Strategy Inc (MSTR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Hello, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon from wherever you are. Welcome to the Heartlands User Group session. I'm glad that you all make it today. I am Joe Mayberger. I'm the Sales Director for MicroStrategy. And as my background suggests, I'm in St. Louis and it's cloudy outside, a little rainy. I'm part of a team that's based in the Heartlands, and our team is assigned to work with you, our customers. Like most of you, we've had to make some changes to some of our programs to support the work at home that's in effect in so many states. And one of the programs that our customers were asking about were virtual user groups, right? Hosting user group sessions since we cannot get together, how can we do this via Zoom conferencing in our case. And that's what today's program is all about. For today's sessions, we've invited customers from our entire region to attend and even those outside of our region to participate. What we'll do today, if you can advance the slide, Vasant, for today's session, we'll spend some time on a quick update of the latest release, which is MicroStrategy 2020 Update 1. And then we'll talk about what we're cooking up in development. After that, we'll hear from [Cal Trulson]. He's from Casey's General Stores, and he's going to talk about how they went through their journey to get on to MicroStrategy and how it's been effective for their business. After that, one of our sales engineers, Evan Williams, he's been doing quite a bit of work on COVID analysis for some of our customers. And we've asked him to do a live demo of some of the things he's showing, so it will be a quick demo. And then we'll hear from Aaron Ehrlich. Aaron's from Meredith, the company that you may know is a publisher of magazines. And he's going to talk about how they went through an acquisition and how to consolidate their platforms. Throughout the day, if you have questions, thoughts, things like that, there is a chat button at the bottom of your screen. There's also a Q&A button, and both the chat and the Q&A places will be monitored today. And then at the end, we ask you to stick around. We'll have a poll asking questions about the usefulness of this, any additional content you might want to have, things like that. So again, appreciate you spending some time with us this morning. I hope everyone has been safe and doing well. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Vasant Paranjpe, and Vasant is going to talk about our MicroStrategy 2020 Update 1.

Thanks, Joe. Good morning, everybody, or good afternoon, to being where you are. My name is Vasant Paranjpe, as Joe said. I'm the Director of Sales Engineering over in the Heartlands, so I've got responsibility for the folks that you guys have been working with throughout the Heartlands, the central region and even up into Canada. I've been with MicroStrategy for about 6 years now. I was a SE before this. And I've been in analytics for a little longer than I'd choose to disclose. But with that, we're going to run you through a couple of the key points that came out in MicroStrategy 2020 Update 1. I want to just kind of have this slide up here as a refresher, just to remind everybody what our release strategy is. What we tried to do as a company is be a little bit more predictable in when our releases come out. So every Q4, you can depend on a platform release that allows an extended support. And every quarter, we'll give you some updates. So where we're at right now is if you're on MicroStrategy 2020 Update 1 is the latest and greatest. And if you're still on 2019, we do have Update 5 out for you. So we're going to go about the 3 main topics, the areas. We're going to go through modern analytics, open architecture and talk about things for the platform. So the first thing I want to call out for the modern architecture is I really like the fact that we've extended our hyper to include barcodes out of the box. So as you can see in the video that's playing, you take your hyper application on your 'iOS or Android device, point it to a barcode and it'll support most of the common barcodes and QR codes that are out there, and now you've got an analytics app and you've got your data out to everybody that has an Android or iOS phone. Think about folks that are walking through stores, need to do inventory management, you put a new card down to someone's iOS device, they scan a physical piece of inventory, a piece of asset, a patient tracking, if you walk into medical facilities, really quick for folks that are using MicroStrategy to push the analytics out and not worry about the delivery mechanisms. In 2020, we've -- hopefully, everyone has had a chance to play with the free-form layouts. In Update 1, we've done a few more things on usability to make it even easier for you to make some really compelling dashboards and Dossiers out of here. A few things that are the usability things are the ease to duplicate objects, if you get your formatting right in one little quadrant of your dashboard and you want to go ahead and duplicate it out, makes it really easier for your analysts to create these Dossiers, get everything lined up, format things properly and just all the usability stuff. So we're continually improving on things like that. This is a pretty popular one out of there. So when Dossiers introduced in library, library is a nice clean interface for your end users to get to all the visualizations of data Dossiers. But you have to go to individual visualization panes to get data exported out to Excel. What we're doing now is on the share menu that you've seen where you can either send a link, export things out to PDF, we have a nice export option that will get to your grid-based visualizations out into Excel in one click. So it just makes it a little bit more streamlined for your end users to consume the data that they've been dealing with, that they've been using in Dossiers. Really excited for this one for anyone that has a mobile application, so contextual deep linking, so what is contextual deep linking? Think about your MicroStrategy application right now. So in this case, we have an Android device, has a retail application that was built up at MicroStrategy, got lots of great content in there, but what if you want to take another piece of action on it. So in a scenario, imagine that you have an inventory report on your application in MicroStrategy, and you want to go flip over to a third-party application, that, well, has maybe a reorder screen in it. So what deep linking means is if you're on the screen and you're looking at the quantity for product 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, with deep linking, you can go jump from the MicroStrategy application to a third-party application, pass along context, so you'll know that I'm looking in a particular store that I'm in. You're going to pass over the 1,2,3,4,5 as the item, and it just continues to flow into other applications, really powerful. Depends on the URL schemes, both in iOS and Android and -- sorry, URL schemes in iOS or Android intents. So really cool stuff if you have some mobile apps out there. And the last one, we're going to really touch about on the modern analytics, this is a really cool usability feature as well. So if you have an application out there on a mobile application, we already know that our mobile applications take your locations if your locations services or not. Before, if you had an Esri map out of there, you'd have to pinch and zoom, get yourselves zoomed into that little pinpoint. This will give the ability to have your maps auto zoom in, great for anyone that has a mobile sales force or folks that are on the road, pull up your application and then your map is going to automatically zoom right into your current location. Just saves a couple of key interactions or swipes that a user would have to do on their device, making them more productive. All right. I'm just going to remind everybody, as Joe said, we've got the Q&A open. We've got the chats going. So if you do have any questions on any of the stuff that we're talking about, throw those questions over into the chat or the Q&A, and we'll answer them as they come across. All right. So moving on to open architecture. What's new for open architecture in Update 1? For 2020, as in the recent past, we've given you an updated interface to get data out of MicroStrategy into Excel. And with 2020 Update 1, we're doing a nicer way of really tweaking that UI and the UX. So things that we've done is you're able to look at a Dossier, the bookmarks that you've created in your existing Dossiers, you'll be able to leverage them within the UX, so pulling the data into Excel, a little bit of improvements on getting the refreshed data to come down properly. Again, it's really usability that's been the key tenet of this. So things like toggling on and off, subtotals, getting the attribute forms in a separate column just makes it a lot nicer to get the data from your Dossiers off into your Excel document. Federated, we've been talking about federated a lot, right? So we want to get everyone out there using MicroStrategy in whatever way, shape and form that you want to consume it. Obviously, we'd love for you to do it within MicroStrategy, but we've [extended] out the Connector federated. Update 1 is now the Power BI Connector, is going to be available out of the box if you have Power -- sorry, the MicroStrategy connector for Power BI is going to be available out of the box for Power BI desktop. Saves your users the steps. If they're using power BI to go download another connector, they don't have to worry about security permissions. We're certified by Microsoft to work with their environment. So it just takes another point of friction away from your end users if they choose to use Power BI. Another one where we're taking some of the rough edges off of our connectors. So MicroStrategy for Jupyter and Our Studio was released a little bit ago. What we've done in Update 1 is we've cleaned up the UX, easier for your data scientists to get into MicroStrategy, find an available data set, pull some data in. Two things to point out on here. We're always trying to get data faster to folks. So we've worked on some of our APIs in the back end, you should see anywhere from a 2 to 5x improvement in importing data down from your MicroStrategy environment into either Our Studio or Jupyter for your data scientists into the work. The other thing, data science, open source technologies are always evolving. We try to keep on top of that. So now we do have a certification for Python 3.8, if that is what your data science teams are using. All right. And the last thing that we really want to talk about, the open architecture. This is what I'm kind of excited about. For anyone that's used our cloud platform, we've had a facility called MicroStrategy backup or MSTR Back. We're able to take an environment in AWS but with one click, a few clicks, back it up, back your metadata of your cubes, your caches, everything that's in the configuration systems, your ODBC settings, all the fun stuff that makes the MicroStrategy environment really your own environment. You take all of the data that's in there on that backup, you're able to, in a couple of clicks, 15 minutes, restore that environment into a new AWS environment used for testing your production upgrades, for sandboxing stuff or just a quick environment for migrations. What we're doing now with Update 1 is we're having -- we have all that functionality of MSTR Back available on the Azure stack now. So what that gives you is, one, if you're on the Azure stack for our cloud environment, you have all these capabilities. But it's really cool that you can take an environment from AWS and move it over to Azure. So we really want to be open with our platform strategy. So we're not locking you into a vendor. If you start your journey on AWS and you have an initiative to move over to Azure, we make it as easy as possible for you to take the data and your environment from AWS, spin up a new environment and Azure. All right. I got a couple of questions coming in to Q&A.

