Microstrategy World 2011 (keynotes)

Michael Saylor, founder and CEO of Microstrategy

“Turning our civilization into software driven processes”

“You might not be interested in technology but technology is interested in you”

“It is an exciting time, BI is coming out of back offices and paper reports into hands”

“Blockbuster went down and Netflix went up. Filing cabinet and paper trash bags went down but I-pads went up”

Michael’s keynote was definitely one of the high point at the conference. He is a visionary and will make you think. I did hear him couple other times including partner address, examples he provide and analogies he draw are just phenomenal and as I said will make you think.

New visualizations in Microstrategy mobile includes Heat maps, calendar, time series, map network visualization, embedded pdf reader, embedded web reader, RSS widget. Among all the BI competitors, Microstrategy seems to have the biggest push for mobile and as Mike quoted about I-pad “I-pad is the first device that competed with paper“.

Another discussion was on updating reports that were built long back. “Every report that was being built-in last 10-15 years is obsolete and needs to be rebuilt”. And it does make sense, it is not the same business forever, things change, market change and so do KPIs and end-user requirements. Every company should have a plan to sit back in X number of years and see what are they doing, how are they doing and why are they doing it. And if does not fit in their ‘current’ company scope, it means, its time to rebuilt it.

Another good example that Mike quoted was of a Family credit card where one can manage finances on the go using their mobile devices and allocate different settings for credit/debit cards for family members. e.g. son can only use the card within school campus, daughter can only use allocated x $ every week, every purchase wife makes over 500$ needs approval in real-time.

One of the examples that Michael quoted is a very normal day-to-day case when you request someone or specially a sales person for a document and you hear back “I will get back to you”. And what it used to 20 minutes, sending the document on email, before has now reduced to 20 seconds, point it on your mobile device and share it with contact right away does not matter if you are standing at a subway station or just met a potential client in a coffee shop.

Some of the examples Michael quoted for where mobile will be playing a big role in future were Traffic ticketing, doctor prescription and mobile payments. As he quoted “mobile transaction changes (will change) the relationship with customers”

Another good example of using mobile computing was of a bar code scanner example and retail shopping. Believe it or not that is something I have myself done, went to Bestbuy last December scanned bar code of a Toshiba laptop using barcode app and did a quick search online to find the cheapest price and see if there is any online store selling it for cheaper, it was Bestbuy itself and hence I bought it for them but think if it would have not been them, I would have used Best Buy store to find my product test it and then perform a little query on my phone and with  few clicks buy the cheapest one from online retailers such as Amazon etc provided they sell it for cheaper.

But imaginations went further when Michael gave an example of a friend that walks in your door looks at your TV in your living room, likes it scans it right there, find the cheaper online store provider and have it ship it to his door next day. There would be no need to walk into store have your phone handy, scan bar code on items you like around you scan them and order online.

Sanju Bansal, COO and Co-founder of Microstrategy

Sanju Bansal, COO and co-founder of Mirostrategy presented 5 awards to different organization and individuals in different categories including Linkedin and Starbucks followed by a customer presentations. One of my favorite was the I-pad app demo presented by GAP, it was not only fully functional but aesthetically very appealing. Good part about their demo was use of pictures, if you have to select category of apparel, there will be pictures on your desktop and when you will click a picture of the model wearing a jeans, it will filter the data for jeans. It not just made the application very appealing but I bet I might be faster to scan quickly the pictures and pick what you want to select than reading through the list.

Kurt Schhgel, VP Research Gartner

“User adoption – Best measure of success”. Very similar to what I heard at Sanju Bansal’s Keynote and I would second this statement any day. Does not matter what technology or tool you implement, if you can make your end users work enough on it, you will never be able to achieve the final goals. That is the same reason why new tools like qlikview and tableau have been working on what they call “sticky feeling” users have with their tool and like to work on it. I hear on twitter or Linkedin every other day when a developer or end-user says, I love working on your tool. Is is not the measure of true success ?

He also recommended the book (which he had it in his hands all the time on stage): Seeing what’s next. I am ordering my copy!

Jeffrey A. Bedell, CTO Microstrategy

“70% user running machines with less than 2GB RAM” under power machines, invest in memories, it is cheap now”

I would not disagree I face the similar problems with my customers when I hear problems about program being slow when they are trying to run applications on under powered machines. Just with a small investment of  couple hundred bucks, lot of time and efforts can be saved.

You can also find more information on my blog on Microstrategy technology and an overview of the Microstrategy world conference.