Strategy Inc (MSTR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. We're going to get started. Thank you, everyone, for joining us for our Federal Executive User Group: Positioning for the Future. I just want to go over a housekeeping -- a few housekeeping items. [Operator Instructions] Don't forget to fill out the survey after the session as we really do value your feedback, and join us on social media to join the intelligence conversation. So today, we're pleased to be joined by several VIP speakers, our customers, who will share their insights and experiences with you today, including Mike Piscotty, Ryan Alldredge and Kathryn Whitaker from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; JP Krieger from Datastrong, who works with the FBI; Dawayne Pretlor from NASA; and John Nelson from the Army Combat Readiness Center. Our MicroStrategy speakers include Ozzie Nelson, who's our Executive Vice President and General Manager of Public Sector; Phong Le, who's our Senior Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer; Saurabh Abhyankar, who's our Executive VP of Marketing; Clayton Myers, who's our Senior VP and Product Owner for Cloud; and Ryan DeLone, our Sales Director. Our agenda today will include a welcome and introductory remarks from Ozzie and Phong, followed by insights from Dawayne at NASA. Then we'll hear trends in cloud computing by Clayton Myers, a MicroStrategy 2020 upgrade -- update, I'm sorry, from Saurabh, and excuse me, there's an error on this slide. We'll then hear from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. And then JP Krieger from Datastrong, who will talk about transaction services of the FBI, and then we'll move into our discussion and Q&A, which will feature John Nelson from Army CRC. And with that, I'll hand things over to you, Ozzie.

Hi [ Donna ], thank you for that -- for the introduction. Everyone on the call, on the video, we really appreciate you joining us today. I joined MicroStrategy about 15 months ago with the charter to really invest and grow in the federal business. And part of those efforts, we started a series of users groups, and this is the second one that we've had since I've been at MicroStrategy. The first we did in in-person at our headquarters in Tysons. And obviously, with the pandemic that we're all dealing with, we're now doing this virtually. The good news about this is we can hold a lot more people virtually than we can in in-person, and I know a lot of you couldn't travel to our user groups in the past. So this is actually might end up being a better forum for us. So I'm very excited that you're all here. We have a very packed agenda. Because we're using Zoom, we're trying to keep everything very short and to the point. If there's anything that, to your questions, you don't get answered in this session or you have follow-on questions, please reach out to anyone in the federal team, and we'll get back to you with those. But I'm going to go ahead and cut my remarks short to keep with that theory and turn it over to Phong Le. Phong is our COO and CFO, and Phong has been with MicroStrategy for about 5 years and is the leader behind getting MicroStrategy to reinvest further in federal. It has been a huge champion for our business over the last 15 months. So hopefully, all of you on the call have seen the results of that investment. But I want to turn it over to him to kick this off. So Phong, thank you for taking time out of your schedule to join us. Over to you.

Thanks, Ozzie. It's obviously a pleasure to be here and to talk to this esteemed audience. It's always an honor, a privilege to see you take time out of your day to spend time with MicroStrategy, learn more about us, invest in us and for us to share back with you what's happening in the analytics environment today, given all the changes that we've seen. So thanks to those who are customers who've joined today, thanks to those who are looking at MicroStrategy and considering us. I also do want to thank our partners. We have several partners who have joined this conversation and obviously are essential to our ecosystem and our business. And I do want to thank the Army Combat Readiness Center for joining and leading the Q&A at the end and being a newer customer to MicroStrategy and also using HyperIntelligence. So for all of that, I thank you. I'll give you some brief thoughts on what we're seeing overall in the analytics industry. I have the great privilege of talking to hundreds of customers and seeing, generally speaking, the macroeconomic impacts, the pandemic impacts and what that's causing companies that think about from an analytics perspective. So I'll talk about sort of a few trends that we're seeing. And then we'll go a little further into one of those, which is the cloud trend. First trend, we see when we have, I'll call it, a global recession, and we saw this in 2008, I would say, with analytics and with software in general, a flight to what I'll call safety, right? So people tend to go look for things that are the most important during these times. They want software that's highly secure. They want to make sure that they have software that's highly scalable and that's extremely stable and something that you can count on. That's why we've been a company for 30 years. We've been public for 20 years. We pride ourselves in product first as a company. And when we talk about product, we want to be able to work at scale, whether that be large enterprises, large government agencies and entities. And so these are typically good times for companies like ours, like MicroStrategy to rise because folks will reinvest in the things that they currently have in place that are operating and working well. A few maybe more discrete micro trends that we're seeing. Crowd analytics is an area that, obviously, you're hearing a lot about social distancing, companies returning to the workforce, companies returning to serving their customers. And so it's an area that MicroStrategy obviously does well, understanding through whether it be mapping technologies or other geospatial technologies where crowds are, providing that information, whether it be through distribution services as a PDF report or real-time through a dossier or a library. And we're doing that for a very large entertainment and parks vendor who just recently returned to opening their parks. They're using MicroStrategy to understand where the crowds are and where they need to bring more folks, create lines, queues, et cetera. That's one area we've seen as a big focus. The next is supply chain analytics. As you know, even before COVID, global supply chains, with trade wars and et cetera, were starting to get quite disrupted; post-COVID, even more so. And to the extent that you need to know real-time where inventories are and what you need to place orders for, what you don't and when those are going to come in, we're doing that right now for a lot of large organizations. We do supply chain analytics for a large home improvement retailer in North America, and they're relying on our software to get that real-time information to make sure that everything is available when they have runs on their stores for certain types of supplies. And the third one I'll mention is survey analytics. And so surveying, for example, employees, are you home, are you safe, getting information about particular health trends with the employees and that could be done through a SurveyMonkey or just an internally built survey, providing that information real-time into dashboard and reporting and running analytics off of that. We see that become a trend more recently also among a lot of our customers and sort of the return to work workforce and also just making sure everybody is healthy and taken care of. So those are sort of 4 trends I'll talk about. The fifth one is cloud. And everyone is talking about cloud, everybody has been for a long time. But as we're trying to enable a remote workforce, trying to enable the ability to scale up and down very quickly workloads for whatever reasons to become more agile, we're seeing a lot of folks who have already been talking about moving their data sets and their analytics workloads to the cloud, seeing that happen more and more over time. So those are 5 trends that sort of a return to safety, crowd analytics, supply chain analytics, survey analytics and cloud that I just wanted to mention that we're seeing increasing over the course of the last 3 months and maybe things that you may want to consider, and of course, areas that MicroStrategy does very well in all of those. With that, I'll turn it over to Ryan, who will introduce our next panelist and speaker.

Thanks, Phong. It is my pleasure to introduce Chief Architect at NASA, Dawayne Pretlor. We've been working with Dawayne and his team for a number of years, certainly, following to your message around one of our leaders in cloud, but also has a very interesting -- a number of interesting use cases, this one's specifically around ServiceNow. So Dawayne, the floor is yours.