So one question we have out there is regarding the MicroStrategy Office connection. Is this something that many companies are using? Or is it less common for companies to be using this? Just wondering if this is popular around -- amongst MSTR customers. So I can't speak from the customer side. Maybe when you open it up to folks in the panel, if you can put your notes into the comments to see if -- how customers are actually using it. From my personal experience, there's a love/hate with this. Users tend to love this because they get their data back into Excel, folks that are on the BI side, maybe not so much because we're letting Excel back out of there. The one thing I do like to stress is I used to run a BI department before I came over to MicroStrategy. The one thing I really like about this is the data's still coming from MicroStrategy. So the key benefit to using office connectors is you're getting that governed data, everything that your teams have put in to make sure that it's trusted information. You put that data as a source for Excel. If they want to do a presentation later on in Excel, it enables your analysts to do that, but it really keeps the control out of there. And I'll -- if I see any customers that do respond with a -- either a use case at their customers, are their end users are using Excel or they're not using it or feedback, I'll share them up as we keep going through this.

All right. And the last bit of what's new for 2020 Update 1, on the platform side. One big asset we've had for HyperIntelligence is we've had the capability for users to be able to blacklist out sites so that if you don't want your cards to produce analytics on top of, say, your banking side or something like that, it was controlled on an end user basis. We're now giving your administrators the converse of that. So we're allowing your end users to create -- sorry, your administrators to create a card, say, for Salesforce. So if the cards should only work on salesforce.com, the administrators will be able to white list that card for salesforce.com. So all of our security will still be in place for data security, who can see the card, but that card will only inject analytics onto salesforce. Really powerful to allow you to build these quick cards and now really make them targeted towards a couple of applications that you're thinking about. Automatic data refresh. So this has always been a tricky point for our development teams. The whole key tenant for Hyper is things needs to be fast. It needs to be interfaced, you need to get the data, where you want it and it needs to be quickly. We use a lot of caching in cubes to make sure you get the latest data. But what we've found is not all data refreshes at the same frequency. So we're doing some techniques on the back end to enable some automatic refreshes down in Hyper web. So what this means to your end users is they're still going to get their performance because we're still going to enable caching and cubes and all the other fun stuff, but we're going to make sure that the data is refreshed in a timely manner, matching what your actual -- your data refresh cycle is. So if you have something that refreshes, say, every 20 minutes or so, the cache will automatically update on your cards, your users will get the latest and greatest out of there. This one I really like. So also on the theme of automatic data refresh. In the library application, either on your iOS or Android devices, we're doing a better job of seamlessly updating data in the background. So when you open up a Dossier, it's going to have the latest and greatest on there. You might notice when you update -- when you get the latest version of raw applications, you'll see a little note coming down the bottom that says that Dossier is updating or refreshing the background. Just a way for your end users to always have the latest and greatest without getting a Dossier, seeing it stale then having to refresh it manually. We're going to give your end users the flexibility to choose between manual and automatic. Maybe there might be use cases when you say, "Hey, I really want to look at that copy of the Dossier you had from yesterday and leave it up to me when I want to refresh it." Along with that refresh, right, so this is a nice use of our semantic graph. So you probably hear a lot of your sales engineers when they talk to you, we talk about the power and the usefulness of the semantic graph in providing the single version of the truth and ensuring your data -- your users get consistent data. We're using that semantic graph in a slightly different way here. So that downloading and automatic caching that we're talking about in library, we're going to use the data that we have within our platform. So things like platform analytics, so we know what users are using data, when they're using it, what dashboards are more popular. If an administrator hasn't scheduled an automatic update for a Dossier for me, but I tend to use this Dossier every day, all day, MicroStrategy is going to be smart enough now to say, "Hey, Vasant uses that dashboard or Dossier every morning." I'm going to go ahead and proactively push this cache down to his mobile device before I'm ready to go with my analysis. So it just makes it easier for me so that I don't want to go ask an administrator, just everything is ready to go on my device. Last thing I want to talk about on this slide, so additional stuff that kind of falls out of the context of everything else we've said. We were always doing updated drivers and gateways. So we're always trying our best to stay on top of what the industry has out there in terms of drivers and gateways. One I really want to like to call out on the gateways is we spent a lot of time tweaking and enhancing how we're pulling data from BigQuery. I know BigQuery has a lot of -- it's getting a lot of momentum in the retail space for retailers to go to BigQuery. So we're doing our part on that. But the one I really wanted to call out on here. Anyone that's been following the Google Chrome 80 SameSite setting, we know it was a pretty large change that Google put out into Chrome that affected a lot of applications, not just MicroStrategy. So with Update 1, we have added support for those changes in Chrome, so that all your users are going to be able to have their same seamless experience when they go between web and library.

All right. And then I've got one question here that says -- oops, it just got answered. Let me go over to the answered hub. What is the cube size record limit for cubes on HyperCards to work in 2020? In 2019, HyperCards have a limitation of 200,000 records. So in MicroStrategy 2020, we've upped that record limit to 500,000. And that's really going to be a limitation of what the browser cache imposes. Just kind of like what I was talking about before, is we got to play that balance between performance and getting the data out quickly -- I'm sorry, getting as much data out and making sure it's performant. All right. I'm going to look through the Q&A to see if we have anything else coming on here. I don't have any other questions open at this time to share with the team. So I'll keep -- I'll be on the Webex. I'll keep -- or it's with Zoom, I've got to change my language. I'll make sure I keep answering the questions, but now I'm going to switch it over to my colleague, Rich Rodgers who's going to give us a little bit of a vision on what the road map is going to be for MicroStrategy.

Great. Thanks, Vasant. And I think I'm going to start my video. There we go. All right. And whoever asked that question, it was a nice segue into what I'm going to talk about. Actually, like Vasant said, the limitation is 500 records. And we do that because the browser needs to continue to perform. And what we found actually is that the browser cache, once you get above that limit, it starts to degrade in performance. And it actually -- we've seen instances where it actually fails and it crashes, the browser that is. So we've imposed that limit to maintain the browser performance and sustainability. But, as I'm going to talk about here in a minute, there is a new feature that we're releasing called pattern matching, which actually allows you to get above that 500,000 ceiling because there are many cases where people have a long list of either customer records or products and whatnot, and so we'll talk about how pattern matching helps with that. There are ways to get around that today actually by separating your data, of course, into chunks that is less than 500,000 records. But anyway, let's -- we'd love to talk to you more about that. If you have a specific challenge on that, please let us know, and we'd love to take it up with you. So Vasant, can you just verify that you're seeing my screen?

