Strategy Inc (MSTR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Audio Gap] There will be a survey at the end of the session. We'd love to get your feedback, so please fill it out. Last but not least, be sure to check out our Twitter page @MicroStrategy and share your thoughts about our webcast today using the #Analytics2020. So without further ado, I'm going to pass things off to Saurabh. Take it away, Saurabh.

Thanks, Jackie, and thank you, everybody, for joining us today. I have the unique privilege of representing the many hundreds of people in technology that have brought to us Update 2. So I'm going to walk you through that. But today, we're doing something a little bit different than we have in the past. I've got 3 awesome product managers with me. I've got Nida Imtiaz, Suchita Verma and Holly Stevens representing different parts of the portfolio. And throughout, we're going to actually be able to talk to them a little bit about some of the behind-the-scenes of how some of these technologies and features came to be as well as -- and you'll see this in a second why we have a safe harbor statement. We'll also talk a little bit about the road map and where we're going. And also, we're going to be doing some polls throughout to get your feedback because more important than what we think we should do next is really what you think we should do next. So we're going to have some polls throughout to ask you about where you think we should take different parts of our portfolio. So with that, I'm just going to jump right in, and we'll talk to Nida and Holly and Suchi later on. And let's talk about Update 2. So there's a ton of things in Update 2, over 100 new features. But if you walk away with 3 things today, it's these 3 highlights. And really, the theme of Update 2 is instantaneous access to information. And there's 3 fundamental things that we've done. Number one, we're releasing a brand-new market strategy application for Mac and for Windows that makes dossiers available to you instantaneously. It automatically caches for you. It figures out what you want, and it makes it really easy to search and find the things that you're looking for. So I'll show you a demo of that. It really speaks for itself when I show it to you live. The second thing is we've extended HyperIntelligence, with search and sharing as well. And what that allows you to do is in addition to the Zero-Click automatic HyperIntelligence cards in your browser and in Office, you can now also search for things. And again, that speaks for itself when I show it to you. But the idea here is instant access, no matter where you live, whether you're in your desktop or browser or office. And finally, sometimes, it's not information and data that you're looking for, it's expertise and help. And we have over 2,000 people here at MicroStrategy. We all live and breathe analytics in our products every single day. And we've added a brand-new feature, not just to our product to Workstation, but also to our website and to the company, called Expert.Now. And what that does is it allows you to go -- if you have an Architect Pass, if you get a 30-day trial for Architect Pass, it allows you to click a button and get pretty much instant access to an expert at MicroStrategy to help answer whatever question you might have, whether that's help me figure out how to create this kind of visualization in Dossier or I'm trying to optimize my system. Whatever it is that you need help with, you can click a button, and we're all here to help you all the time. So with that, let me just jump in and show you some of these things. Probably the biggest part of our release this quarter is the new MicroStrategy app. It's available in both the app store for Mac and for Windows. And it's a really simple lightweight app. It installs on your computer. And what it basically does is it brings the Library, which we introduced about 1.5 years ago, to your desktop. And the reason we did this, it's a fair question to ask us, why are you building another app? Why are you building another desktop app? The reason we did this is because what we realized is that one of the major barriers to analytics adoption is it just takes too long, right? It takes a long time sometimes for these dossiers or dashboards or whatever to load. And what we want to do is find a way to make it pretty much instant. And what the MicroStrategy app allows us to do is actually leverage some background processing, some smart caching and predictive caching to basically figure out for any given user what are the dossiers that they use most often and then go ahead and prefetch those on their behalf. And what that basically means that you can take these offline, because we cache them. Loading time goes basically to 0, which is really awesome. And it just really gives you a much better experience than anybody in the industry is able to deliver in any web browser. So with that, let me just do a quick demo of it. I think it really speaks for itself. So this is the new MicroStrategy app. It's got both a light mode and a dark mode. You can go into settings and change it. I'm a big dark mode fan. So you can see that it's here in dark mode. And it's the Library as you would know it, and you can just scroll through it. It scrolls really fast. And the really cool thing is, when you click on a dossier, it loads very, very quickly. And this is because we've actually been able to do some precaching. And also because it's not sitting in a browser, we're able to take more advantage of the CPU and RAM that you have on your local device. And so it loads quickly, you can then page through things. Again, very, very quick load times. This is actually one of my favorite dossiers. You can see with the free-form layout that we had in MicroStrategy 2020 just how beautiful a dossier you can actually create. But not only is it beautiful now, but it's also really fast. So this just gives you an idea of what that feels like. Let me just close that up. You end up with a new icon here in your menu bar. And you can actually go and search for things quickly. So that's [ coffee ] dossier, for example, that we just looked at. You can see here, I can just search for it. It's now synchronized. And again, I can click it and open it up. So you don't even need to have the MicroStrategy application open. You can actually just go to your menu bar. And so you might be in Microsoft Word, you might be going about your daily life. And if you're looking for a dossier, you can just quickly go into the MicroStrategy icon here, search for something. And again, you can see that there's a number here that are synced, and they're synced because it's content that I've been playing with a little bit, I've practiced for this demo, and so it recognized that these are the things that I want and it helped synchronize them for me. Automatically, I didn't have to do anything. And then, of course, you can navigate and organize these things. You can organize it by [ deep field ] and so forth. As many of you hopefully know, we have a certification feature in our portfolio, so you can specify that you only want to see certified content. And generally speaking, it's a very, very simple application. Maybe before I move on, I've got Holly here, who's a product manager for this. And this is really version 1 of the new MicroStrategy app. It has auto update and a bunch of other things. But Holly, I don't know if you want to add in anything that maybe I missed. Or talk a little bit about where we might want to go in the future?