Thanks, Ryan. So I'll take a few minutes just to talk about, as Ryan mentioned, our use of MicroStrategy with ServiceNow. So we have an executive dashboard that we've built with MicroStrategy, and it pretty much shows our daily workload across the organization that we have here at NASA. And not the entire agency, but more so the IT organization here at headquarters. And that typical dashboard shows outages, the priority, the impact of those outages, and it shows our work management and current open IT tickets that we have. And the advantage of this was we had this information in multiple systems, what MicroStrategy allowed us to do was to pull this information mainly from ServiceNow, but from our other systems as well and be able to present it to the headquarter CIO so that he could view all of the information in one spot without trying to figure out what was happening across his organization. Our next steps with this, since we did bring up cloud, is that we're actually looking into the whole cloud -- MicroStrategy Cloud platform to help us scale up our environment as needed. And that's pretty much all I wanted to share today, Ryan.

Okay. Thanks, Dawayne. I really appreciate you joining today and sharing some of those use cases. We will send out a link actually with some of the use cases that we've ultimately built to help our customers around leveraging insights from ServiceNow. So we'll share that out with our participants today as well.

Okay.

Great. Thank you for that, Ryan, Dawayne, thank you very much for taking time. I know your schedule shifted and you had to go early. So thanks for being the first speaker, not an easy position to be in. But again, we are super excited about all the changes that are happening in the MicroStrategy federal team. One of the areas where we are getting better and improving our efforts is doing things like getting us some of these videos and these materials out to show specific use cases. So as Ryan said, we'll send that ServiceNow use case out to you all. And with that said, we have a recently promoted Head, Executive Vice President of our Marketing Efforts. So I'm thrilled to introduce our next speaker. He's been a huge fan of the federal efforts as well. And he's going to give us -- Saurabh is going to give us an overview of MicroStrategy 2020 and a quick demo on our Hyper capability. So Saurabh, again, it's always an honor to have everyone from the C-level leadership to support the federal team, so thank you for presenting.