Not yet, Rich.

Okay. Awesome. Great. So I'm going to talk about -- build on what Vasant showed. There's a lot of really exciting stuff that we released in 2020. And Update 1 actually was very exciting as well. There's a lot in Update 1. But I'm going to talk to you about some of the stuff that's coming in the next couple of quarters. And of course, whenever we talk about stuff that isn't released yet, we have to remind you that it is still in development. I'm going to talk to you about things that are targeted for the very near term. But there is, of course, that chance that they get delayed, or not delivered at all because it's a road map. Yes?

Can you stop and reshare your screen? We're having a -- we have a couple of comments that you're not -- they're not able to see your screen right now.

Yes. Let me try. Let me try to do that. Let's see. Zoom, share screen, share desktop, share. How about now?

Beautiful. I see our lovely safe harbor statement. Thank you.

Right, yes. So whoever couldn't see it, you missed it. And so it's a road map. But the things I'm going to talk to you about are actually very near. And in fact, we're looking for feedback on these things now. And I think most of you know, we have a program, the early adopter program. It's also been called the release candidate validation program. So we are looking for people to -- customers to play with this and give us feedback. So any of the things I'm going to talk about now in the next 10 minutes, if you have an interest, please contact your account exec and sales engineer, and we will work with you to get this in your hands and get your feedback. And so you know the details of what's coming. I think it's pretty exciting. I'll just handpick a few things that I'm going to talk about that are coming. Of course, we have a lot of -- a lot more things coming between now and the end of the year here with 2020. All right. Let's start. So building on the theme of -- of Hyper, we have the -- what we call the JavaScript library. You've probably heard this call the Hyper API or the Hyper SDK. Essentially, what this does is it removes the need to have a browser extension. Right now, you have to have a Chromium-based browser, which essentially is Chrome or Edge. You have to install the extension from the Chrome Store and a way you'd go. That's no longer necessary with this, right? And so what that means is you don't have to worry about what your end user -- what browser they have, you don't have to maintain a plug-in and make sure that they've -- or it's just not maintained it, but make sure that they have the plug-in installed. This will work on any browser, in fact, any web-based application that you have because it's JavaScript and it's embedded in the actual page itself. So what that means is these have to be sites or applications or pages, but you have the ability to control, right? So oftentimes, this will be your own internal portal. This will be a web page that you might display to your customers or your partners. And so if you have control of the web page, you simply embed the JavaScript into that page or domain. And you can control what HyperCards they see, who sees them. But again, it's really nice because it removes the need for the extension and makes it available on any browser. All right. Now we're going to talk about pattern matching. So this is really the way to get around that limit -- one of the ways to get around that 500,000 limit. And so what it does is instead of pulling all the data from the card into the browser cache, what it does is it pulls patterns. And when we talk about pattern, think about a phone number, right? You have an area code, a dash or parenthesis around it and then two number -- three numbers - four numbers, a social security number, maybe a product idea, SKU, a customer number, right? We all have intelligent-based numbering systems that we use, UPC codes, et cetera. So all you have to do is to find the pattern that you're looking for. And then the pattern doesn't get -- the Hyper will search for that pattern on your page. And then once it hovers -- recognizes that pattern, it doesn't do the search into the actual data set until you click on it. So what that means is, essentially, it's only storing the patterns in the cache and then very quickly goes and hits an in-memory cube and pulls in the data. So we've maintained the performance, but now we've gotten it so companies with hundreds of thousands of SKUs or customers can operate and Hyper works seamlessly over that. All right. Now continuing with Hyper, we have made it much easier to share cards. So what's happening today is customers are taking snapshots, right? I mean we all have smartphones. So we can easily just take a picture of it and then copy it into our photos and then write a text or an email and then go pull it from the photos and do it that way. Well, that is air-prone, that is time-consuming. So we wanted to make it easier. So we did. So if you see here, what's going to happen is I'm simply going to look for -- look up -- do a lookup, I found this company, [Spencer and Touch.] Here's the card. I have the ability to focus in on it, so I can see the buttons more clearly, right? In this case, just going to paste it into an email, right? I could air drop it. I could do all the gestures that you could normally do with sharing on a phone. But in this case, I just decided to paste it into an email, it pastes the card. It's a nice resolution. You can see, it has those rounded corners, et cetera. And now I can just type my email and send it, right? The same what happened with the text, so making the ability to share cards. So this is on mobile. Now let's look about how we're doing this on web. If I can advance the slides. There we go. So on web, obviously, it's a little bit different but very similar, as you'll see. When I hover over [Spencer and Touch], I get the card, and you'll notice in the header, I just have this copy/paste again, right? So I click it. And now it's into my clipboard, right? Once it's in my clipboard, I can jump to whatever application, whether it's email, whether it's a PowerPoint, whether it's a Word doc, whatever, paste it in, resize it, and now I have a copy of that card. All right. Very simple stuff, but as you can see, very efficient and useful for end users. Moving on. We're going to talk about one of the other things we're putting in place for Hyper. If you attended World, you heard about this. This is the next, I'd say, big step, one of the next big steps. I mean the Hyper SDK and API is a very big step. But this one is triggers, right? So this is actually taking the information on a card. Remember, a card is going to have summary level information from a variety of data sources at your fingertips, right? It's going to just appear to you. But what are you going to do with that information, right? Sometimes it will just allow you to be more informed to make a decision. But a lot of times, you're going to want to take action, right? In this case, you might want to approve a quote, right? So what we're going to do is we put buttons on the card. You can see them here. When you press the button, it's actually going to complete a transaction in another system. So we've had selected systems that we're working with and accessing their APIs, passing them the data from the cards and actually completing the transaction, right? So you can imagine things like approving a quote, approving an expense report. Maybe you're in the last iteration of your bonus cycle or raise approvals, and you want to just quickly go through them and approve them. If you're in retail and/or managing a number of units of stock, you -- instead of just saying you need to reorder and a card indicating that the stock is low, you might want to place that order, right, and actually specify the quantity. So we can actually capture data as well and pass it. So here, I'm going to show you a couple of examples. Here is in an email, getting a list of quotes, the quotes have HyperCards, and you can simply hit approve or reject. The next one here. This one has a little video behind it. This is looking at Workday and maybe you're looking at -- or you're looking at data from Workday, and you can hover over the person, the HyperCard comes up, you get the information, you pay their bonus. This completes the action and completes the transaction in Workday. Another example here I have is in an email, maybe you'll want to send a reminder to renew a subscription, maybe you'll want to schedule a meeting to talk about that. So creating a meeting in calendar or sending an email, right? So simple gestures, but again, very fast, very efficient and allowing you to take action. The whole idea of triggers is, after you have that information from your HyperCard, taking the next step and actually completing the action, right? Rather than jumping into another system, logging in, remembering who you were, navigating to the certain page or place where you need to do it and then completing the action. So this is going to save people a lot of time and make it efficient. Okay. So the last topic is I want to move a completely different kind of area of the product, which is containers. So many of you, our customer base has been waiting for this, and we are very near. We have customers doing containerized deployments today. But they're kind of doing it on their own, a lot of times with help from us. We've worked with many customers to do it. But now we're making it out of the box and mainstream. And so if those of you -- if you're not familiar with containers, I have a one-page kind of overview on it. But containers are what you'd commonly hear as, as Docker or Dockerization or Kubernetes, right? So we are providing this. Containers provide for kind of the ultimate flexibility. So the options suit really any deployment model, right, from automated deployment or managed services. We are releasing containers on all 3 of the major public cloud platforms. Azure and Amazon, which you know we work on today with our Cloud Console. But Google, right, has its Kubernetes engine. And containers was really our answer on how to best deploy on Google Cloud products, so GCP. So the other thing containers does is it really allows us to horizontally scale, right, because each of these containers essentially is a service or one of the MicroStrategy's servers and we can horizontally scale out. Today, we can vertically scale very well by just adding more horsepower to the devices that are deployed on the cloud, but now you can horizontally scale as well with containers. And again, it really allows -- it's -- you can monitor it remotely or locally, and it really is kind of OS dependent, right? So not only the backup and restore that Vasant was talking about, about being able to move from one cloud environment or on-premise to a cloud and vice versa. But this really is your container, you can simply pick it up and move it to another OS, another cloud or on-premise, and it is the same. So that is kind of the virtue and value of containers, okay? This is kind of one slide just for those who may not be as familiar with containers, right? These are the things -- the tenets that we see that containers offers, right? It really is speed to really move, maintain, deploy horizontally and vertically scale. It makes it completely portable, very efficient. And you don't have to worry about what's operating system or things working in one environment and not another because it's all contained within the container. So there you go. Those are the things that are coming very near term. Like I said, there's a lot more coming in this year for 2020. But these are the things that are very near, and we're looking for customers to raise their hands. So if you're interested in any of these areas, remember, we covered the Hyper SDK. We covered the sharing. We covered triggers, and we covered containers. So if you're interested, please let your AE know, and we'd love to talk to you more and set you up with some hands-on experience and get your feedback.