Yes, sure. So thanks, Saurabh. So one thing to add here is notice that in the libraries panel in the top right, you can easily add new libraries and switch between them. And we keep you logged in at all times with that nice remember me function. And this is a little bit different than library web, right, where you have that pain point of having to log out and log back in, in one single library. So that's a pretty nice feature. Another thing to note is that this is really powerful for offline use, right? So we're constantly caching and syncing those dossiers. And then offline, you can switch between pages, you have bookmarks to see specific data views. So very powerful. And then in the future, you'll start to see a lot of this rich, new functionality such as hyper integration. So getting those key insights across visualizations in your dossier. So really taking that viewing to the next level. And then we also want to bring in functionalities, such as the quick ability to set KPI alerts or global annotation. So a lot of really cool road map items that you'll see in the future. So make sure to stay tuned.

Thanks, Holly. And actually, one thing both of us forgot to mention is collaboration. So for all of these dossiers, collaboration works as you would expect. You can comment on the dossiers and so forth, you get notifications. It really is a really simple, almost Netflix-like MicroStrategy experience running on your desktop really fast. So really excited about that, and I hope you enjoy it. Let me go back to my presentation. So the second thing, that was all about instant access to information on your desktop, right, on your Mac, on your PC. The second area is taking HyperIntelligence and expanding it even further. And one of the things that we saw is people, as they use HyperIntelligence, of course, hyper will show you cards based on the websites that you're browsing and things like this. But oftentimes, you want to just actively go and find things and being able to -- one of the things that people ask for is the ability to just go into the hyper extension and search for something and find it. And that's what we've added. It seems like a super simple, almost an obvious piece of functionality, but it really changes how you use the product. And what it really does is it puts fingertip access to information right in the browser. And so again, I'm going to show you that here we are in Chrome. As you can see up here, we've got HyperIntelligence installed. And it works as you normally would use HyperIntelligence. I'm on the Apple website. One of the demo cards I have enabled is a company card, which just shows you Fortune 500 companies, which Apple is one of. And so as this is hyper as you would normally expect it, right? But now, I can go in and say, well, maybe I want to learn about some other company. Maybe I want to learn about Facebook, right? And again, we've got these cards enabled. I can go search for Facebook. It supports partial search, so it doesn't have to do an exact match, the way it has to do on a web browser. And now I can just go ahead and search for things. I might want to search for companies. I might want to search for people. So here, I'd search and there's a couple of different cards. There's an employee card with a J in it, and then this is a sample card with sort of a fake person. But the point here really is for all the cards that you have enabled, you can now go into hyper and just search. And I've got to tell you, I've been in the industry now for 17 years, I hate to almost admit it. And this ability to search for content has sort of been the holy grail of analytics for a long time. And finally now, you can go into a browser, type in a couple of keywords. You don't have to go to the analytics tool. You don't have to go to a dashboard. You just type in a couple of keywords and you get the answer that you're looking for. And another thing that we've added is once you've actually found a card that you're interested in, maybe this card here or even this Apple card, we can now copy and paste it into something. So maybe I now want to share that with somebody. I might want to take it to Slack or to email. This is a demo. I've got an empty document here. I can go ahead and take that card and share it with other people as well. So that's the new hyper functionality that we have in Update 2. We actually have a bunch more that we'll talk about as we go along, but this is the one that I really wanted to highlight in this particular session. That's the second big one, search in HyperIntelligence, that works both in the browser, in edge, in Chrome as well as mobile and office as well. So that was the demo. And the last thing I want to talk about is all those situations where you're building a dossier or maybe you're an administrator and you're trying to figure out how to tune your system, whatever it might be, and you have a question. And you just wish that you could get in touch with somebody that knew MicroStrategy really well, that lived and breathes our product. Well, we have a brand-new product called Expert.Now. It's part of the Architect Pass, which actually gives you access to education and a number of other things as well. We've also included Expert.Now privileges in our premium support offerings as well. And so the whole point is you can go to our website, click the Expert.Now button, tell us what you want to know about. So there's a simple drop down menu. You can say, I want to know about Hyper or I want to know about -- I want help with Mobile or something else. You click that. We actually have assigned to all the different experts in our company, we know what they're experts in. And so what we do is we see who's available and we connect you with the expert or the potential experts for those areas. And we're trying to get it so that 80% of the time, you can connect with somebody right away. And if an expert doesn't -- happens not to be available, we know exactly when they are available and you can schedule a time at your convenience to meet with them. And then just like this call here, you get a Zoom call, you can talk to them face-to-face, you can share screens, all that sort of stuff. It's a really great way for you to get -- leverage all of this expertise that we have at MicroStrategy. And so when we think about products going forward, a product isn't just technology. A product is all the things that we can do as a company to provide value to you, our user and our customer, and we're bringing to bear, not just the technology organization, but our support organization, our consulting organization, our sales engineers, basically, everybody across the company that has expertise, and we're going to make that available to you on the fly. So we're really excited about that as well. So those are the 3 biggies, right, the 3 big parts of Update 2, and it's a significant