My pleasure. Thank you all very much for being here. We actually did a federal round table as our -- when COVID happened, it was one of the first user groups that we did virtually. And I thank you all for attending that one actually. We've used it as a model for user groups that we've done around the world, we just thought it was great to have everybody together and share ideas. So today, I'm going to try to be fast, I'm going to watch my clock here. I have 10 minutes to do probably an hour-long presentation, so I'll do my best. And what I want to do basically is introduce MicroStrategy 2020 for those of you that either don't know it or maybe have forgotten about some of the things that we've been doing. And the 3 pillars of our MicroStrategy platform that we've really been talking about a lot over the past 3 years or so have been delivering modern experiences for as many users as we possibly can. And so I'll talk about some of the things that we've done there. We've always prided ourselves as being the most open platform on the market. I was going to use a term that maybe in the federal audience, this uniquely is a bad term to use, but we used to call ourselves the Switzerland of BI, which is to say that we try to be as open as we possibly can. And I think that this is a one unique situation where that term probably doesn't work so well. And finally, of course, we try to be enterprise grade, right? So these are the 3 pillars of what we do. And in fact, in each of these areas, we try to differentiate ourselves from the competition with Power BI and Tableau and others, and often actually fit into some of the things that the ecosystem around us is doing as well. So with that, without further ado, I just want to talk through those 3 areas. When it comes to modern experiences, what we're really trying to do is bring analytics to as many people as we possibly can. And when we look at the market around us, typically, what you'll see is you've got companies like Business Objects and Cognos, for example, doing a really great job of sort of enterprise analytics with reporting and things like that. You've got Tableau that does a pretty good job on sort of self-service, Power BI does that as well. But what we really try to do is give you the full breadth of capability, right? And so there's a couple of things that we've been doing with MicroStrategy 2020 around dossiers and self-service. We're really, I would say, past the finish line in many ways of a self-service product that is fully complete with free-form canvas, a number of other things I'll show you in a few minutes. We, of course, also have reporting, and we've taken our document capabilities that many of you have been deploying for a long time. We've modernized the look and feel of that. We've added some new capabilities as well and integrated that into our Workstation offering. And the #1 thing that we're really excited and proud of is we introduced HyperIntelligence when we released MicroStrategy 2020. And over the past year, there's some really exciting developments. We released HyperIntelligence for Office, which plugs into Microsoft Office and allows you to get insights right within when you're looking at e-mail. We've introduced HyperIntelligence for Mobile, which puts basically your enterprise in your pocket and gives you the cards and zero-click analytics there. And really importantly, we've gone from 0 customers when we first released it, actually, we had one customer, we had one customer when we first released it, to now having over 250 customers that have bought HyperIntelligence. Many of them have already deployed it. It's clearly one of the big differentiators in the market. And actually, we're really proud that Gartner -- I don't like to reference the analyst too often, but Gartner actually called HyperIntelligence one of the most innovative product capabilities in the space over the past number of years. So we're really excited about that. And so with that, I'm just going to do a demo of these different things to give you a better idea instead of just talking to it. So for those of you that don't know HyperIntelligence, what does it do? Basically, it's a very simple plug-in product. You plug it into Outlook, you can plug it into Chrome, you can plug it into Edge. It sits on your mobile device. And the whole idea here is to bring analytics to people in the everyday workflows that they use all the time. So this is HyperIntelligence in Outlook. And what it does, it reads through your e-mail. Just locally, by the way, it's not like sending that off in any kind of crazy way. It just looks at the words in the e-mail. And when it sees things that it can give you insights about, so if it sees an employee name or it sees a product name or it sees a place or whatever it is that you configured it for, it then says, hey, I've got something for you, and it shows that to you. I use this all the time. I get e-mails all the time about customers that I'm going to visit or meetings I'm going to have. And just having that extra little bit of information, knowing who the customer is, the pipeline, who's the account executive, I can click a button and call Ryan and get more information, things like that. It's just like magic. And I don't have to go and leave the application. Just ask yourself, how often have you gotten an e-mail and you have a question in your mind, and you know that there's some system somewhere that could potentially answer it, but you don't have time to go and get it. So Hyper does that for e-mail. It does that in really all of your web applications. And this is something where we've adjusted the messaging a little bit around Hyper. We used to talk about zero-click analytics and these kind of things. But really, if you think about it, every enterprise has all of these web applications. And all of these web applications have silos of information. And all the time, users are looking at something in Salesforce, and they need some data from ServiceNow or they need some data from some other third-party system, and they don't have that data. And then they got to go and dig it up or they just give up and guess, right? And HyperIntelligence, basically, allows you to connect those dots, allows you to bring information from all of those different applications, the most important information, and they just integrate it into the applications that people use with no code. You just deploy the plug-in and it just works. So here it is in Salesforce. And again, it's detecting something. And when you hover over it, you get an answer, really straightforward. And that's HyperIntelligence. And I could spend an hour talking about that, but I won't. And we've actually been publishing some new videos and things at our website, so if you want to know more about Hyper, just go to microstrategy.com. Or you know what, you can just ping me, I'm happy to talk to you about HyperIntelligence if you're interested. The second thing that we've done is self-service. And we've been at this for 10 years now. We started with this thing called Visual Insight, and we've incrementally been improving our self-service offering quarter after quarter after quarter. And it's like kind of the little engine that could, we feel like we've really gotten there. And so now in 2020, we've added free-form layout. We've added overlays. We've added attribute/metric selectors, a bunch of things that allow you to build really beautiful dashboards, we call them dossiers, very easily. And so here's a few examples of the kinds of dashboards that you can now build. These are completely different than what you could build before, they're really pretty and they're really easy to do, a businessperson could do this. By the way, one little secret about this particular image that you're seeing in front of you. It's called the overview of tourism in Western Europe. The engineering team, when they built a sample, they originally -- this was originally called an overview of terrorism in Western Europe and we felt like that wasn't a great way to market our product. So we changed it, and the idea is what you can do here. Here's another example, again, overlays, we've added overlays, we've added very specific relative positioning. You can use it now to build compound chart. So oftentimes, people would want a bar chart and a pie chart kind of together or a doughnut chart. They just want to have something that looks like an infographic, none of that was possible with dossiers prior to MicroStrategy 2020. And all of that is possible with dossiers in 2020 and beyond. So we're really excited about that. I'll just let this play. This is kind of what it looks like to -- what these new highly designed dossiers can look like. And we've also added a new feature called attribute/metric selectors. And this basically allows you to create dossiers that are much more interactive because you can drag and drop elements. And then the end user can just say, hey, I want to see this state or I want to see this metric, and the dashboard, the view will automatically update itself. It allows you to build much simpler dossiers, but it also allows the end user to have much more flexibility interactivity, which is really cool. And so that's just a touch on a few of the key things that we've added on the HyperIntelligence front and the dossier front. Again, I wish I had a lot more time, but we can have another meeting some other time. The second major area is around open architecture. And so a few key things here. We've opened up our platform. We've opened up our platform, and we've actually built connectors to many of the products that your users use every single day. Again, allowing you to integrate analytics into everyday workflows and allowing you to deliver consistent information from the MicroStrategy semantic graph. And so we have connectors for Excel, for Power BI, for Tableau, for Qlik, we've added new connectors for Jupyter and RStudio for all the data scientists out there. And all the way through, we're always optimizing our APIs and optimizing query performance. This is something that we've been pretty good at for a long time. We continue to move that forward. And as Clayton will talk about later, we have a full-featured offering on both AWS and Azure. So you don't have to choose somebody else's cloud, you can have full flexibility. And you can move between the 2. And if the government decides to one day choose Azure and the next day choose AWS, that would never happen, of course, you would have full flexibility to do that. So I really just don't think I have time for all these demos, but this gives you an idea of basically using the MicroStrategy connector in Excel. It's just Excel. You open up Excel and then you say, I want to connect to MicroStrategy. And then just like you're building a dossier, you're essentially just dragging and dropping or just selecting the items that you want. It has full support for our metadata, so you're selecting attributes and metrics and filters. We have prompt support now as well. And we've also recently with Update 1 added the additional ability to actually import things from dossiers. So if your business users have been in self-service and added new calculations and things in a dossier, you can also import straight from that as well, which is really cool. I mentioned data scientists a few minutes ago. I don't have -- I won't get to the whole story, but the main point really here is data scientists, they do 3 things, right? They connect to data, they do data science where they build models and then they have to operationalize that. So they need to get that out to the world. And MicroStrategy is really good at 2 of those things. We're really good at trusted data, we're really good at getting data out to lots of people via Hyper and self-service and other things. And so our connectors to Jupyter and RStudio allow the data scientists to use MicroStrategy for the trusted data, but then push that information back to MicroStrategy so you can use it in Hyper and self-service and other things as well. And so that is some of the connectors that we've done. And finally -- and I know I'm speaking really fast. And finally, on the enterprise platform front, again, a number of key things that we've always believed in, one is a single version of truth, right, with our enterprise semantic graph, we've now brought the ability to view schema objects into Workstation. And a little sneak peek of the future, we're also adding data modeling into Workstation. So with MicroStrategy 2021 planned for December, January, we're going to continue moving that forward and allowing you to work with our semantic graph in Workstation as well. We've added improvements in distribution services for people that use that. We've done a number of things that allow you to govern memory for performance. And of course, we continue to invest in security. And we've added user roles and privileges and these kinds of things into Workstation and a really awesome thing that I really recommend that you use is Platform Analytics, which allows you to really understand what's going on in your system, who's accessing what, who's using what and so forth. So this is Workstation for those of you that don't know. And the last thing I want to say is, of course, I'm a product guy, right, so I'm going to spend a lot of time talking about product, but around our product is the rest of the expertise of the company. And we just launched Free Education a few months ago. A lot of people took advantage of that. So we've got some fantastic courses and certifications for people to really use MicroStrategy in the best possible way. And of course, we've got an awesome services team as well because a lot of times, you don't have the expertise you need. It's hard to find -- analytics is so hard. It's sometimes hard to find people, hard to staff them. But we've got lots of experts that you can use and some out-of-the-box advisories to help you upgrade, help you do data science, help you do HyperIntelligence and all those things as well. And the final thing is beyond the product. As I mentioned before, we're going fully virtual. This is an example of these virtual webcasts that we're doing. We're seeing lots of traction. We're really excited about that. We have lots of great webinars that we're planning. And so we'll send those to you so you have access to those as well. And we're actually going to also be taking World 2021 fully online as well. And I think that will help connect the dots. And it just allows a lot more access to expertise. And so we're super excited about that. So with that, I thank you all very much. I do appreciate that this was a pretty quick run through MicroStrategy 2020. If you have any questions, let us know, you can ask them in the chat. And if not, you can always schedule a meeting with me through your account managers, and I'm happy to go into more detail as well. So with that, I think I'm handing it off to Clayton Myers to walk you through our cloud offering.