Thanks, Rich. We have one question for you. So along the same notes of Hyper, do you plan to add any other visualizations like bar charts, et cetera? Right now the only charts available are ring charts and HyperCards.

We do. We're actually adding more visualizations in general to MicroStrategy. We partner with a few people for that today, and we have our own, and we are adding to those. And we are going to be adding more to the HyperCards as well. HyperCards are interesting, right? Like Vasant already mentioned, the -- one of the things we really love, we -- anytime we add a feature to a HyperCard, we have to make sure it performs, right? It's instantaneous, right? It's sub second response. So it's not going to have a full set of visualizations, but we do have more coming. So if you have an idea of a specific one you'd like, please let us know, but we do have some on tap that we plan on releasing very soon.

Awesome. Thank you, Rich. I think that was the last question that we have on the Q&A.

All right. Well, like you, Vasant, I'll be online. So if more questions come in, we'll be happy to jump on and answer them.

And for all our customers out there, Rich is our Vice President in our product management organization. If you would like us to do a -- an individual session with your organization, please contact your account executive. Rich has been able -- in the past has been able to come on site, but we can do a session like this talking about our road map and getting input from you, our customers on what you think would be valuable to us. Thanks, Rich. So next, we've asked [Cal Trulson] to talk a little bit about things going on at Casey's. And Cal is a BI analyst at Casey's General Stores, headquartered in Des Moines. Over the past 3 years, he's been responsible for training all MicroStrategy users, communicating requirements across their BI team, doing data analysis, acting as a scrub master and developing reports within MicroStrategy. He has a degree in management information systems and has acted in many capacities for the BI Team at Casey's. Thanks, Cal. Interested in hearing your story here.

Thanks, Joe. All right. So for those of you that don't know about Casey's General Stores, we're at a Midwest company. Like Joe said, we are located in Des Moines, headquartered actually in Ankeny, and we have 2,200 stores. With everything going on right now, there's been some impacts and some closings on our stores with the COVID cases. But I'll kind of talk about some of the things we've been doing recently to kind of combat everything that's going on in the world. So what is Casey's? We're the fourth largest convenient store and the fifth largest pizza business in the United States. We average around $7.2 billion in revenue. And again, this slide's a little bit stale, but we have 2,200 stores across 16 states, and we're continuing to grow. We employ roughly 38,000 team members and we are in cities of less than 5,000 population or less, and that's kind of like our key footprint. The history of our success comes from these small town community service areas where we can actually drop in the store and serve as not only a pizza shop, but also a grocery store for the communities. Some of the things we've been doing to get back to our communities has been the implementation of our Rewards platform, where now, instead of using your points when you purchase at Casey's for your own stuff, you can actually donate to the schools that service in those areas. So it's kind of a cool part of a way that we can actually give back to the company by using our Rewards platform. We're not only just known for our pizza, but also our gasoline. So hopefully, you guys continue to fill up during these crazy times where everyone's stuck inside. I know it's pretty nice going to these gas pumps and paying about $1.50 per gallon rather than the $2.30 that we were at last year. So now we're going to talk about MicroStrategy. So before we implemented MicroStrategy, we had all these old IT systems that -- we actually had some very dirty data going through. And that data was actually coming through on spreadsheets and sometimes, they were even coming through on Word documents, which was very inefficient and difficult for our management to process and to act on. So we had to figure out what kind of BI system we'd implement. And I know there's Tableau, Power BI and MicroStrategy. Ultimately, we decided to choose MicroStrategy and that was the only platform we decided to go with. We didn't want to go through managing all different kinds of different BI tools because then we'd have a bunch of data in separate places. And our team is about 13 people. So the bandwidth to manage all those sources would be very difficult having developers on both the MicroStrategy side, the Power BI side and maybe a Tableau side as well. So three steps that we used: we kind of went through an adaptation step and then an operational step; and then on top of all that was a credibility of what we were doing is actually accurate and worth it. From an adaptation standpoint, we had to teach the users how to use a new tool, a new way to look at data. So now not only do you just get a spreadsheet with a page of data that is for 50 stores, non-aggregatable and you have to kind of pick through it all. You have to pull this data into another source, where you can actually do calculations on it. Now everything can be done in this MicroStrategy tool, which was, for some people that were not very tech savvy, a pretty big leap forward within their technical skills. From an operational standpoint, we had to figure out who would use it, who can see what, so do we have some of the more sensitive data out there that we don't want some groups to access, so one example is credit card numbers. Obviously, we don't want to have some people working out in the field, accessing our credit card information because it's sensitive data. From a credibility standpoint, we also had to prove that, "Hey, these numbers that we're giving you in this new tool are correct and right numbers that you're used to seeing. But now when it goes into an Excel file, that number still remains the same." Traditionally, there's been a lot of data kept on spreadsheets where, all of a sudden, one day, it's another -- one number and the next day it's another. So it's very difficult for us to push these new reports out with the correct -- with information that everyone trusted. Everyone always went back to the old system and say, "Well, I want to match these two numbers together," which was ultimately a waste of time. So here's an example of kind of a templated grid report that we built. And we found great success using a report with kind of some of the key KPI metrics that our business asked for. Again, changing the mindset of the business is very difficult to do. It was a new concept, a new team. We had to clean a lot of the data that came into our data warehouse as well as find a new way to get into these sort of untapped data sources. One example would be Opus. Our fuel team utilized this data to figure out terminal pricing, so how do we now tap into that system to integrate all this data so there isn't five different moving pieces that people are all trying to merge into Excel file. And we were successfully able to do that. Within the Business Intelligence team, we have a data team who is responsible for maintaining and bringing in new sources into the data warehouse. We have a reporting team that does all the development within the schema and within the actual report development within the tool. And then the analysts who are actually using MicroStrategy to do some data analysis, some workflow planning along with that and then also assisting the business on using their tool. I've been kind of near and dear to the fuel optimization team when it comes to MicroStrategy. When this group came in, we had actually no centralized fuel pricing teams. Everything was done at the stores. And our field team was very, very -- they had a very scarce amount of data. So they basically had, "Hey, here's how many gallons I sold yesterday, and here's the cost of it." And now we have -- we have integrated and implemented a wide array of sources for that. The field team has been split up into the retail pricing team and the procurement team. So how do we price fuel and how do we buy fuel? From a retail pricing standpoint, we are able to help them with volume forecasting. We can do some predictive analysis based on some historical weather data. There's some geospatial analysis that can be done within Esri, a tool that we've kind of used within the MicroStrategy Dossier, and we've actually purchased license for the full tool. We can also look at our historical comps to figure out how did we price last year or were we even correctly priced? One of the jokes we kind of said around Christmastime was we were basically giving gas away, as Christmas presents for how poorly priced they were because we didn't have this data to actually implement and figure out the most optimal pricing based on our costs. We've also implemented a trickle feed where our fuel pricing team can actually see gallon -- the gallon movement throughout our company throughout each hour a day. Now this is light years ahead of where they could see this prior to bringing in MicroStrategy because one of the main fuel reporting we had that was by hour, actually came out every month. So imagine managing a rapidly changing business on a month prior to your execution. It's extremely difficult to do. And now with the ability to drill into each of these hours by store, products or even some of the management hierarchies we have was a huge leap in the right direction for our MicroStrategy and Business Intelligence group. From an operations standpoint, this was kind of our biggest struggle when it came to rolling out to everyone. So when we first started out, we rolled out to a lot of the internal business groups within Casey's. And then we decided, you know what, let's throw some reporting out into the field, and we're going to try and figure out how do we manage the regional managers, district managers and area supervisors. With all in, it's probably a group of about 500 people with varying skill levels. We've got people that are super confident using some of this -- some technologies, and we have people I don't want to see a computer in their hand one bit. So what we did is we decided to do what we call our roadshow, where we actually went in person to each of these regions where we have stores. In total, we went to eight different regions that encompass all 16 states, actually sat down and had working sessions with regional managers and district managers. What we tried striving for in those meetings was the comfortability of using our tool as well as having kind of that face-to-face interaction that kind of breaks the barrier for people to come and ask questions, provide feedback and ultimately, get better at using this tool and then, in turn, ultimately better manage their business. We've created these snapshots that we kind of worked through during these sessions. So kind of a quick go here, here's all your data, and we're going to actually put some buttons in this dashboard that if you think there is an issue with your hours, you can hit that green tab or that green button, and that'll actually take you to a page with visualizations for the hours. So super, super beneficial for someone to go in, they see their stores are highlighted red. Now I can go in, now I can see visuals, and now I can really dig deep into this data. With all the COVID-19 stuff going on, we actually were pulled into a lot of analysis on store profitability. We had a lot of stores that we were able to close due to this analysis because we were able to track what store -- which store is close to another Casey's in the area. For those of you that are familiar with Casey's, sometimes we tend to build stores on top of each other, it seems like. But it's very beneficial because we can close one store and direct traffic to another, or maybe we can cut hours because one of them has a pizza kitchen and the other does not. What we recently have been doing, which is on the plus side of things, is we've actually been trying to figure out what stores do we need to actually extend our hours on because we've cut them due to the COVID-19 and things are kind of starting to open up. What we did is we checked on the first hour of operation and the last hour of operations and actually built a MicroStrategy report that it's kind of like a what-if analysis. So what if I have 50% of my customers in the first half hour of opening, and it actually is greater than my average? So if I'm saying I'm taking a 50% cut and my profitability is still going to be higher than what it would be throughout the rest of the day, that means we have people that are basically standing there waiting to open the doors. So that report would then shoot out a number that would say, you know what, we have 1,600 stores that we need to actually extend the hours from 5:00 a.m. to 6 -- to 4:00 a.m. and get that store open sooner. We have some sensitive data on those dashboards because it's actually -- we actually have down to the hour of profitability. So that's why there's not a screenshot of those. So that's what I had today to share. Happy to take any questions. I can shoot screenshots and talk about any sort of other dashboards that we've done in the past as well for any of you that are interested. MicroStrategy has been a huge -- it's been a huge impact to not only Casey's as a BI team, but it's actually been a huge impact to our company as a whole. Our senior leadership team, they sit and churn through these reports come out every morning. So MicroStrategy team, it's been a great journey.