release. But we're not done there. The technology team has been hard at work across our entire portfolio, across all the different modern user experiences, across all of our open connectors and APIs and gateways, and across our platform as well. And so I'm not going to be able to do all 100 features justice, but I'm going to try to talk through as many of these as I possibly can. So with that, let's start with our user experiences, our modern analytics experiences. And that really covers the library. It covers HyperIntelligence, Mobile, Dossiers. I'd say the biggest thing beyond those first 3 that I talked about is a number of new improvements to Dossier. And the analogy I sort of use -- you probably heard this as a kid, right, where you take a stick and if you can -- one stick, you can snap by itself really easily. But if you take a bundle of sticks or twigs, you can't really snap them because when they fit together, the sum is greater than the parts. And the features that we've added in Dossier, in many ways, the sum of all these little things that we've done, what it adds up to is a much better user experience. So what we really did is focus on how can we make the user experience better. There's a number of different things I'm going to walk you through. So let's just take a look at them. The first is the ring chart. Now the ring chart is actually not something new. We've had a ring chart for a number of years now. But to create a ring chart was always a little bit complicated. You had to create a pie chart, and then you had to go to the properties and then change the format of the pie chart to a ring chart. And so a lot of people just didn't discover it. And so we brought that out. It's now a new -- or we've added that chart to our digitalization gallery. And so it makes it much easier to create a ring chart. And because we added the overlay and transparency functionality in MicroStrategy 2020 with free-form dossier, we're seeing a lot more usage of the ring chart because people want to overlay the ring chart and the KPI on top of things like Maps and other things that you see in this demo. And so that's a simple improvement that we've made. But if you use ring charts, if you want to use ring charts, it makes life a lot easier. The second thing I want to talk about is exporting grids to Excel. This has actually had a number of improvements over the past 6 months, 9 months or so. If you just roll the clock back about 9 months, the way to export a grid to Excel was that you would have to go into the grid itself and click on the 3 little dots and then you would export that specific grid to Excel. And what we found is a lot of users just couldn't find it. They didn't know that that's where you export to Excel. And so the first thing that we did a few months ago is we actually took the export to Excel, and we put it in the main sharing and exporting menu item. Again, it sounds like a small thing, but it really helps the users a lot. And now what we've done in Update 2 is make it possible to export a number of grids all at the same time. And so now, when you -- if you have multiple grids on your screen and you click export to Excel, it actually gives you the option of which grids you want to export and you can select them. And then when you actually export, it'll create a new sheet in Excel for the different grids. Again, a really simple thing, but it really helps our users a lot. It makes export to Excel, honestly, like 10x more powerful than it was before. This one is actually one of my favorites. You know that the product management team is paying a lot of attention to the user requirements when they start adding features like this. And so I know Amy and the team has been working really hard. But what she did and what the team did here was add keyboard shortcuts. And so for any of you that have started actually building free-form dossiers in MicroStrategy 2020, you probably are going to be very thankful for this feature. Because what you'll realize really quickly is that your ability to control layout using a mouse is relatively limited. But now, what you can do is you can put something in generally the right area and then use the arrow keys to get it right into the spot that you really want. Again, one of these fit and finish features that really rounds out dossiers quite nicely. On the visualization front, we've improved the default so that the labels look much better, they line up better. We automatically adjust the access scale. And you can see the before and after. So before, you can see here on the left-hand side, you don't actually see all the labels. And so those first 3 bars is really quite difficult to figure out what the number is. And with the new settings and the new automatic scaling and labeling, you can see it's significantly better. So this basically means that all of your dossiers will look better if you're using graphs and charts in them. And it's a nice upgrade for anybody that obviously uses dossiers. Again, another fit and finish one, oftentimes, you'll see something in a dossier that you want to copy and you want to put it someplace else. And so we've added keyboard and copy paste functionality. So you can select something, copy it and then paste that into, in this case, an e-mail or wherever you want to paste it. A great shortcut. And again, we shouldn't underestimate these things. I remember when the first -- some of you might not remember this, but when the first iPhone was released, the big missing piece of functionality was copy and paste. And people yelled and screamed, how can we possibly use a productivity tool with no copy and paste. And so these things are really important. And so anyways, we've added that to Dossier. You can now take content from a dossier and put it wherever you need to, share it, communicate it. Information should be liberated, and this helps us do that. We've also added the ability to show data on iOS. So this is a very common feature that people ask for where you're looking at a visualization. And what you want to see is the detailed data. And so we added Show Data on the library web a few quarters ago. And now, we've also brought that to iOS as well. Here, you can see the demo. This is useful for a couple of reasons. Number one, especially on a mobile device, sometimes you can't see exactly what -- you can't really get the resolution that you want in a visualization. And so being able to actually show the data allows you to see the detail that you want. It's also useful for accessibility purposes, being able to tap through and read through a table of data can be a lot easier than trying to process it visually. So it helps in a number of different areas as well. So with that, those are some of the new features in Dossier. I've got Holly here. We're going to do a little poll to see what you want next. So Holly, are you there?