Absolutely. Thank you, Saurabh. And I'll try to make up for some of your time overage there as well. So over the next few minutes, I'll talk through the continued adoption of cloud within the market; some challenges that may be encountered in your journey to cloud, depending on where you are in that journey; MicroStrategy's offering and how that fits into the market; our compliance programs and some additional offerings that's relevant to this group that we'll be releasing over the next couple of quarters and then looking into next year as well. This is a slide that we put together just to show why people are adopting cloud. Phong hit on this as well, but organizations continue to adopt and invest in cloud for a number of reasons to better support their business. I've highlighted 3 here. There's many other ones that go along with this. But this accounts for a significant portion of the move to cloud value proposition. The ability to move faster allows organizations greater agility to be able to provide services to their customers, the ability to provision infrastructure and services when needed based on the changing requirements of your business, allow you to deliver applications and services at a greater pace than your previous on-premise hardware, and you get to focus more on ensuring business and operational needs are met and less on infrastructure operations and management of underlying components. This allows you to focus on your mission and deliver critical services that bring value to your organization, right, rather than focusing on some of those legacy infrastructure and hardware components that you previously had to take care of. In the improved security piece, it allows organizations to adapt quickly due to the ever-changing security landscape. Cloud brings a host of additional services and capabilities to bear to allow for easier implementation of key security controls as well as monitoring to ensure the services you deploy remain secure and provide greater insight than ever before on how your applications are performing with the ability to implement additional controls through automated response procedures as usage pattern and the security landscape changes. And then for the third bullet, to save time and money, this may be the one of the more obvious ones, but it allows you to scale quickly to meet changing demands for your customer base. Historically, with on-premise systems, you got to plan for peak load and have a projection on usage, which was typically pretty difficult to accurately predict. The cloud provides the capability to start small and scales quickly when successful applications, while also providing the capability to scale down and move applications while also providing to scale down. This removes the need for large capital expenditures upfront based on projected use and allows you to deploy resources required to meet demand at that current time. This is needed more than ever as the current landscape has changed to a shift in work from on-site work to remote work. Organizations that adopted cloud and built applications optimized for the cloud had greater success in adapting to this change, both for applications that needed to scale up quickly as they became essential during the shift to remote work as well as organizations that needed to scale down to save costs as their businesses were impacted by the number of closures or the reduced utilization. And [ Donna ], you can just put all of those up. Yes. That works perfect. So as Saurabh mentioned, this is another one from Gartner. Don't go through them too often, but I think this one hit on some of the key challenges that you may face through that. So this is just 3 of the key challenges that we took from talking through our customers and understanding their challenges and some of the ones that we actually encountered it through our journey to cloud as well. So the first one for cost optimization. In the previous slide, I talked about how the benefits of the cloud allow you to save money, but it also has the potential to cost you quite a bit of money if your applications are not optimized for the cloud, utilizing the cloud technology that's available. It does require additional work from your organization to plan for cloud to ensure you're taking advantage of those benefits and keeping a close eye on operational costs and making appropriate optimizations as your application evolve over time and throughout that life cycle. When you look at traditional lift and shift approaches, so moving all of your on-prem infrastructure into the cloud, those typically bring additional cost burden with that migration and don't take advantage of the cloud services and capabilities or an optimized base deployment. When you look at the second column for the skills gap, cloud builds off some of the current infrastructure that you have in place, your team, your processes and your procedures, but it also introduces a new way of operating with hundreds of additional services available to optimize your applications for performance, stability, security and cost. This requires a cloud-specific skill set to be executed effectively, which may take time to build up within your organization. Policies, procedures, controls may need to be reevaluated or completely rewritten to ensure they are adapted to this new operating model. All this takes time and resources and ultimately may delay your adoption of cloud. Managed services from partners from both the people and application perspective will help bridge the gap as you look to migrate to the cloud and your valuable resources as you look to move to cloud to ensure success. And the last piece, Saurabh hit on this a little bit around the ability to move between AWS and Azure, but preventing vendor lock-in. Many organizations we work with, and this comes from the Gartner report as well, are looking at a multi-cloud, both on-premise and in the public cloud as well as a hybrid cloud approach to reduce vendor lock-in and take advantages of the unique offerings of the multitude of cloud providers available today. The applications you deploy are unique, have a set of requirements that may need to be evaluated to understand where they can best be hosted to ensure they meet your unique requirements. In a hybrid cloud deployment, as an example, you may have applications deployed that require complete segmentation and deployment to an on-premise infrastructure, while also having a set of applications that need to be deployed in a public cloud provider to best meet those requirements of the business. Application portability and ability to deploy applications across a multitude of cloud providers allows you to make the right decision based on your unique needs on where to deploy your applications to best serve those customers. You can go to the next slide, [ Donna ]. Perfect. So this is just a -- there's a lot on this slide, but this covers sort of the MicroStrategy deployment methods. And we provide the ability to deploy your applications across all of these methodologies today. For the far left column with the MicroStrategy enterprise platform, you could deploy to an enterprise data center or to a public cloud provider. In this methodology for the left 2 columns, you're able to control all of the aspects of the deployment and are ultimately responsible for all of the operational considerations within that deployment. With the MicroStrategy Cloud Environment, MicroStrategy assumes control of all operational aspects of the deployment in a fully managed offering. And this is in the third column for MicroStrategy Cloud Environment. Your organization gets to focus on developing and deploying applications that bring value to your customer base while the MicroStrategy Cloud Environment operations team at MicroStrategy handles all the environment administration, security and management. And then for this group, I did add the one on the right, so sort of to the right of the red bar there. Today, we do offer AWS and Azure through their public cloud offerings. And we're actively working to expand this capability to the AWS GovCloud as well and are currently working through a number of pilots with customers, some on the call today as well. And this is expected to launch in the Q3, Q4 time line. And this will allow you to utilize AWS GovCloud, both as a MicroStrategy-hosted option as well as if you choose to go with GovCloud in a public cloud offering. Slide 4, I brought this -- put this slide together. A number of industry-recognized compliance certifications have been achieved by the MicroStrategy Cloud Environment to date, ensures we're utilizing industry-best practices, audited on a routine basis. Most important for this group, maybe the one below the red line, which is the FedRAMP certification. The MicroStrategy operations team has kicked that off. Obviously, that takes some time to make sure we have all the controls in place and that we have that audit take place. And that's planned for completion in the Q3, Q4 2021 time line, and we'd be happy to talk about that with any customers that may need that on the call today. And then the last slide, just to end my segment. I wanted to provide the offer. So the MicroStrategy Cloud pilot is now available and allows you to test drive the MicroStrategy Cloud Environment free for 90 days. So you can reach out to any of the account team members on the call today, get started with that free pilot, experience it firsthand, evaluate the offer and see how it can help accelerate your mission to the cloud for your applications. With that, I'll hand it back to Ryan to introduce the next speaker, and thank you for the time today.

Thanks, Clayton, appreciate it. I know just about every conversation I have with a number of our customers and prospective customers are always thinking about their current operations and always what does cloud mean for them and how we can help support some of their cloud-based initiatives. So thanks for that overview.

Absolutely.

And so now I'd like to introduce the Lawrence Livermore team led by Mike Piscotty, who is the Director for Enterprise Data Warehouse Solutions. I've had the pleasure of working with Mike and Kathryn and Ryan for, gosh, maybe 5 or 6 years now. You've probably -- if you've attended World, you may have seen one of their sessions around some of the mobile capabilities they've deployed with MicroStrategy. But they're going to be talking about their experience with their most recent upgrade to MicroStrategy 2020. So Mike, the floor is yours. Mike, you out there?

I could take it, Ryan. I believe he is out there, but he's not joined as a panelist. But I can take it. [ Donna ], if you'd like to go ahead and advance the next slide, I'll kind of let you know who we are and what we've been doing with MicroStrategy 2020.

I can promote Mike as a panelist if that would be of interest.

Is it -- are you guys hearing me now?

Yes. Here we go.

I could feel like I'm going to have a feedback. All right. So just be it and let Ryan handle it.

Okay. Go to -- advance to the next slide please, [ Donna ].

Sure.

