalization of the school. The Schwarz group itself consists of business units operating across the full value lifecycle of the circular economy strategy. We have Lidl Kaufland, one of the world's leading food retailers, in more than 30 countries across Europe and the US. We have Schwarz production producing high quality goods and services, focusing especially on sustainable raw materials and ingredients, and we have three zero the experts in waste and recycling managing microsurgery version 7 plus the starting point of our common journey. That was a time when the business users were driven by spreadsheets and simple ways of how to consume information. Due to the strong expansion of Lidl, the individual countries and departments developed individual system solutions and key figures. This led to incomplete and inconsistent key figure calculations and KPI names, as well as the very large number of reports. 

Our main target is to provide the right information at the right time and the right speed to enable and support better decision making and derive the right actions. We have redefined the role of data and analytics for our business. It is now at the absolute core of our strategy. The modernization was an important cornerstone of our strategy. We shifted our whole technology stack into the cloud. We are now able to serve our users with a modern technology stack, and this basically provides the biggest return on investment, so the biggest business value. As part of this process, we centralize data having a single source of truth. We work together with our colleagues from qwhat city on digitizing the kpis, using standardized end to end management cockpits and MicroStrategy. We have a solution we call cockpits, which is an easy overview of the central KPIs for our management. Each day, these cockpits deliver the necessary daily updated KPIs to Tens of thousands MicroStrategy users in more than 30 countries from the individual store up to the International board members. We're using a large number of end user reports or power user reports for decision making on a daily basis. We have introduced the self-service bi concept using MicroStrategy dossier as a main tool. Tens of thousands of users are accessing and using the things and the platforms and technologies and the data that we have built up in the last two years and listening to our business customers and the different units that are using what we have created and generated makes us just so proud. So Microsoft is a partner with a strong technology platform and the combination with professional services to scale out and have integrated teams that work together on this new modernization. It's such a great fit, so we are very proud to have reached the current state of data at the Schwarz group. 

Now, I had the privilege of sitting down to talk with Hogan shell Swartz, its managing director at BI AI and data analytics, about how they undertook this journey and what they've been able to achieve. Hi joining me today, Mr Holger Schell, the managing director of BI AI and data analytics at the Schwarz group. Good morning, as it is. Good afternoon. Hi, good afternoon, you. Thanks for having me today. No, it's an absolute pleasure. So, you know, you have you've achieved amazing things at the Schwarz group with your Schwarz it team. You know, you've really helped make data and data driven culture a key part of the organization. You've undertaken several large scale initiatives over the years. You've consolidated massive amounts of data from four global brands. You've released a variety of apps out to little stakeholders and others across your enterprise. You've implemented the cloud and you've operated a one stop shop that allows you to continuously provide new stakeholder value. It's been an incredible journey. So walk me through that journey. What business challenges did you face and what was the most important to you as you worked to solve them? Thanks for asking and a lot of things you mentioned already. So one of the biggest challenges we have as a Schwarz group acting in a lot of different countries, acting in more than 30 countries, serving a lot of different operational business units being it legal and Kaufland for the retail food business. 

Our colleagues in Jawad's production that are providing high quality food, especially focusing on sustainable raw material or even our experts from green cycle zero, they're taking care about recycling and wasting basically means that we in the Schwarz will be try to spend the whole full lifecycle or circular economy value lifecycle. And with that one? I mean, it's very easy to tell you that we have a lot of data coming in and out and having a data lifecycle and data value. So the question at hand is how can we provide at scale in speed? And we talk about not only days, we talk about minutes, seconds down to real time. How can we provide this data to our business users that they can generate value out of this data at hand? And with this challenge to have a modern future proven technology stack and platform where we can serve all of these different needs of scalability, performance, timezone differences, real time versus management reports. This was the question at hand when we started our journey, I guess around three years ago to modernize fully the way how we manage and treat data within the Schwarz group. So it's impressive. So you start with the overall organization or business strategy, and then you work out how data and analytics can best support that strategy. You know, given those objectives and given the challenges that come with implementing that, what did you do? How did you get started? So I think finding the right starting point is very important. And when we look at the challenges our business faces, we mirrored it basically to what does it mean for us? What does it mean for us in the group as a whole? And when you look at the technology landscape or the technology challenges we face at the business processes, the methodologies and also the way how our business users are changing in the way, how they want to consume data and they want to consume information and how quickly they want to access it. We started to say looking at our own strategy, what does it mean for us? Where where do we want to be? 2025 And with that in mind, where do we want to be? 2025 We said, OK, where do we need to start? And we laid out a holistic vision of how we manage and want to have our data landscape driven forward. And that was the starting point in terms of we laid out a vision where we said there we want to be in four to five years and we need to start now to be there just in time and we are now halfway on our track. 