Yes. So as you guys know from earlier, I drive the viewing experience here at MicroStrategy. But the Dossier road map is actually really important because that's how we get the content. So I know that the Dossier authoring PM team will be interested to get this feedback. So let's check out the question. What feature would you like to see next in Dossier? So, A, information windows; B, panel stacks. So both things that you see in documents today. C, transactions; or D, report banding. [Voting]

I'm a little upset that I'm not allowed to vote, Holly.

I know. I know.

What do we have here?

All right. Pretty much split right now.

Holly, these are our final answers now.

This is already the final answers?

Yes.

Oh, okay. Interesting. I tend to -- I mean, you know what, you can see that they're split between info windows, panel stacks and transactions, which I guess means we should do all 3, right?

Yes, most likely. I think that's what they're saying.

Cool. Cool. Tim is next door to me, I'll walk over there after this and let him know. So thank you for that. That's great feedback. Not super surprising, I have to admit, but definitely helps us priorities. So thank you. Thank you, Holly. Anything else you wanted to add on the Dossier front?

No. I think that you guys should expect a lot coming from the Dossier authoring team. I think we're looking at a lot of different workflows that will make a lot of things easier. So as you guys saw with that question, we have a lot of things that you can still do with RSDs, but not Dossier. So we're kind of working to close the gap there to make sure that Dossier provides you all the things that you'll need moving forward. So just stay tuned. And if you have any questions, just reach out to us, and I'm sure we'd be glad to get your feedback.