Thank you. Okay. So Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is located in Northern California. We're under the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration. We were founded in 1952. And basically, our motto is science and technology on a mission. So we support the safety and security, reliability of the nation's nuclear stockpile, a term that they call stockpile stewardship, among several other areas in the science and technology space. Next slide. So we've been using MicroStrategy since 2015. We actually started with a proof of concept back on version 9. We partnered with Datastrong, who's going to be the next speaker. And they really helped us get started with that proof of concept in some of our initial installs on version 10. Since about 2016, we've been on various versions of 10.4. So most recently, we were on 10.4 hotfix 6 and I think we've been there for a couple of years. Very happy with version 10.4, by the way. That was a great release. We have 4 environments, 3 are kind of what everybody would expect, a development, QA, production, standard set of 3 there. But then we also have a fourth environment that we refer to as sandbox. So completely stand-alone, the purpose is to test new releases, any high-risk plug-ins, that type of thing, have something completely off on the side. We're currently completely on-prem in our own data center. We have been monitoring the cloud space so that was good to see in Clayton's presentation that now they're going to have FedRAMP support coming soon. So it's good to see. We'll continue to monitor that. But as of now, we're completely in our own enterprise data center. We've got an Oracle database back end so that's supporting our metadata, history lists, et cetera. Most of our warehouse connections are also Oracle, our data warehouse is Oracle. We do have a few projects on Microsoft SQL Server. But by and large, we're an Oracle shop. We've got about 30 projects and 10,000 user accounts. Of those, we have about 4,000 people who have actually used the product at one point or another, but we do make it available to everybody who has an active directory account at the laboratory. And then we're nearing the end of a multiyear migration effort. So we've had various other COTS tools such as Oracle Business Intelligence and Oracle Discoverer, Tableau, you name it, we've had it. Also a number of custom in-house solutions, and we've been focusing on standardizing on MicroStrategy for the past several years, since about 2015. And we're just about done with that effort now. Next slide, please. All right. So why did we want to upgrade to 2020? So there's a few drivers. One is the new features. So we've been monitoring the products from all the versions since 10.4, and gaining interest every single time they add something new. So by the time we get to 2020, it's really quite a large list of things that we didn't have access to if we didn't upgrade. So some examples are here on this slide, dossier, library being a couple of the main ones, Workstation, the embedding API. We do still do quite a bit of custom Java Play and Angular development. So the ability to integrate those dossiers was very important to us as well as that new REST-based Excel plug-in that we saw a demo of a few minutes ago. And then finally, Platform Analytics. We've always used enterprise manager in our previous releases, but we were very interested in gaining the near real-time ability of Platform Analytics and seeing what's going on without having to wait for an ETL process. Next driver was our operating system support. So besides being an Oracle shop, we're also a Linux shop, by and large. We had been on RHEL 6, all the way back to version 10 so that support is ending in November, so we needed to get upgraded there. And then MicroStrategy is ending their support for 10.4 after December. So that was the next driver. And we were also, at least for our intelligence servers, on physical hardware. So that physical hardware was end of life, and we made the decision that now was the time to jump in. We've had a VMware stack for quite some time, and we decided now was the time to jump in on that. So now we're fully virtual. Next slide. Okay. So here's the strategy that we took to kind of evaluate and implement 2020. So first was utilizing that stand-alone environment. We did install 2020, taking a clone of our metadata. And we don't use our production metadata for the clone, we use our development metadata that just allows our developers better access for testing the capabilities without having to make a bunch of modifications. That's worked well for us in the past and also worked well for us this time. We did test for about 30 days. We had planned to do a 3-week test, but of course, we had the coronavirus fun and work from home in there. So everybody was trying to jockey for getting the correct home office setup and VPN going. We did extend it to 30 days. And it was a combination of manual testing. We maintained a big matrix of areas of the product to test existing capabilities, new capabilities, any areas that we've been bitten by in the past, we kind of have the lessons learned. So we make sure that we test all that. We've had some automated testing as well using Integrity Manager. We'd like to expand on that for the future, but definitely trying to automate is a big help. So after the 30 days, we held a WebEx meeting with all these 20 developers and a few other stakeholders, people like Mike, and we conducted a go/no-go decision. So obviously, if there was any big showstoppers found, any customizations that we're working properly, that type of thing, we would have kind of halted there until we could feel good about it. But we conducted that poll, and it was unanimous that everybody felt 2020 was a great release and we should move forward into the remaining 3 environments, which is what we did. So we did our QA environment first, which seems like we're kind of starting in the middle. But for us, it actually works better to minimize downtime to our developers. Obviously, we're not going to start in production first. But development is very important to a lot of people. So the first one that we do there, we really wanted to make sure we had an extra day to get our documentation down, screenshots that we still wanted to take, that type of thing. So we did QA first followed by dev, followed by production, which was over a weekend. Next slide. All right. So we'll talk about what went well. And then after this slide, we've got one on what didn't go so well. So using a stand-alone environment, we thought was really key to this. You're not going to want to just start in one of your critical environments, dev or QA and say, let's wing it. You're going to want to evaluate in an environment that's completely [ optimized ]. So if you have to decide that you have a plug-in that needs to be rewritten or that type of thing, you have an opportunity to get that taken care of. The documentation is very, very good. So there's several guides that you're probably familiar with, upgrade guide, admin guide and install guide. There's a few others, all available through the MicroStrategy community. Most of these have PDFs, not all, but we did feel the documentation was done very well, and that was a big help. And kind of reviewing that before you start, it's a lot. You're not going to read it cover to cover, but you're definitely going to want to be familiar with that and the know-how to find what you need as a reference as needed. Having experience of completing those 3 other environments before we got to production really helped that weekend go well. You don't want to be stuck on a Saturday morning needing some help from your VMware team or something like that, and they're not available. And -- or if they are, it's a 4-hour response time. So knowing exactly what you're going to need and what you're going to hit, we felt was very helpful. And then also having access to staff with complementary skill sets. So you're not going to have one guy that knows everything. I don't know everything. So the guys that are better in the database administration or the Linux administration probably know a lot less about the MicroStrategy administration side of it and so forth. So having that complementary set of staff experts in their own area was really beneficial. And then finally here at the bottom, we've had 0 unplanned outages. So we've been very happy with our upgrade. We were happy on 10.4. It was stable, but we had all those drivers for wanting to move, gain the new features, be supported, and we are very happy that we have made the change. It has not gone down on us at all. We have not had any users saying, "Hey, where did all my stuff go? I don't know how to use this anymore." It's really gone great. And then next slide, talk a little bit about some lessons learned, what didn't go so well. Thank you. So we had one issue with the history list. And by the way, all these things we found before we got to production. So another big advantage of the methodology that we took is we didn't have any users hit these items. But the first one was the history list links. So as you know, you could do subscriptions to subscribe to reports that are delivered via e-mail or history list or a combination of the both. We did have issues where those URLs were not valid. It was not including the fully qualified domain name for the I-Server, one of the parameters in that URL. So we were able to find a tech note and get that resolved. That was easy to fix. Next one was our intelligence server SSL certificates had to be regenerated. So this is one that not all of you are going to hit when you upgrade, but it was something that we hit so our I-Servers have multiple names and our certificates only had one of them. So we did had to -- or have to regenerate using subject alternative names. So that was an easy fix once we realized what was needed there. And then the final one that I'll cover here is relative lengths. So we had several Visual Insight dashboards under 10.4. So that's kind of what dossiers were previously, where we had used relative URLs. So before Library, there was just MicroStrategy Web, you had consumer Visual Insight dashboard there. You can use the relative URL. So then as you develop something in your development environment and promote it to QA and promote it to production, you have the same Visual Insight dashboard in all 3, and it works appropriately. But with the introduction of Library and the ability to consume dossiers in Library, that then introduced a wrinkle, where those relative URLs were no longer valid. The URL API for Web is quite a bit different than the one for Library. So we did have to go through and fix that. And the solution we found was using the web server auto text. So that way, it will still substitute the correct web URL for the given environment and then any deep link that you had that relied on a web capability would still work. And then the final sub-bullet there is really the best way of using native linking, and then it will do the right thing, and you're not going to have to worry about Library versus Web. And the native linking is actually pretty sophisticated now in 2020, quite a bit better than it was in 10.4. So that is it from our upgrade. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak.

