In this issue of MicroStrategy UK Direct we congratulate two customers for winning industry awards for their BI implementations and you can take a closer look at why the ever growing mobile workforce requires more business intelligence.

TOP STORIES

Guy Carpenter’s ‘Radical BI’ Application Wins TDWI Best Practice Award

We are proud to announce that Guy Carpenter & Company, a leading global reinsurance specialist, has won TDWI’s 2008 Best Practices in Data Warehousing award in the category of Radical Business Intelligence for its MicroStrategy-based solution. TDWI’s Best Practices Awards program is designed to identify and honour companies that have demonstrated excellence in developing, deploying, and maintaining business intelligence and data warehousing applications.

Guy Carpenter & Company won the award for gaining a competitive advantage by bucking mainstream principles about how to construct BI/DW solutions. The award recognizes the use of radical new approaches or technologies to address problems and issues where traditional methods have failed or proven cost-prohibitive. Often these organizations are pushing massive deployments or have significant cost constraints that force them to think “outside the box.”

Learn more:
TDWI Best Practices Awards

Congratulations to Ahold on Top Business Intelligence Award at BI-Congress

We are also proud to announce that Ahold has received the top Business Intelligence Award at the BI-Congress. Albert Heijn, a supermarket division of Ahold, won the award for its MicroStrategy enterprise-wide business intelligence environment, which spans across Europe and the United States. Ahold uses MicroStrategy to conduct sales and customer analyses at its Albert Heijn supermarkets and other Ahold holdings.

In selecting the award winner, more than 120 companies were researched on 60 different topics considered key elements in creating an intelligent organization. Albert Heijn uses business intelligence across its 750 stores in areas including merchandising, logistics, marketing, replenishment, store operations, supply chain, transaction reporting, and customer satisfaction.

Resources:
Press Release: May 28, 2008

Intelligence on the Go:
Mobile Delivery of BI with Nygard

In a recent article in Intelligence Enterprise, Doug Henschen discusses the ever increasing need for intelligence on the go through mobile delivery of BI – quoting MicroStrategy customer Nygard:

There are more than 800 million mobile workers worldwide today… and that figure is expected to reach 1 billion by 2010, according to IDC…

The impetus for mobile BI at Canadian women's wear giant Nygard came from chairman and CEO Peter Nygard himself. "In late 2006, he said 'I'm never in my office, so I think from now on, any time you develop an application, it's going to have to be accessible through my Blackberry,'" explains Len Nicolas, the retailer's CIO. "That started the whole initiative, and now every time we develop something, we think in terms of Blackberry.

Nygard's "Daily Sales Flash" reports look and behave the same whether delivered on the desktop (background) or on a BlackBerry


After building the home-grown lookup app, Nygard executives learned that the retailer's BI vendor, Microstrategy, was introducing a module for the Research In Motion (RIM) Blackberry platform, so it signed on as a beta customer for Microstrategy Mobile.

"Microstrategy was working very closely with RIM, and they had much better insight into development languages, encryption and performance," says Nicolas. "It just made sense to move to their platform…”

Read the full article:
Intelligence on the Go: Mobile Delivery of BI
      Intelligent Enterprise, Doug Henschen , 19 May 2008
Learn more about MicroStrategy Mobile for your BlackBerry