Thanks, Cal. That's a great presentation you have out there. I'm sure that Casey's love the fact that you guys stopped giving gas away, but I'm sure I would have loved a little bit of free gas coming through your stations every once in a while.

Yes. Pretty hard to make money when you're selling it for less than the cost of it.

All right. I got one question in here for you. How has COVID impacted the volume or analytics you do? More dashboards or reports, more requests, et cetera?

Yes. So actually, when all the COVID stuff first started off, our requests actually just went through the roof. I think I was probably in meetings for two or three days straight on how can we analyze profitability on these stores quicker in a more efficient way than our -- we'll just go through a blanket out and say, every store, we're going to cut two hours, and then that's it. We have an executive report that gets sent out every morning that has our guest counts for the prior day. It has all of our category sales for the prior day. And all these numbers are read. So people would think, all right, you know what, let's just cut store hours. We're losing money all over the place. Once they brought in our BI team and we built some of these tools for them, there's kind of this big sigh of relief of "Oh, now I have this dashboard that if I'm managing these 10 stores, I can see. You know what? Maybe I have three stores that I can close entirely. They're near another Casey store. They are just -- they're bleeding in sales, but the other one that's nearby is actually doing okay. So we can kind of rattle that traffic." So a lot of the reporting during the COVID era -- or during this time, I guess, is centered around when do we need to operate our stores? And how many people are in those stores? So if we have six people, six Casey's team members working, do we need to start spreading those out? Or do we say, "You know what, let's have someone that's working between either of those stores." And the biggest thing is when a store does get hit by COVID, so let's say there's a case that happened maybe in that area of the store and that person either visited the store or they worked in a store, there was a lot of impact analysis that needed to be done. So yes, we've been super, super busy during this time.

That's great. And one of the comments that came on was, I think you answered it while you were speaking, it sounds like we're doing a lot more near to real time than any weekly batches or anything like that with this data, which is awesome. One more question. Are you doing anything to track employee safety?

So one thing we're doing -- like we're not really tracking. We don't have any health metrics or anything like that, so if a case does come in, we're not doing that sort of analysis on trying to track who was in contact with who. But we do know who was in the store, the time that they were actually working in the store. So if there is a case, we can say, "All right, this person was in the store from 6:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and now we can figure out of that group, who's all kind of inside -- who was all in that store with that person?"

Awesome. It's a great use for analytics, probably not the best dashboard that we want to create, but definitely a good use of the data that we have up there.

Yes. And we do have some sort of dashboarding where we've kind of tailored towards some what-if analysis dashboards recently, too. So actually, having some user input in them, which has been super cool to use.

Nice. All right. Anyone else from the audience have any more questions for Cal that we can answer while he's still on? I'm sure if we get more questions, we'll manage that.

Cool. All right. Well, thank you again, Cal. I really thought that was a great presentation, tied in a lot of good uses of how you're using MicroStrategies and benefits out of it, also that you guys are pivoting with the latest and greatest. And on that note, one of the SEs in the central, Evan Williams is actually going to give a quick little demo of how he's been helping some of his customers enhance some of the existing applications you have out there with some new data that's really focused around all the stuff going on with COVID. So Evan, I'm going to stop sharing, and I will hand over the sharing to you since you are going to be doing a live demo here.