Awesome. Thank you. I came to the office today only to make sure I had a good Internet connection for this. And my lights went out as I was presenting, so I had to just get up and get them back on. Thank you all. All right. Let's keep going. So that's Dossiers. The next major area that we've improved is HyperIntelligence. I already showed you the features around search and sharing. Both of those are available both on the web, on Office and also in HyperMobile as well. But there's a few more things that the team had up their sleeve. One is what we call pattern matching. And so for those of you that know HyperIntelligence, what you might know or what you may or may not know is that HyperIntelligence typically has a limitation of about 500,000 rows of data. So we can match up the catalogs of 500,000 things. And the way that typically works, it actually indexes those 500,000 unique values and then actually looks for that in Office, it looks for that on websites, it looks for that in other areas, and then it uses that to actually highlight and then show the card. But there's cases where you have catalogs that are much larger than that. If you are a bookstore or a retailer or have thousands and thousands or millions of customers or insurance policies, things like this. You have very, very large data sets. The nice thing about those is that when you get to that kind of a size of data set, you often have codes that are patterns, right? So if you think about like social security numbers or if you think about ISBN numbers or employee IDs, all these kinds of things, when you get to large numbers, you typically have coded them. And so what we added in HyperIntelligence in Q2, in Update 2 is the ability to actually detect that pattern when you're creating a card. And now the plug-in actually looks for that pattern. And the awesome thing about that is that it no longer needs to store the unique values, it just stores the pattern, which is a very small, little string. And now it looks for that. And what it allows us to do is support significantly larger data sets. I've actually got Nida here on the line, who is the product manager for Hyper. She's been the product manager for Hyper since day 1. And Nida, do you have anything you want to add to this one?

Sure. Thanks, Saurabh. I think Pattern Matching is a very powerful feature because it, as he said, that it lets you accommodate for use cases with large data sets. I've spoken to some of you and some customers, and it's a -- there's always a use case where you have millions of rows of data. So with this feature, hopefully, we should be able to solve your problem. So -- yes. And we can look at the demo and see how that works.

The demo is a little bit, I almost want to say disappointing, because it just looks like Hyper. There's nothing -- it doesn't look any different. But what's actually happening is it's detecting these codes, which, again, allows for much, much more data volume than we had before. But a type of it, just as you would know and expect it. But again, here, it's actually looking for these specific codes. All right. So there you go. That's Pattern Matching in Hyper, great new addition. The second thing I want to talk about is the ability to support multiple matches on a single keyword. And this is something that people have been asking for, for quite some time. Again, for those of you that know HyperIntelligence, right now, or up until Update 2, your set of data in any given card had to be unique or had to be -- the keyword had to be unique. So you couldn't have 2 people with the name Ann Smith, for example, in the same card set. You could have an Ann Smith in Card 1 and Ann Smith in Card 2, and then you could carousel and we would detect both. But you couldn't have Ann Smith show up twice as -- for example, you couldn't have 2 employees called Ann Smith, as an example. And so we fixed that. We've improved that. So now, you can actually have the same keyword appear multiple times, and HyperIntelligence, when it detects that and you hover over it, you then just carousel through and you can click through the different matches that you have. I was joking earlier, one of our heads of engineering, his name is Andy Smith. And this helps us internally, and I'm sure you have many employees that may have similar names. All right. Very straightforward feature. So with that, I'm going to hand it back to Nida for a couple of minutes to do a little poll on the road map for HyperIntelligence. Nida?

Sure. So in the poll question, so we are planning some really key initiatives for the next few releases, and we would like to know your feedback. So on your screens, you will see 5 features. One is create derived metrics on HyperIntelligence card editor. I think it is self-explanatory. We want to bring the Dossier experience of creating derived metrics on the card editor so that you can create metrics on the fly. The second one is color code the card header conditionally based on a threshold. So basically, the colors that you see on your screen that light up your keywords, we would want it to have a meaning behind it, whether it's good, whether it's bad. So we want to attach a threshold to it. So your cards when they are green, it means it's good. So that's a feature that we want to implement. The next one is it's actually a way of having HyperIntelligence on the browser without using a browser extension. And this, we can do using the hyper web SDK. I think this is powerful because, now, you don't have to be confined to just Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, but you can even use it on Firefox and different other browsers. You can embed the SDK easily into your web application and you're good to go. It lights up with HyperIntelligence. The last 2 are more about so that you can seamlessly deploy these apps in your organization. So the third -- so the fourth one is EMM support for HyperMobile. We want to integrate or comply with app config. And the last one is white label support for Hypermobile and hyper web, which is letting you or giving you the opportunity to rebrand your apps. So start voting. [Voting]

Thanks, Nida. I'll give everybody a few seconds to vote. Again, I'm disappointed that I can't vote. That's okay.

Oh. It's okay. You can send us an email.

We were still getting on a lot of votes. So let's give them some more time.

Awesome.