It's no, and it's impressive to be able to, you know, do two things that one is have a vision of where you want to take data and analytics within the Schwarz group and secondarily taking into account and prioritizing how people consume data, how the consumers can actually use and use and value the information you're giving them. There's obviously a lot of things that play into that, you know, the standardization, the centralization of all of the different data in turn into a single version of the truth. And you've also embarked on a significant amount of modernization as part of your plan. So what was your strategy from a modernization perspective? What did you do? So I think there are two things coming together. On the one hand side, I mean, we are using macro strategies since 2004. So microsurgery version seven, I guess it was the starting point of our common journey, and that was a time when the business users more were driven by spreadsheets and simple ways of how to consume information very spreadsheet people alike. And the modernization basically was an important cornerstone of our strategy because we just cannot invest only in technology. Let's say in simple words, invest money to have a, let's say, better technology, a better warehousing, a better enterprise by platform. There needs to be also value in what we are doing and this idea of that modernization, modernizing applications and giving value back to the business. So the business is driven to invest again into technology, architecture and technology platforms basically was a starting point where we said, what are the most used applications and where do we get the feedback that increasing or modernizing these applications and bringing it to the next level basically provides the biggest return on investment, so the biggest business value. And with this short life cycles where we said we modernize first applications, then we modernize the technology backend and then we do the next steps and the next steps. We try to have this self-funding or self investment strategy to have a common business and IT strategy moving data and analytics onto this new level where we want to be. 

So and now I'm really interested as an organization that has a vision for 2025 as it relates to data and analytics. What's next and also a whole what are you most excited about? I mean, looking where we are today, where we shifted our whole technology stack into the cloud from a backend perspective, from a foreign perspective that we have shifted the existing data also into in this new technology stack in the cloud, and that we are now being able to serve our Tens of thousands of users with a modern technology stack. The next step is now to further strengthen the modernization of our applications, the ability of the business users to access this information, and not only from a lets call more by perspective with a descriptive view on the data, but also from an AI perspective with a prescriptive view with a predictive view to also and intensively enable the full stack of analytics from a asset to an AI perspective, enabling the data scientists and the business units and in the IT units to work with this data and generate again new business value. And where I'm most excited about beneath what I just told you is that looking at our circular value chain from an entrance perspective, from Schwab's production to little Callan to our experts from xero, where we have waste and recycling management, it's very important that we even more intensively intensively increase the data that we can get, can get out of the different systems and have the full whole data lifecycle in this platform to make it even more worth to access the data and generate new value. And if we are able to do this. And that's our wish in 2025 I'm very happy and exciting. Looking forward to that one. OK, well, this say there's a lot that you want to continue to execute on in partnership with MicroStrategy towards this 2025 vision in terms of making sure the data and analytics continues to have a huge impact, making sure the data and analytics continues to deliver in your business's overall strategy. And you know, we've been working together for many years. The Schwarz group and MicroStrategy is, as you mentioned, with a relationship that goes back to MicroStrategy. 

Seven analytics applications are a long term in nature, and partnerships with are also there for long term. So how did partnering with MicroStrategy help you achieve these goals up to now? And what aspects of your approach have had the biggest impacts on your success? So we in the Schwarz group, we strongly believe in the competencies we have and the impact we can make. And at the same time, we know that we have to rely on strategic and strong partners. And looking at MicroStrategy , I'm very proud and happy to have such a strong partner because when I talk about the transformation we have gone under as a Schwarz group, I'm also looking at MicroStrategy as a partner and the transformation, you have had and the way how you can better serve by a day to day business. Our own business, basically. And this renewal, for example, the dossier topic and my colleague has mentioned it before with the self-service access, it is very important for us to drive this forward. So microsurgery, as a partner with a strong technology platform and the combination with professional services where we have access to knowledge with the newest and highest feature knowledge that we require to be able to scale out and have integrated teams that work together on this new modernization. It's such a great fit and I'm very, very much looking forward on the next journey and the next steps doing together. And so, Olga, as you know, the swatch group is an incredible company. You and your team have done incredible things as it relates to data and analytics as you work with MicroStrategy and execute towards that 25 goal. And in recognition of this, we're really, really proud to announce that the Schwarz group have won this year's global business Impact Award. 

Congratulations Thanks a lot, you. Thank you, and especially in behalf of my team, Thanks a lot. I think it's teamwork and it's only work if you have the right competencies at the table of different people working together. So on behalf of my team, very, very much, thank you for the award and looking forward to the next steps. Yeah, and you know, to you, hoga and to your entire team. Congratulations and thank you so much for joining us today. I look forward to continuing to work with you and your team as we work towards that 2025 vision. Thanks a lot, and many Thanks for organizing this, this microsurgery war 2022 and I wish you all the best for a successful war. 2022 Thanks so much. All right, bye bye. Thank you. Congratulations again to the Schwarz IT organization and the many collaborators who brought their data driven transformation to fruition. This concludes the day one keynote session of world, but join us here tomorrow, where my colleague Tim Lang, MicroStrategy 's chief technology officer, will take a deeper look at how our platform empowers your developers, along with the industry trends he sees that will most likely impact the way your business runs in 2022. Now, in the meanwhile, the event platform is yours to explore with more than 80 sessions networking opportunities, several hands on workshops to get you familiar with what's possible with MicroStrategy and those of you who are interested in our Bitcoin for corporations event. Stick around because Michael Saylor is coming up at 12:00 noon Eastern. I'd like to thank all of our sponsors who are making this event our best yet. Well, and thank you and congratulations again to the teams at Sainsbury's NICE and Schwarz group. And thank you for joining us this morning. We are so excited to hear how your organization will transform with intelligence in 2022 and beyond.