So thanks, Vasant. So yes, as Vasant said, I've been working with a number of customers in our region. I primarily work with large health insurance companies and health care providers. So obviously, there's a lot of interest in COVID-19 from them. And one of our customers came to us and said, "This is all so new. We don't really have a good pathway to report on this, and we need to start figuring out how we're going to get metrics around COVID-19 into our existing analytics." And the two kind of main requirements they had are that we have to be able to get this done very, very quickly. This is going to be a new data source. We don't have time to do a huge ETL project. We don't have time to build a huge new application to support this. We've got to just get this out there. And then the other requirement was the data has to be easily accessible. So every single person across the organization is going to be asking about this in different capacities. We can't depend on everyone being super data-driven or technically proficient in analytics. We need to be able to service these list of people regardless of their technical ability. And so what we put together was kind of a proof-of-concepts around how we could do that HyperIntelligence. And I will share my screen now and kind of walk through what we put together. So interestingly enough, the application -- one of the applications they were using for their existing analytics, at this point in time, was Cognos-driven, which is what you see here. But they did not want to put in the time or energy investment into modifying the front of Cognos. So what we put together is a HyperCard that could kind of just hover over, in this case, a company name. So one of these health insurance providers who has members out at different companies, they want to know how many members are making claims related to COVID or making calls related to COVID. And so instead of saying, well, we need to go out and do a huge ETL project, pull all this data into our existing data set, then go back into this legacy Cognos application that we weren't planning on enhancing at all and do some UI redesign, retrain people on how to use it, how to find that data, instead using HyperIntelligence, you can just hover over your key terms and instantly get those really important metrics. So by doing this is HyperIntelligence, you're meeting both of those requirements, right? You're meeting the speed requirement, speed to delivery because you can just very quickly build a microchip out of your data set and build a card on top of it. This is something that could be done in under a day very easily. And then you're meeting that kind of speed of data access requirement because you don't need to do any work as far as opening up different dashboards, drilling through analytics, relearning how this tool works, you just hover over the term and instantly get that data. So that's kind of one of the huge advantages of HyperIntelligence is having that ability from the speed to delivery and speed of data access perspective. And this is something that really we see interest in, obviously, for companies like health insurance companies, health care providers, but even as we heard in the presentation on Casey's, right? There's use cases across every single industry for figuring out how is COVID impacting your performance, your bottom line, safety, all that stuff and Hyper can be a really good way to deliver that information. Beyond the kind of quick access within existing applications, also, what's great about Hyper is the ability to use it as a way to navigate around the -- all the different applications that you use throughout your day and still have that data right there. So we can easily jump out from this kind of traditional dashboarding-based application into an email and then we have that same card show up right in our email. And what I really, really love about HyperIntelligence for Outlook and for email is that beyond meeting that requirement of very, very quick access to data, kind of providing this data in context with the stuff you're doing anyway, such as email, you're also taking a medium that's kind of inherently insecure and making it much more secure. So here, we don't have any private information in the email. All the email says is 3M company. So if I were to forward this email on to someone outside my organization, someone who shouldn't have access to this data, then either they're not going to have the Hyper add-in, so they won't see the HyperCard. Or maybe they do have the Hyper add-in, but because this is all backed up by MicroStrategy's security, then they're not going to see the card at all or they're not going to see private or privileged data. So that's another really, really great advantage to implementing stuff like this with Hyper is the ability to securitize email and maintain really, really rapid communication, rapid collaboration around this type of really important data during this crisis while making sure you're not just delivering private or privileged information to people who shouldn't have it. And then the last thing is just kind of the ability to use it to drill down to additional levels of detail. So it's really, really great to get that quick snapshot of data. It's really, really great to have a card that maybe is going to answer some pretty good percentage of the questions you have, but it's not going to be the case that a single HyperCard is always going to answer every single question you have. So the ability to use that card to then drill deeper into other applications, again, have different cards that can pop up, you've got kind of a high level card, now we're down to the individual patient card. And then you can drill further, once again, out of traditional analytics applications and into enterprise applications that your various employees are using every day. So this use case was around COVID, was around health care providers and payers. But using Hyper in this type of way is relevant during this time for COVID-type data across pretty much any industry you can think of. And then even beyond the current state of affairs, anytime you want to very, very rapidly deploy a new area of analytics and you want to do that without necessarily making the time investment of a huge data integration projects or a UI redesign of an existing application, HyperIntelligence is a really, really great way to do that. So what I would say is, if you're interested in anything like this, reach out to your account team. We have a really, really cool process in place where we actually host virtual hyper design workshops where we'll gather some stakeholders from your organization, work together to come up with some concepts for HyperIntelligence and then do a very, very rapid fire PoC to deliver these cards in a way that you can test out and see if this is something that could provide some value to. So that's what I wanted to cover. Are there any questions?

Awesome. Thanks, Evan. So just 2 questions came up. One, how is this different than InfoWindows?

Yes. Great. So this is different from InfoWindows because this works across any application. So InfoWindow and MicroStrategy is basically, you can click on a text field or an attribute or metric in MicroStrategy and have an InfoWindow pop up with some additional detail. But as we've seen here, the HyperCard works -- here, I'm in Salesforce. Here, I'm in Cognos. Here, I am in Outlook. So if you build a dashboard of MicroStrategy with an InfoWindow, that's a really great way to get a quick glance within that MicroStrategy dashboard. But if you want to have the same type of quick glance of data delivered to your users regardless of where they're doing their work and what application they're in or what workflow they're undertaking, that's something you can really only do with HyperIntelligence.

Awesome. Thank you, Evan. Any other questions for Evan? All right. I got a yes from Darren. I guess that means he's got another question. All right. We'll let him queue up that question while we -- does it still require the same overhead that InfoWindows do? No. It's got a -- it's a different mechanism than InfoWindows and dashboards, right? So in dashboards, we're really pulling all the workload into MicroStrategy. And then the extra data set and all the other fun stuff that we do in InfoWindows is going to drag down -- has the potential to impact the performance of the dashboard. But this is really -- as we've kind of touched upon throughout the presentation today, the whole tenet behind Hyper was speed of that insight. So we're trying to do our best to not have any overhead on your calling application. So InfoWindows transfers a lot of data for just the window itself. And so what we're trying to do is we're going to match up those keywords. So those cards that Evan showed, all we're going to put around is once we get a keyword match, those 8 or 10 elements of data that are on that HyperCard, that's the only things that are going to be pulled across the wire. So it's really fast, and we're going to get all that stuff down there. All right. I got some applause. Thank you, Darren. Awesome. I love it. All right. And I think that's the last question. So I think we'll move on to the next topic, Joe.

Excellent. Excellent Great job, Evan. One of the things he did describe at the very end was the design thinking for Hyper. It is a program that we can bring to your organization to help identify business cases and business uses of it. As a matter of fact, Meredith Corporation, they went through design thinking on Hyper looking at some different applications that they can enhance. And once COVID hit, we slowed down a little bit, but I think going forward, there's things that Meredith is looking at to say, "Hey, this technology is of high use to us." But Aaron's not going to really talk about that. Aaron Ehrlich is a Senior Systems Engineer at Meredith. He began his career as a software developer and has been working with MicroStrategy and BI for about 4 years. He's worked on a number of different projects, including dashboarding, advanced analytics and infrastructure. In his free time, Aaron enjoys playing music, and he's very good. He has a great band, attempting CrossFit Workouts and reading paperback sci-fi novels. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Aaron Ehrlich and have him talk about his journey.