Come on, people. Yes. Look at these numbers. It's awesome. All right. I'm going to advance the answer. There you go.

Interesting.

Awesome. Well, Nida, don't we have the hyper SDK planned?

Yes, that's actually our high priority. So we -- so I would say coming soon. Let's see.

You don't want to promise the date. I hear you. But I will tell you that it is coming relatively quickly, sooner rather than later. So we're really excited about that. Thanks, Nida. Thanks, everyone, for your feedback. That's really useful.

Yes. Thank you.

All right. Let's keep going. So that was all of the new features for our -- basically, our user interfaces, right? Dossier, Mobile and so forth. Now let's talk a little bit about our open architecture. As you know, I hope you know, one of our fundamental kind of our DNA, is to be the most open analytics platform that we possibly can. We want to give you lots of flexibility. And there's a number of things that we've done over the past few years, specifically around connecting to other analytics tools out there, other data science tools, such as Jupyter Notebook and Our Studio, APIs for Python and R, connectors to Tableau, Excel, Power BI. What we've really seen is our customers use all of these different things, and they want to be able to deliver consistent data to them. And so we've been improving that. Specifically in Q2, we were focusing a lot again on fit and finish. Make sure the performance is really good. We've improved the content browsing experience when you're selecting items and things like this. And we've actually certified the Tableau connectors. That way, you can use Tableau to connect to MicroStrategy and then publish your workbook to Tableau server, and that can then refresh the data against MicroStrategy and just work as you would expect. So those are some of the new features that we've added. We've also improved the user experience for the Excel connector. So for those of you that have been using it so far, when you import something or you refresh the data, you get a dialogue box, and you can't really do anything in Excel until that dialogue box goes away. And so the main thing that we've done here is we moved all of that into a panel and so that we can asynchronously go and do the import and refresh and all those kinds of actions, and you can keep working in Excel while the tool is doing that. So that simplifies things for Excel. And this is basically a quick demo of that. All the notifications, all of the dialogues, all that stuff is now in the side panel. So you can basically just keep working. Nice and easy. All right. On the Azure front, so again, that was on the Excel and the connectors that we built. Another big part of our open strategy is to make sure that we support the key cloud platforms out there. So we support AWS and Azure to date. You can also use images and things on other platforms as well. And some of the things that we've done in Update 2 are specific to Azure. We've added a backup and restore to Azure, our MicroStrategy for Azure, which basically enables a 1 click update. So this is really powerful, and I'll talk about that in a second. We've also improved the securities that you can specify private IP addresses. And as usual, we've added more regional availability as well. So now, we've actually brought the upgrade down with the 1 click upgrade from 192 manual steps, if you can believe that, down to 4. That's a huge improvement, makes it way easier to upgrade MicroStrategy on Azure. It's nice. You can do that manually or you can do it through a schedule as well. I don't think I need to show you a demo of that. We've also added new regional availability. And so as usual, every quarter, we continue to expand the regional availability. The way we do that, and actually, we should do this maybe in a poll next time, is really based on feedback that we get from prospects and customers. So when people tell us that they would really love to deploy MicroStrategy on AWS or Azure in this specific location, we work with them and we prioritize those things. If you have feedback for us, we are not doing a regional poll today. But if you do have feedback for us, please enter it in the chat. You can e-mail us, we'll take that into account. I think maybe next time around, we can do a regional poll as well. All right. So that is some of the improvements that we've made in our open strategy. This is something that's really unique to MicroStrategy. We're not part of a specific vendor. We're not part of Salesforce. We're not part of Microsoft. We're not part of Google. We're not part of IBM or SAP. And so our open agnostic approach is really central to what we're doing. So those are some of the things that we've done there. Our promise is really that every quarter, we'll continue enhancing our open strategy. And the third area I want to talk about is enterprise-grade scalability and administration of the MicroStrategy platform. Oftentimes, if you ask people, why do you use MicroStrategy? It's because of our modern experiences, sometimes it's Mobile or Hyper or Dossier or documents, these kinds of things. It's our openness. But more often than not, it's because we are enterprise-grade, right? It's because we can scale to basically more than anybody else. And beyond that, we provide very, very fine grain control of our administration. And one of the journeys that we've been on is to simplify all of the administration to Workstation. And so over the past 3 years, the team has been busy adding more and more functionality to Workstation, bringing in more of the capabilities of developer and desktop and other things as well. So in Update 2, I'm really happy to announce that we've added filters on the ability to create filters in Workstation. This is powerful for obvious reasons, right? You can create filters. But from a business user perspective, it allows you to have a very simple interface to go and create sets of things, right? So if I want to keep track of my top customers in Canada, I can create a filter that says show me this particular region where revenue is greater than some amount, and so on and so forth. I can see that as a filter object in the metadata, right? It's a filter object just like it always has been. But what we've done is made it way easier to use. And it's actually -- it's literally 2.5x easier to build a filter in Workstation than it was in Developer. We took something like, I think it was 28 clicks in Developer, and we brought that down to something like 12 clicks in Workstations. So it makes it much, much simpler. And it's also nicer to look at, frankly. On the line here, I've got Suchi, who's a product manager for Workstation. Suchi, do you want to jump in and add anything that maybe I missed or talk a little bit about where we're going next.