Ryan, thanks for sharing. I think this goes without saying we certainly value the partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Lab and the Department of Energy. So thank you for that. It was great to hear, and congratulations on such a successful upgrade. We're now going to turn it over to JP Krieger. He is the Technical Lead at Datastrong supporting our FBI customer. I will not steal his thunder, but there's some very cool and interesting things that he has done more recently around COVID. And JP, the floor is yours.

Thanks, Ryan. So I'm here to talk today about a feature of MicroStrategy that has been around for a couple of versions now, but is often we find largely underutilized and it's called Transaction Services. So what MicroStrategy Transaction Services is, is it allows you to input and manipulate data either in your data warehouse or in a transactional system from directly within your reporting tools. And what we're really seeing this allow organizations to do is evolve from simply using data to make decisions, using data to take action and ultimately realize organizational change much faster than they otherwise would. And this is a big trend that we're seeing in the industry that some organizations may not even realize that they want but -- or may not even realize that they need, but it's something that they want. They want to be able to be looking at their reports, looking at their data, understanding their data, not just making decisions, but actually taking actions on the decisions that they've made. So in a world pre-Transaction -- without the Transaction Services implementation, a typical problem might arise and you have to go out and you have to gate your data. You might have reports in dashboards available. You might have to go call someone to assemble that data for you. You get it assembled and then you have to sit there, you have to analyze it, you have to come through it, figure out what you need to do and ultimately come to a decision. Then once that decision is made, you have to go out, delegate the execution of that decision to whoever group or team is responsible for taking that done. They then have to go coordinate with their developers or their people to actually take action and then finally you realize some organizational change. That whole process can take a long time. We're talking weeks, if not months, to actually see the organizational change realize and then what's happened is new problems have sort of come up before that first problem was ever really resolved, and that's causing you to kind of always have to be reactive in solving your organization's problems without really presenting the opportunity to have some of that proactive capabilities. So when you have Transaction Services employed -- or deployed, some of those steps are terribly similar. You identify your problem, you get your data together, and then what you're able to do with Transaction Services is actually make decision, execute and act all in the same step. So we're actually now able to be looking at our reports and identify the decision we want to make and either send a data call to a transactional system to kick off a workflow that might start the process. We're able to write a data point back to our data warehouse and then instantly visualize that in a report. We're able to do all those steps in a much more simplified, unified way and realize organizational change faster. So the use cases for Transaction Services that kind of come about are emerging applications and analytics. So this is something that a lot of organizations struggle to do right now, but we think it's going to become more and more evident that it is needed in the near future. A lot of times a typical employee comes in and they probably have half a dozen, if not more, tabs open every day because they're looking at reports in one tab and they're going and updating data in another tab, and they're having to do something else in a third tab and it's easy to lose track. It's not a good user experience, and it makes it difficult to actually get your work done effectively. Transaction Services is a step towards putting those analytics and applications together. I want to look at my data and take action. Another benefit of Transaction Services, you're able to implement this very quickly. I mean sometimes business needs arise that, hey, we don't have time to deploy a whole new module in our ERP tool. We don't have time to coordinate with all these groups and all these stakeholders to get -- we need to collect this data now. And I'll talk about that when I get to my COVID use case. Transaction Services can be implemented quickly in a much more integrated and standardized way than traditional fast implementation options like standing up a SharePoint site, sending out data calls via Excel workbooks. Doing it in Transaction Services is going to create that one centralized integrated reporting solution because you're already in your reporting tool. And the big use case for Transaction Services is adding to or augmenting existing data. So your business applications exist for a specific purpose. You have Salesforce to track sales, you use ServiceNow maybe to manage your HR workflows, or you use Workday to do whatever you need to do. But sometimes you have data points that just don't quite fit in that specific application. So rather than -- instead of gathering the technical debt, customizing that application to capture whatever data point you need, you can build a Transaction Services solution that allows you to look at that data from the source system and then add or edit those specific data points off to the side, see that data instantly refreshed in your reporting application that you're already at. And the big benefit of Transaction Services is at the end of the day, we want faster results to the problems we identified. We saw problems. We want to see the change happen as quickly as possible. And because of that ability to collapse the make decision, execute and act step -- or delegate, execution and action steps into one, we've condensed that time line down considerably. So I'm going to walk through 5 use cases that we've had at the FBI, kind of go through them quickly. We rolled out our first Transaction Services solution late in 2019. So all 5 of these have gone live in roughly around the last 6 months. The first one here is personnel allocation. So at the FBI, they assign a number of workers to a division or field office based on what are called funded staffing levels. So they give you -- you get 50 other clerical workers or you get 100 of something else. And that's not very helpful to us in HR because we need to be able to know what types of positions are you recruiting for. Are you recruiting for HR specialists? Are you recruiting for data scientists? Are you computing -- or recruiting for IT specialists? We allow them to take the existing data that they're given in their source system and then using Transaction Services tell us how many of each position they want, which allowed us to truly track where their vacancies were. And kind of a follow-on to that was we were able to actually allow them to create a hiring plan. So with those allocations that they set on one report -- in one tab in the same report, actually, they were able to view where their vacancies are based on what they said they want and actually tell us how they want to staff those vacancies. Are you going to hire internally? Are you going to recruit externally? Are you going to hire an intern? So we're able to kind of not just look at a report of our vacancies, understanding our problem, we're actually able to make the decision, take the action and users are, in one simple step, able to walk out of a meeting or just on their own time with an actionable hiring plan they can take to start to staff those vacancies. A third use case we've had was for a workforce relocation application. So there's a project going on at the FBI to relocate a lot of its workforce to a new city. And those decisions involve a lot of data. So they have to track well what's the building capacity? How many buildings do we have? What divisions are going down? What happens if we take -- what percentage of the workforce is going down from that division? So all these data points were about to be gathered in various Excel spreadsheets. No one was going to be able to report on it and it was going to be a disaster to manage. We're able to stand up a Transaction Services application that allowed for all the inputting of the data. It joined up to all the rest of the data in the data warehouse and was able to create a seamless application and reporting all in one MicroStrategy interface. Fourth example of Transaction Services that we did recently was COVID response tracking. So around 3 p.m. on the day before the national emergency, our Section Chief of Analytics reached out to me and said, hey, JP, we're going to need a way to track various data about -- data points about people in response to COVID. So we stayed a little late that night, but in about 4 hours, we were able to get a page up in our MicroStrategy portal with proper security that allowed users to -- allowed supervisors to go and enter for their staff, who's going to be teleworking? What percentage of time are they going to be on site? What percentage of time are they going to be on leave? What percentage of the time are they going to be teleworking? Who's mission-critical? All that data was able to be set up, deployed out to the workforce, and we collected 95% of the FBI's data across the globe in under 24 hours. And all that data instantly fed in the same dashboard all the reports that FBI leadership needed to make educated decisions about which offices are going to need the most support getting to telework, how we're going to start to think about reintegrating now that those talks have been being had as well. And lastly, applicant projections, the one that we've rolled out recently. There was a process being managed in SharePoint that was essentially taking a large number of people a lot of time to maintain calling applicants that were scheduled to come into classes before they can onboard. And we had no way to basically report on, well, is the class going to be full? Or is it going to be overstaffed? How understaffed are we going to be? So they used to track this on SharePoint, we're able to get it into MicroStrategy where they're able to look at their list of applicants, tag which class they think they're going to project them into, and we're able to produce seamless reporting to make it very easy for executives to make decisions especially because these classes, especially the ones coming up now, have to be carefully managed in response to COVID. We're able to know how many applicants are actually able to come to this class and this upcoming one as well as [ subsequent several ]. So those are some of our use cases that we've had for Transaction Services. It's a very powerful feature. I look forward to seeing how we're going to expand on it more over the next few months. But that's sort of all I had. I'll turn it back over to you, Ryan.

