People and Technology - MicroStrategy Inc.

Saylor doesn't think of MicroStrategy (headquartered in Vienna, Virginia) as a consulting or software business, although it does consult and build software. MicroStrategy, he says, is in the intelligence business, specifically business and personal intelligence. And he believes in the power of that intelligence to improve how companies operate as well as how people live their lives. "I want to make sure that everyone gets real-time intelligence every hour, every day, every week, to make better-informed decisions," he says. "We live in an ignorant world. Our mission is to purge that ignorance."

MicroStrategy, which is one of the largest vendors of decision-support software, enables some of the world's largest organizations to produce sophisticated, detailed reports on any facet of their operation. More than 900 companies -- including CVS, Blockbuster, First Union, Glaxo Wellcome, MCI Worldcom, Nike, and the U.S. Postal Service -- rely on its data-mining products. That's because the software is sophisticated enough to navigate the ongoing explosion of virtual warehouses of information and to analyze terabytes of data. National and international retailers manage their inventories better because they know which products are selling where. Insurance companies reduce fraud because they can identify irregularities hidden deep within their own data. And dotcoms and e-business units can personalize services because they can profile shoppers.

Business intelligence is nothing new. But what's different about this form of intelligence is its immediacy. Interactive intelligence, says Saylor, is information that you gather when you want to make a decision. Real-time intelligence -- information that you need to know to make a decision -- is far more valuable. It's the information that you can act on the instant that inventory levels dip below a certain threshold, or the moment that one of your stocks drops by 10%. Instead of constantly monitoring the situation yourself, you receive only the relevant information. That's the whole concept behind MicroStrategy's Strategy.com: When a set of predefined conditions occurs, its software sends an automated alert to your pager, fax machine, or cell-phone, so you can respond instantly -- by, say, changing travel plans or selling a stock -- y just pressing a button. MicroStrategy calls that "closing the loop," which is the logical and valuable next step. "If I can control a transaction, I can control the world," says Saylor. "The transaction is the fulcrum of the economy."

Strategy.com is also the name of the business unit devoted to making that vision a reality. Today, the unit is still in its infancy, and the content its software provides is limited to stocks, weather, and news. But Saylor believes so adamantly in its potential and in the value of real-time traffic, travel, crime, and health alerts that MicroStrategy is spending $100 million to build a personal-intelligence network. The success of the network depends on consumers' willingness to provide personal information, which, in turn, depends on trust. Once consumers realize the network's value and are assured of its security, Saylor believes that they will deposit personal data like medical records into the network much as they deposit money into a bank. The company predicts that between 1999 and 2003, the number of digital, wireless cell-phone users in the United States will nearly triple to more than 80 million. And because MicroStrategy wants to be ready for those customers, it's assembled one of the world's largest Dell NT server systems to store millions of subscriber profiles.

Strategy.com has signed up more than 50 affiliates, including Ameritrade, EarthLink Network Inc., Metrocall Inc., NCR, usatoday.com, and WashingtonPost.com. And 120,000 individual subscribers have signed up, mainly through those affiliates' sites. As a result, Strategy.com sends more than 200,000 alerts or regularly scheduled reports a day, including messages to MicroStrategists who are following their company's stock as it continues its meteoric rise.

Among those MicroStrategists is Saylor, who receives the local weather forecast on his bedside cell-phone every morning along with an email of personalized news (including links to stories that mention Saylor, MicroStrategy, or 18 of its competitors) as well as George Will's latest column. "I'm embarrassed to say that I sometimes get messages saying, 'You've lost $279 million,' " Saylor says. "Recently, I was in a morning-long meeting, and at 11 AM, I got an alert that our stock had risen by $8. People notice things like that. My job is to convince them to see the value in this sort of intelligence."