Absolutely. So I did see one question saying, is Workstation still there? It absolutely is. We are working very hard to make life simpler for content authors, architects and administration. So I will start with the mission. I know Saurabh alluded to it a little bit. But really, the mission for Workstation is to unify all of these tools so MicroStrategy users, content authors, architects and admins don't have to manage and skip through multiple tools to get their work done. As part of that, with the filter editor, we are bringing data modeling capabilities into Workstation. And our engineering team has taken a step back to really reimagine and modernize these capabilities. And we have now a new infrastructure, a new microservice we are calling modeling service, that sits behind the filter editor. So really, really excited about this. And as we go in the future, not just these editors, you would also see REST APIs that you can use to basically create all of these objects including filter, attribute, facts in the future automatically. You don't have to come to Workstation to do that. If you're comfortable with the REST API, do it there. And I do want to like say, this infrastructure is something that we've been working for 6 to 9 months. The engineering team has like really put an effort, tested it in and out before finally making it public with filter editor. And this would be the basis of all the editors, including, as I said facts, attributes, tables in the future. And also, it will help us solve some of the key problems we have seen and our customers have shared with us when they're modeling schemas within MicroStrategy. So really excited about it and the avenues that opens for us and for our customers.

Thanks, Suchi. And by the way, I think the biggest feature in Workstation in Update 2 that I think the audience has probably noticed, and you and I have not mentioned, is the look and feel. So you might notice here in the screenshot that Workstation has a brand-new look and feel. We brought environments to the top. It's a bit more organized. The color is pretty cool. I quite like that. Sometimes we just get used to these things because we've been playing with the new version for quite a few weeks now. But that's another thing that we've done as well, is clean up the look and feel a little bit and continue evolving it and modernizing it, too. The second area I want to talk about in Workstation. Now I'm going to be very honest with you. I really see this as a step towards something bigger. And it's basically the ability to add scripts as objects in the metadata and in Workstation. So here, you can see we've got a new item here called scripts, and you can basically upload a Python script and store it in the metadata. And you can add [ ECLs ] and those kinds of things. Really think of it as not something that you're going to use broadly today. But as we go forward, what it will allow us to do is do object manager and command manager-type actions from within Workstation based on Python. And so in Update 2, we put the infrastructure in place, so we can get the metadata there, we can put the objects in. But really, as we go forward, what it allows us to do is potentially execute those scripts. You can create scripts that do things like, for example, archive all dossiers that haven't been viewed in 90 days, right? You can write a script that does that, and you can run that on a schedule, and they'll just go ahead and archive it. It'd be a really cool script to have. You may have scenarios where people join or leave the organization. And so you might want a script that says, for anybody that's left the organization in the past 5 days or today or yesterday, whatever, please go ahead -- no, you don't have -- please. You don't have to ask permission for a script, but go ahead and archive or change the permissions or change the ownership of that content to somebody else, these kinds of clean up-type things. So we can't execute scripts yet, but it gives you an idea of where we're going in the future. So that's a big addition that really paints a picture of where we're going. Suchi, do you want to add anything to that? Did I cover it all right?

You actually did cover. And just to sneak peek into the polling question, yes, this is something which is -- we think of this as a first step, and we did use Python because we've accepted that as a standard for automation and scripting. And we believe like in the coming releases, this would be enhanced greatly to actually be able to use it. One thing that, Saurabh, you didn't mention, which I can talk about is one of the things that we have heard from customers specifically using command manager is that the scripts, they have to manage separately. So if they're migrating an environment to MicroStrategy environment, the scripts are not part of it. So with scripts now being part of your metadata, as you manage your environments and move objects or move projects, your scripts follow along, so you don't have to manage them separately. So even with this one small feature that is part of Update 2, you would see that benefit and how it will play out in the future for you.