Thanks, JP. I appreciate you sharing. I've been around MicroStrategy now coming up on 8 years. And one of the pieces that probably gave me the strongest feeling of what the technology and platform can provide is really evident within the FBI. Mike Marino, who leads the Human Resources division at FBI, gave a presentation, again, on MicroStrategy World a couple of months ago. And after that, his closing remark to us was that this technology is making the country safer, which gave me goosebumps. So thanks for sharing. I think it's a number of fantastic use cases. And certainly, you're leveraging the platform for -- to its fullest capabilities. So thanks again for sharing, JP. So I have the pleasure of introducing our next speaker, John Nelson with the Army Combat Readiness Center. He is the chief of application and data services, and is going to share some of the ways that MicroStrategy is being used to make sure that the Army and its readiness is actively tracked. So John, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Ryan. Can you hear me?

Yes, I can.

Thank you, Ryan, and thank you, [ Melissa ], for inviting me. I will say before I start that within our organization in a given year, we probably spend $1.2 million to $1.5 million just on software licensing. And that's probably spread across 30, 40, 45 vendors. With that said, I would say that if I had one chance to speak on behalf of any one of those vendors, MicroStrategy would be that vendor. And I will tell you why in just a minute. But we are the Army's safety center. And basically, from a data perspective, what that means is on a global scale, we are the single repository for every event that takes place that impacts readiness of the Army. So historically, we've been focused primarily on mishap reporting, but in 2014, 2015, our scope expanded to safety and occupational health. And that's important because it essentially means our scope's expanded about 500%. So we go from mishap reporting to safety inspection, safety audits, hazards management, program management, training, education, and all those different activities that comprise that overarching requirement. So in the process of doing that, we also realize that we need to build an overarching information management system and as a result, select an enterprise and business intelligence platform. So in 2016, we conducted an exhaustive analysis of alternatives and we looked at everything in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, SaaS, Tableau, Logi Analytics, Power BI, MicroStrategy, probably about 16 different vendors. In the end, MicroStrategy was head and shoulders above the rest because of the licensing model, because of the price point, because of just the overall responsiveness of the sales team and what we've discovered after the purchase after the fact, and Melissa, I give you a ton of credit for this, when we look at the enterprise support sector, I cannot say enough good things. That to me is a game changer across the board. And I will say about probably 4 to 5 months ago, we encountered an issue within our data center in which we saw dashboards that were taking 15, 20 seconds to load, at times take up to 6 minutes, which is just insane. So [ Melissa ] and her team engaged with me on what probably a 3 to 4 times per week basis to help us troubleshoot, and we spent a few weeks. In the end, we discovered it was not a MicroStrategy problem. It was an issue with one of our intelligence servers and once that machine was declustered, the problem went away. So again, it was a problem resolved, but I cannot say enough about what that's done for us. From a business intelligence standpoint, we historically have been really good at lagging indicators. And as we move forward, we've identified the need to be a little more proactive and a little more reliant on leading indicators and thus predictive analysis. So we've integrated our in the MicroStrategy. We're still in the early stages of standing that up, but it's still moving along quite well. Again, excellent support from MicroStrategy. And we have big plans going forward. So our use case is pretty straightforward. We serve, in a given year, about 550,000 unique users across the Army and across DoD. And one of the things that we love about MicroStrategy is the licensing model. So with a CPU-based licensing model, we can serve as many dashboards, as many dossiers to as many users as we can handle at no additional expense, whereas some of the competitors -- many of the competitors did not offer that model. So I mean, again, that's a great thing. And the ad hoc capability is one of the key selling points as well. So within the workspace, the user can build, from any data source we provide, his or her own reports, dashboards, dossiers. They can collaborate. They can share. And that's been one of the selling points to the Army. So the purpose of my discussion today is not technical. It's more along the lines that we love the product for numerous reasons. The company has just been stellar in its support. And we're currently on version 2019. And as soon as we do the first major rollout, we plan to initiate the 2020 upgrade probably by the fall. So that's pretty much all I have, Ryan.

John, thanks for sharing. I know we've been working with you for a number of years now, and you mentioned our enterprise support program. And for those who aren't aware, this is our commitment to you all as a customer. We are reinvesting our experts and our resources to ensure that the MicroStrategy investment that you've made is not only meeting your requirements now, but also performing to your expectations and making sure that we can meet your future requirements as those ultimately evolve. So I know the large majority of folks on the call here have leveraged that enterprise support program. And I certainly appreciate you sharing that content, John. So I want to thank everyone for joining.

We're now entering our discussion and Q&A session. I know there's some folks out there that have some questions. [Operator Instructions] I think, [ Craig ], if you're available, I know you just sent me a note, you had a question in regards to Livermore upgrade. Is that right?

I did. Yes. Thanks, Ryan. So Ryan Alldredge, great presentation, and good to hear your voice again. I had a quick question just about the change management that came along with the upgrade. You had some folks on version 10 for a long time. Just kind of curious how you guys prepared to roll out introducing new features? Did you guys do some training? Or kind of how did you manage that upgrade with all the new capabilities?

