Michael Saylor, MicroStrategy CEO, says the company aims to give its customers a three-year head start on building software to boost their competitive advantage.
Presenting the keynote address yesterday at the company's Global Customer Conference - MicroStrategy World 2013 - at the Barcelona International Convention Centre, Saylor said there are many ways to build.
"You can build from scratch, hire engineers, build an app for iOS, then develop it for Android, then develop it for Windows. The conventional method is slow and expensive, and it will take three years before the software works well.
"We have 5 000 customers," he states, "and if we have a primary goal, it's to provide them a three-year head start on competitors. We realise that each customer has dozens or hundreds of apps, and dozens of development teams, and developers. We want to make sure each of your teams does not have to go through the same learning curve. In an ideal world, we can put tools in their hands to build better, more secure, more powerful and more robust software than they could if they were starting from scratch."
Saylor says MicroStrategy believes four types of software applications will be particularly significant - analytics, mobile, identity and loyalty.
MicroStrategy started doing analytics 20 years ago when McDonalds asked it to analyse its marketing spend so it could optimise it. "This need has not changed," he says, "companies still need to analyse marketing so they can optimise their spend, but the demands on the platform have increased."
Mobile is where it's at, even for enterprises. "There's not a company in the world not thinking about the 950 million smartphones that will be manufactured and sold this year. In the next 36 months, five billion people will have smartphones," Saylor comments.
Mobile is the next platform for the software business, he says. "Twenty years ago, it was the graphical user interface, 10 years' ago the Web platform, now it's mobile. Everything in your company needs to be re-engineered and redeployed using the new platform. We intend to accelerate that by a thousand."
Identity, increasingly a bugbear as cyber crime becomes a multimillion-dollar business, is also on MicroStrategy's "fix" list.
"There are millions and millions of identity systems on the planet - citizen identity, drivers' licences, student ID, company ID, and so on and so on. We believe they are all obsolete and will become identity apps that are threaded into the workflow of our systems - corporate, social, education, etc, and MicroStrategy is delivering a platform to build identity apps on."
Last on its big four list is loyalty. "You've got loyalty cards, customer cards - the world is full of them. And we likewise believe they're all destined to become great enterprise mobile apps - changing the way people buy and the way brands market and communicate to customers. There are hundreds of thousands of loyalty apps to be built or rebuilt in the next decade. We're building a platform that will let you build an app in a week or two with a few marketing people and deploy to a million customers," he comments.
The company also has a cloud offering that clients can use to deploy apps from, based on its global network of data centres. Customers can deploy apps on their own cloud platform, or use MicroStrategy's or hop between one or the other, he notes.
Disclaimer: Samantha Perry is being hosted in Barcelona by MicroStrategy.
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