Thanks, Joe. I'll give you a word of warning now. My slide deck will not be as fancy as Cal's but it's going to be a lot of fun. So hopefully, you enjoy this. I'm going to share a little bit about our journey. But first, I'd like to start with some -- let's see if this is working here. Here we go. Let me go back one. So I thought a fun snappy name for this, it's called consolidation station. So you'll see a train theme with this as we go on. All right. A little bit about Meredith. Ah, this goes. Here we go. All right. Meredith is a publishing, media, digital and local media company. We have brands such as Better Homes & Gardens, PEOPLE, Allrecipes, Martha Stewart, Magnolia Journal, Rachael Ray, pretty much any sort of magazine that you would see in a dentist's office or that you probably have lying around your house, Meredith had something to do with it likely. As far as a business intelligence perspective, Meredith is a very data-driven company, more so than you would even realize. We use data to work with our customers for publishing. We have all sorts of lists and customer profiles for print magazine subscriptions, but we also use our data. We have a very large swath of website data that we use as well as we have taxonomy and all sorts of search engine optimization. We have a really wide -- use very advanced data uses that we use at Meredith. And our Business Intelligence team and our MicroStrategy is just a piece of that puzzle that works into all of it. Meredith is a global company. It's based primarily in Des Moines, but we have about 8,000 employees all around the world. So I'm on the phone, basically every day with people in New York City or Bangalore, India or Seattle, Washington, and we talk to people all the time from Atlanta, Georgia, pretty much anywhere there's Meredith influence. We serve about 200 million customers. So a majority of that is millennial women. So we have a really large user base, which, as you can imagine, leads to a really large base of data. Small detail to note was that Meredith actually acquired Time Inc. in 2018. That's when I joined Meredith. I wasn't with Time Inc., but I joined Meredith about the time that we were starting this big merger. And it was a pretty wild undertaking, but everything's kind of settled now, and we're really cruising in a good group. And what I wanted to talk about was how we integrated the Time MicroStrategy environment with the Meredith legacy MicroStrategy environment. Both companies were already existing customers of MicroStrategy and they had their own systems and I was brought on, and my boss said, "All right, Aaron, we need you to integrate both these systems." So it was quite the journey, and I'm going to share some with it. To start, I have some diagrams. You'll see that Time, just called the legacy environment one, had about 18 servers and it was Linux on AWS. So they had servers for just about everything. They had their own server for Object Manager, and all of it was built on the cloud. For Meredith, we had about 15 servers, and they're all Windows 2008 servers, some are even 2003 servers, and it was all an on-prem solution. I think the legacy Meredith version was on version 10.4, and the Time version was on 10.11. So we had a big version discrepancy, a lot of different projects, as you can imagine, and the infrastructure was totally different. So I had two totally different things that we had to bring into one. So talking about the process. You can see in the background, I have a subway, all the different choices we could choose for the path. So this is the path that we followed. First, we picked the server. I should note that this was a migration -- a partial migration from on-prem to the cloud, and we are fortunate to have our own little AWS team. So I was talking a lot with our AWS server administrator. And we picked out a really large -- technically, it's called an R5, 12xlarge AWS instance, EC2 instance. So what you need to know about that is that it was just a really, really big server that has 48 cores. When I run disc-free memory -- free memory command in the Bash script, that's showing like 300 gigabytes of memory available. So we really wanted a hefty place to handle all the user requests. So I basically had this blank slate of a server and started to set up the MicroStrategy environment. So that meant I had to grab and move all of our metadata, the metadata databases, the statistics database, the history list database, like set all of those up in a MySQL database. So I had to set up that connection between the new server and a MySQL server, and we copied over some of the metadata and I'll get into that a little bit more later, but I had to set up the connection, and I started to build. Of course, I installed MicroStrategy on Linux. And I should note that if you look at cloud instances, the Linux operating systems are a lot cheaper than the Windows operating systems. And a big goal with Meredith was to save money and try to accomplish a lot, consolidated what we call synergy savings, which is the idea of just running more efficiently to save on our cost of doing business. So we went with Linux. I didn't know anything about Linux before. I did a little bit of Linux in college. So this was just diving in the deep end. I was looking up textbooks and doing a lot of Google searches on how to do things in Linux, and it turned out to be a pretty fun process to learn. A little scary at times, as you can imagine, but we made it through. So I installed MicroStrategy, we had a lot of preliminaries that we needed to install. So we had to pick Java version, right, installed Java, I set it up, so it was accessible to all the applications. Previously, on our Windows service I had administered, we just used IAS, but on Linux it's a little different. So we actually use Tomcat server, which is an open source web server. So I had to learn how web servers work and how Tomcat web server works. And we set up an instance there, was able to deploy a completely new blank slate MicroStrategy. I think it was version 10.11 when I started. And we set up all of our ODBC connectors. So as you can imagine, we have a lot of data sources at Meredith. So I was -- had to set up connectors for Snowflake for Oracle for Teradata, for Redshift databases, and the list goes on. So fortunately, a lot of those data drivers were already in the box, but some of those other ones, we had to figure out how to install an ODBC on a Linux system. And it turned out to be okay. We also were upgrading our authentication. So if you think about it, we had all these employees from one organization and all the other employees from the other organization, and we were bringing them under one really big active directory repository, right? So the network or the account management team decided to upgrade their security as well. So we went to state-of-the-art, SAML, single sign-on with Azure AD. So that was its own process figuring out how to integrate. And so instead of just doing LDAP, which is like a lookup for AD, we were integrating with another cloud solution. Azure AD is a cloud solution for Active Directory. And so with the SAML, the SAML SSO, SAML single sign-on, we needed to establish keys and trust connections and certificates that needed to figure out how to run SSL, make the Tomcat server run with a secure protocol and have their own keys. So that was a lot of integration. I would say the single sign-on was the most challenging element of this whole process. But we figured it out. We made it through. Another aspect of it was I wanted to set up a load balancer and port forwarding. We were a little bit adventurous with this in that we decided we're going to put our web server and our applications server all on the same box. So that means I installed the Intelligence server on this really big server. And I also installed Tomcat on this really big server. And we used a lot of -- we used the load balancer upfront just to kind of manage things, see what's going on. Also, I had to establish new DNS entries to make sure that it plays in the network and it's accessible to our users, from wherever they're accessing in the world, right? So we need people from India being able to access the website that is hosted on this server, which was hosted in Virginia. So we're really traveling around the world with this. Another thing I was really interested in platform analytics. I still am interested in platform analytics. So we set up a new project for that and use the out-of-the-box platform analytics, and we have that run and cooking. It's really Kuai set up a little report that sends to me to show me what the daily usage is. And we've had a lot of fun. That's actually come in very handy, so I highly recommend installing platform analytics and to get that rolling for your system, it's proved very useful. Okay. Next thing I needed to do, so I had this blank -- blank slate, empty MicroStrategy server set up ready to rock. I had to get all the content from our previous environments into one. So MicroStrategy has this really treaty handy tool called project duplicator. So I would -- basically, I run this for 24 projects and I copied it over and what it does is it pulls metadata and copies it into our new metadata database. And I had an interesting challenge with that. I'll share later. Next, we had to transition our users. So I tried to be sneaky about this in that we set up some automatic forwarding on our old servers. So we actually got into our old servers and had it that anytime somebody accessed that URL, we set up a rule, so it would send us to the new URL. So for the most part, that caught everybody. If anybody else got stuck, they would just message us anyways so then I could just hand them the new link and they'd go, "Well, that works, you're a genius." And I would say, "Yes. Yes, thank you. I am." Just kidding. We also had to transition our subscriptions. So a lot of subscriptions, we just interacted with the users, asked them what they still wanted. I sent out a lot of email surveys during this time to see if people still wanted their accounts and also to see if they still wanted their subscriptions. We used a lot of the administrative tools to access that. Also, there are processes that popped up. Some of this we just discovered as we went. But for example, we had a process where our ETL server would trigger, had a little Python job that would trigger a command manager script and send off all these subscriptions. And I set this whole thing up and we stopped the old one and then we had users asking us the next day, "Hey, where are my reports?" And it turns out it was a subscription that was set up like 10 years ago, so I just had to copy that over, repoint some things. Run a little Python in the process, and we got that process worked in and everything's -- everybody's happy now, which is good. And then finally, we had to go through the shutdown process of our old servers because we still had all these things still spinning. So with that, it's a little scary to push the off button, but we've survived so far. So that's good. Next, I'm going to talk through some of the challenges that we face doing this. So in case you ever find yourself in this situation, I'm going to share these things. Maybe it will be handy. If not, it's just something kind of interesting to hear about. So I'll try to keep it high level. Okay. So I mentioned before, we have at our Time servers on one version, we had our legacy Meredith servers, or another version on old servers. And I tried to upgrade the old servers and the servers were too old, so I was stuck in a version. So I had to hack, hack and find a backdoor way. So I actually installed another intelligent server on my personal laptop, this guy was the real MVP. So I installed an intelligence server on my laptop, and I brought over everything -- it was the same version as the legacy servers. So I brought over everything. Then I upgraded that server. Then I brought everything back over, and then I was able to copy it over to our actual server. So that was kind of a fun experience. I pushed my laptop to the limits. There was another issue with single sign-on to try to make it like a high level. What was happening is we had a lot of users logging on. And then the first screen they you would see is error and single sign-on. And I check everything was working as expected. There were no error messages. There's some sort of weird thing going on. Well, I had to look through. I have this screenshot attached. I moved through all of our bad models in the MicroStrategy for our Tomcat server, so there were just a bunch of XML files, a bunch of Java files. You can probably look at it, too, if you can get into the admin. But I looked through and actually worked the support for this. I found a setting where users who are authenticated with Windows had a different time out, so they had a different expiration date than the MicroStrategy default expiration date. So I just needed to extend the expiration date in our web settings to match the Microsoft expiration date for their account with single sign-on in Azure AD and it finally worked. So that was a very big relief to have that done. Also, we have a lot of subscriptions out there. And some of them are all -- you're looking at a list of 100 subscriptions, and you're thinking, does everybody still use this? What's going on? So we just had to work with the users to do that. Another thing that we thought would be kind of cool to do was we wanted to have a load bouncer. We basically took a snapshot of the server every day as a backup, and we had it on the dock, ready to go in case our server ever stopped. So the idea would be our server goes sideways, production emergency, like the picture I have in the background, server catches on fire or something, right, or basically catches on fire. So then this load balancer would say, "Okay, time for me to whip up this other image." And it did. It worked. We would have a copy of the server. But just with the setting of it, it would actually create a whole new server identity with a new IP address and everything. So we did that once, and then I was testing it out. And then all the people worked in building reports were saying, "I can't access MicroStrategy anymore, what happened?" Well, the server address changed. So we decided that it wasn't a very good solution. So we just keep an image. We take a backup of the server every day. And then if it ever goes sideways, we can just restore that server and it will keep the address, or we just have to change it once. Another big thing we had was our cubes and our caches were using too much memory, and the challenge is, okay, did we -- how do we set up our computers -- or how do we set up our server to manage all this memory? Well, really handy thing with our Linux system and with AWS, talked to the server administrator. And he said, "Well, I can just add a terabyte of data. You just have to mount it on to your server" and I say, "Yes, please." So we mounted on another big -- forget what it's called, but just I imagine it, it's like a giant USB stick that's a terabyte. So we moved all of our Intelligent Cubes to be stored on there, and that freed up a lot of memory for our server as far as storage, not necessarily computing power, but just storage. And then another aspect with setting up any new server is you have a lot of permissions that you need to check. For example, I started this -- we built this whole thing. And then you had to be a certain user on the server to start the application. So the community, MicroStrategy community has a lot of valuable knowledge articles where you can figure out how to change the permission, so you can start with the same user and everything works as expected. So that was very hopeful. This was a challenging task, but we -- finally, we got it done, and we're very happy with it. So to go with the train theme, I had to include a train with a jet engine attached to it, which was a real thing. That's kind of what I feel like with our MicroStrategy environment now. We're like a supercharged server. So like I said, we have a worldwide support team. So we have people in Des Moines, people in New York, people in India that all can access and administer this environment. We have about 700 licenses. We have a lot of users that use it all across the world. And it's kind of funny. There are people that use MicroStrategy that I don't even really know what they're doing in there. But we got their project over and it's working and they're all happy. So it's kind of a funny thing if you think about it. We have at least 24 projects. They're increasing. So I took a really far zoomed out picture. You can see our environment, right? Like our users don't see this, but any admin can go in and see like, wow, we have a lot of things going on. From our platform analytics, we can see that we run thousands of jobs a day, which is cool to know that people are in there using our data and using this great tool. Like I said, we consolidated, so we just have one big dev server and one really big cloud server. So we really were able to save costs and kind of keep things simpler too, easier to follow. And so far, it's worked all right. So that was a bit adventures. I was nervous about just having one server, but so far, it's worked okay. We have -- as part of our data, we have URL data. So that's by page on all of our websites usage statistics, like our visits, how long people stayed on that page, where they bounced or what other pages they visited after that. So we have this enormous set of data, and it was clogging up all of our other tools. And we really have users that wanted to interact with it like a live data source. So we used our mounted memory and loaded up a 60-gigabyte queue of URL details. And people -- our users can now go in and interact with it like it's nothing. So that's really cool, and that's a really strong aspect of MicroStrategy. Also, on like another side of it, is we have a lot of salespeople getting in with -- reported in through Salesforce. So we have a lot of new salespeople are interacting with that. That's another big part of Meredith's business, is cutting deals with advertisers and sales agreements and retail agreements. Like we have a partnership with Walmart, right? So it was really important to get our data into Salesforce and all these other tools that people are using that just want a quick data. Also, we're looking at hyper integration. So like the Salesforce integration would be a use case for HyperIntelligence. We also know like internally, the whole company works on Jira, which is a ticketing software workflow, piece of software. So using hyper integration, especially with Outlook, would be really helpful to reduce and consolidate our workflow to save time. So just for fun, I knew approximately how much money we're saving a year from doing this server consolidation. So I did some comparison. So with the amount of money we saved, we could buy a company, Lamborghini. We could buy some prime Des Moines real estate. Or my favorite, we could buy a 1.5-acre tropical island, if we wanted to. So I ran this by my boss's boss. And we still don't have a company Lamborghini or a tropical island yet, but I'm still holding out. Finally, a very important piece is this is a plug for our Des Moines area, MicroStrategy user group. If you want to participate in our user group, we talk about all sorts of things. I know that Casey's guys like to come. And we just like to hang out, talk about things that we're doing to answer questions, so MicroStrategy, Jared and Joe are there, and we just talk through things. There's free pizza and there's beer. We meet at a cool local brewery, one of my favorite local breweries, I might add, here in Des Moines and there's free pizza. If nothing else, you can come just to hang out and have free pizza. You can just email me at that email I have listed there, [email protected]. And I have a good visualization to demonstrate the effects of the user group right here. You'll see his name on the left, not very happy; and then adding the user group, a little more happy, way more excited. It was good stuff. So that's about all I had. Thanks for listening. I know it's a little more technical and a lot of things there. But if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Thank you.

