Informix Acquisition Signals Relational OLAP as Architecture of Choice for Future Data Warehouse & Decision Support Applications

Business Wire, Oct 26, 1995

VIENNA, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 26, 1995--MicroStrategy, the largest relational on-line analytical processing (ROLAP) vendor, today responds to Informix Software's recent announcement of its intent to purchase Stanford Technology Group (STG).

"As the leading relational OLAP vendor, we believe that this purchase reinforces the message that we have been sending for the last 24 months. ROLAP, rather than multi-dimensional OLAP, is the architecture of choice for future data warehouse and decision support applications," said Michael J. Saylor, President and CEO of MicroStrategy. "The data warehouse customer has a legitimate need for tools that marry the features of multidimensional databases with the flexibility of ad-hoc query tools; Informix's acquisition is a recognition of this requirement."

The acquisition enhances MicroStrategy's position in the ROLAP market due to STG's exit from the merchant (or independent) market in this increasingly channel-driven industry. For the last ten years, sales in the decision support industry have been vendor-driven or `pushed.' However with the success of data warehousing, the channel is now `pulling' decision support sales. A similar shift occurred in the client/server GUI development tools market in the early 1990's when thousands of system integrators, application developers, and VARs generated demand for the underlying merchant tools ensuring their success.

In 1996 and beyond, the channel will take on an increasingly important role in the ROLAP marketplace and will be seeking a tool that is not aligned with a single RDBMS vendor.

"MicroStrategy remains the leading provider of ROLAP technology, even within the Informix channel," said Sanju K. Bansal, MicroStrategy's Executive Vice President, "and we intend to play the `Powersoft role' for the merchant ROLAP market. Customers require tools which can access multiple RDBMS with superior performance, even for VLDBs (very large databases). This requires support for proprietary SQL extensions against each RDBMS optimizer. Our support for VLDB in Oracle, Sybase, Informix, DB2, Teradata, Tandem, and Red Brick makes MicroStrategy the best choice for Fortune 1000 corporations, system integrators, application developers, and VARs."

The steady and strong growth of the merchant ROLAP tools market during 1995 has resulted in a rush of new competitors jumping into the industry, and the market has become too resource-intensive for smaller vendors like STG. As the data warehouse and ROLAP markets continue to grow, consolidations like this are inevitable.

"The acquisition has primarily positive implications for MicroStrategy," said Saylor. "Although we believe that the MetaCube offering will be more competitive in the Informix channel, we predict that it will become largely irrelevant in every other channel, as well as the merchant marketplace, due to their inability to establish close technical, marketing, & sales ties to the other RDBMS vendors."

About MicroStrategy, Inc.

MicroStrategy is the leading provider of relational OLAP products and services for developing and accessing enterprise data warehouses. MicroStrategy was the first vendor to define a decision support object framework introducing intelligent agents and exception reporting alerts, develop a logical transparent map between multidimensional data views and relational tables, and deliver an off-the-shelf three-tier decision support environment.

MicroStrategy has the most experience in developing decision support systems on data warehouses exceeding 500 gigabytes. MicroStrategy's DSS Agent product line is widely used by Fortune 1000 corporations worldwide, and in alliances and partnerships with a variety of industry-leading companies.

MicroStrategy has offices in Washington, San Francisco, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, London and Barcelona. Corporate headquarters is located at 8000 Towers Crescent Drive, Vienna, VA 22182; Phone: 703-848-8600; Fax: 703-848-8610; Internet: info@strategy.com; World Wide Web: http://www.strategy.com/.>CONTACT: MicroStrategy, Inc., Vienna

Lisa Houde, 703/848-8692 or houde@strategy.com