Yes. [ Craig ], good to hear your voice as well. Been a long time. Yes. So we kind of took a baby step approach into utilizing Library. So clearly, we wanted Library because it delivers all the REST APIs that we need for the Excel plug-in for the embedded analytics, et cetera, as well as just the interface itself for interacting and consuming dossiers. So we have RSDs that we refer to as hubs. So when you go to the main page of MicroStrategy, we don't show you a project list. We show you a "hub" and from there based on who you are, we'll then navigate you to appropriate areas that you're able to see, so in some cases, it's other RSDs, in some cases, it's dossiers, formerly Visual Insight dashboards. In other cases, it's just holders of traditional reports for the people that can't live without their miles and miles of tabular data. So what we did for probably 80% of the dossiers was continue to launch them into web. So really the interface in MicroStrategy Web for a dossier is not all that different from version 10.4, especially if you don't change the view where your tabs turn into the bars on the left, I forget what they call that other layout. But basically, we've left the larger majority of them alone, so more or less they looked exactly like they were. They get that pop-up at the top, and we did do a customization. So we're rebranding Library to match our branding. So our branding for MicroStrategy is LABI L-A-B-I, laboratory analytics and business intelligence. So we rebranded Library to LABI Library as opposed to MicroStrategy Library. So they'll get the blue bar at the top, saying, "Hey, would you like to experience your dossier on LABI Library?" So then it's up to them. They could decide if they like to go in there or not or remain in the interface that they're already trained up on. But for a few of them, where we were able to meet with the customers ahead of time, we did, natively from our hub, launched those dossiers right into Library. So that way, the only bar they see at the top is, "Would you like to add this to your library?" But they don't get asked if they like to launch it in Library, they're already there. And over time, we're going to have 100% of our dossiers open like that, but we didn't want to cause a lot of confusion with a drastically different interface, even though I think it's a much better interface for most users. A power user is going to want the traditional interface. But for most everybody else, they're going to prefer the new Library interface. It's just so much easier to use, cleaner, and the keyboard commands are amazing, the left and the right. So that was kind of our approach there.

And to kind of add on to what Ryan is saying too, we have this major rollout of this new enterprise stuff that we're converting. And we're going to do a lot of training with our users for that. So we expect them to kind of pick up in 2020 pretty seamlessly through that training.

Yes. Thanks for your response there. I think we've got another question from Tom Burkat with Northstrat, who is very much ingrained within our DoD and intel customer base. So Tom, thanks for asking the question. This one again is for Ryan and Kathryn at Livermore. Ryan, you mentioned you're moving away from different BI tools and decided to standardize on MicroStrategy. Can you speak to some of those factors that led to the decision?

Cost was the main one and staff training. So for every one of those tools that we owned, there had to be at least one expert to administer it and develop on it and ideally a backup. So at least 2 people dedicated to each of those products. So cost was the big driver to standardize.

And then second part -- thank you for that. Did you need to consider web customizations in your upgrade plan for white labeling, deploying custom visualization plug-ins or other extensions?

Yes. Absolutely. Yes. So I didn't call that out in my slides but we actually did. So Datastrong, Mike Carr, has a plug-in that he does for us that he had to redo for 2020, using the new SDK. And then I'm responsible for the white labeling plug-in, and I did have to rebuild that as well for 2020. So yes, we caught both of those while we're still in our stand-alone environment and we did have to develop new ones using the correct SDKs.

Okay. Great. Thanks, Ryan. Another question that came up for JP, if you're still with us. So how did you add Transaction Services to existing objects or added to brand-new reports and dashboards? I think our customers would be interested in hearing a little bit more about the approach there.

So from a technical side, really, the only thing to do with Transaction Services is you have to kind of define your -- the grain of that data point that you'd like to capture. So like if you're trying to capture an additional piece of information about a person, we would find a table in the data warehouse that we tagged as like a transaction table, and it was at the same grain as like our personnel lookup table. And then what we would do is we would create database views that our MicroStrategy reports would render off of. So what that allowed us to do was -- and then in those views, the SQL would like pull from some of their back tables and then join in those transaction data. In Transaction Services, what happens is when you actually save the rows that you've been put in, it's going to -- right to the data warehouse, and then it's going to refresh your data set. So when your data set refreshes, if it's architected against that data-based view, it's going to render the -- pull in that latest transaction data and render it. That's been sort of our deployment approach for now that's been working pretty well for us. Does that answer your question? Is that what you were looking for?

Yes, it does. Thank you. And so second part. So -- we understand that FBI and HRD is upgraded to 2020 as well. So congratulations on a smooth upgrade and accomplishing that. We're excited to see what comes next. And with that, what do you have on the road map, JP, if you're able to share? I know there's some content you probably aren't able to share. But what comes next? What are you guys working on? Where do you think the platform is going to go over the next year or so?

So for us, there's definitely a few use cases we're really interested in. We started experimenting a lot with building some of these machine learning predictive models and we're looking for the best ways to actually integrate those into our workforce. It's kind of we spent the last year building some. But ultimately, what we found is you can build it, but if you don't have a means to actually deploy it across your enterprise, what good did it do? So MicroStrategy gives us a lot of opportunities to do that. We're able to ingest those machine learning results right back into MicroStrategy via some of those plug-ins that were demoed earlier. And the other piece we're really excited about is embedding those results in HyperIntelligence so that they're actually just streamlining across your applications. We actually have a ideal use case, which I'm currently POC-ing to show some people at the Bureau, where we could be looking at a list of which positions are going to have the most vacancies across the FBI. We've had a dashboard that has the ability to slice and dice and look at that data any way you need to ultimately make your decisions. And then from in that same dashboard, you'll be able to actually prioritize which positions you want to hire. So a executive at the highest level is able to look at that list and from within the [ database ] he's making his decision, he's able to prioritize which positions he wants. That data will feed back into the data warehouse, which will then feed into a HyperIntelligence cube. And like in people's work center, where they're managing their applicants, those prioritized candidates automatically get highlighted. So in very easy steps, we're now able to prioritize our candidate list. And integrating it with AI means that we can not only say, hey, these are the underlying candidates, meaning these are the ones we might prioritize, we can go a step further and say, by the way, these are ones that have a high likelihood of coming out soon. These are ones that we predict are going to be a good hire based on their -- are going to perform well based on some of their attributes. So we're kind of really excited about integrating MicroStrategy, including HyperIntelligence and then also using some of those embedded AI features, I think it's kind of our next. On top of just continuing to roll out the dossiers, which are kind of new to us because we were on 10.4 before this. So a lot of our dossiers have already been extremely well received. And we're excited to just keep integrating those as well.

JP, thanks for sharing. Again, I think the use cases and some of the ways that you've been able to implement MicroStrategy not only provide a lot of value for the Bureau but certainly showcase the strong ways that you've partnered with your customer to make sure they can find value and deliver data in unique and new ways. So thank you, again. So with that, we are going to conclude our user group. I was looking at our participant list as we went through the session, upwards of about [Audio Gap] customers. And the last closing remark that I'll leave everyone with is our team here is 100% dedicated to anything that you need regarding MicroStrategy and more than that. We've got a strong team here, of which, I would say, the majority of folks have been here for a number of years. We have the commitment of our leadership, the entire technology team as well. So if there is ever anything you need, please reach out to me directly or your appropriate account executive or engineer because we're here for you. So thank you again for attending.

And we'd like to just promote some of our upcoming events, make them aware of those, if I could, Ryan?

Absolutely.

Okay. Thank you so much. And thank you to all our wonderful guest speakers. So we have a couple of other events coming up later this month that I think may be of interest to you. We have a DHS-focused webinar on June 18. And we'll be featuring Charlie Armstrong, who's the former CBP's CIO. We also have a defense supply chain management webinar coming up on the 23rd. And to register for those or for more information, just visit the federal page on our website. And again, as Ryan mentioned, if you have any questions about any of the content in today's presentations, just contact your account representative or your sales engineer. And your feedback is very important to us. So if you don't mind taking a few minutes to complete a quick survey, which I'm going to launch now. Thank you again.