I don't think you're lame at all.

Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

You got one taker at least for me. The next time we get out there for some free pizza and local brewery, I'm in. Yes.

That's good. That's what I like to hear.

All give a second to see if anyone has any questions, please those into chat.

And Linux is your friend. I think you just been nominated to be in the de Facto Heartlands and is User Group Linux expert now, Aaron.

Yes, I'll take it. It's kind of like the manual transmission of operating systems. I like that.

All right. Well, thank you, Aaron. Great presentation, really liked it. Definitely loved the jet engines on the train. That was fantastic. Good stuff. Good stuff. So yes. So I want to thank everyone for participating today. I just have a couple of things that I wanted to mention to everyone, and then Scott's going to launch the poll for some questions, and please answer those if you can. But I want to let everyone know that we have extended the pre-education program that we started in March. That pre-education allows you access to all of our online education resources. And that's been extended through May 15. So if you have not had a chance to take advantage of it, please do so. Secondly is we are working with our customers to provide a production upgrade. And if you are looking to do an upgrade and need additional resources or want some additional resource availability to you, please contact either your account executive or Tom Maloney, our Professional Services Director for the region, who many of you know. Lastly is we mentioned these HyperIntelligence workshops and pilots. So those are available and can be done remotely. We have a pretty efficient process. And so again, contact your account executive or sales engineer. We'd like to put those in place. Other than that, we've got just a couple more seconds here on the polling. Appreciate everyone's participation and commitment to being here today. Hopefully, this was a good experience. And we will find out if we could do these again in the future. With that, let's give another 15 seconds for the polling and then we will end our meeting. Okay. Thank you, everyone. Have a great day.