That's cool. And by the way, I've been wanting to have action items in the metadata for a long time. So I'm personally very excited about this. All right. Still, there's still more to -- there's still more things. We're not done yet. One of the other things we've done is -- so in MicroStrategy 2020, we exposed basically all of the intelligence server and server settings in Workstations. We gave you lots of way to configure all of those. We also, at the time, added the ability to export those. You could export those to a file. But now what you can do is you can also input them back in. And what that allows you to do is optimize the system, make sure it's running really well. And then if you're creating new systems, you can actually go ahead and export the settings from System A and import them into System B. That export also allows you to compare the settings from different systems. So perhaps when you went from test to production, you noticed a degradation in performance or something like this. Well, you can quickly export both of the settings, you can dip them and compare them and see, maybe it's a setting or something that resulted in that. Or vice versa, maybe one -- you went to production, and you're like, "Wow, that's running a lot faster, I wonder why." Again, you can compare that and see if there was a setting that did that. So again, it seems like a really small feature, but it's really one of those things that can help administrators make the system run better. And every time an administrator becomes 2% better or 5% better, the downstream impact for the thousands of users that they support can be quite significant. So we're really happy about that. This is some of the things that we do on the workstation side. It's all about leverage. It's all about giving the administrator the ability to do things that impact thousands of other people and make life better for those thousands of other people. And when those administrators need help, we have added Expert.Now as a link in Workstation. We've also added it in the cloud. And so when you need help, click the button. And I really encourage all of you to try it. We have a 30-day trial today. Give it a shot. It's a great experience to talk to a MicroStrategy expert and something that you may have struggled with for hours or days. Sometimes, we can help you answer that question in minutes. So you can get help here in Workstation and from MicroStrategy Cloud as well. So with that, I hand it back to Suchi and get your opinion on some of the things that we're thinking about for workstation going forward. Suchi, all yours.

Okay. Thank you, everyone, for answering the polling question. It is -- absolutely, your feedback is precious to us. I have put things that we are on the road map but -- and that we are not currently working on. So obviously, you will not see Developer retirement plan or moving those functionality here. But the 4 things that I want your opinion on, the first is automation of regular tasks, such as user management, application management, et cetera. This is almost like the next step of the scripts tab, and we would like to see how would you use it and what your priority is for that. The second one is subscription management in Workstation. So this includes the ability to create subscriptions, manage your subscriptions, view everything that you have subscribed to. The third is personalization of workstation. This is -- this would be very relevant as we bring in more and more functionality in Workstation, and you would want to have maybe an analyst level view where they only see authoring workflows and not the administrative workflows and things like that. And then the fourth one that, again, Saurabh alluded to is being able to manage your objects and migrations right from Workstation in a very simple, easy, secure and scalable way. So looking forward to your answers. [Voting]

All right. Let's give it a couple of -- let's give it a few seconds here. Jackie, you tell us when everyone stops voting.

Sounds good. They keep piling in. I love the interaction here. So thanks, everyone. All right. Let's give it about 10 more seconds here. Okay. Looks like there’s...

Suchi, what do you think they're going to vote for? I think they're going to vote for -- I don't know. It's going to be the first, second or fourth. It's not -- I don't think they're going to ask for the third.

I think that is a very important one, too. So...

Let's see. Aha. Object management.

Oh, you're good, Saurabh. Yes. Very quickly, subscription management is something that we are absolutely currently working on and laser-focused on and want to not only bring into Workstation, but really, really enhance the workflow. So stay tuned to that. Object management and migration, yes, we are trying to like figure out how do we solve this really complicated problem while keeping your metadata safe and all of the security in place. But thank you so much for your feedback. This is absolutely wonderful for me.

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you all. That was fun. All right. Last couple of things before we wrap up. Again, we continue to make sure that we can deliver the fastest performance possible. And so a number of things that we've done on the gateway is, one is we've now bundled the Teradata and Snowflake drivers out of the box, which just makes it faster for you to deploy, right? So that's a nice improvement. We've also done some optimization, specifically around time transformations on Google BigQuery. So it makes it faster to run MicroStrategy on GBQ. And we've done a number of other things to throttle and prioritize jobs on the server to making sure that the users that are active with the system, have the best experience. And anything that's done as a background process is prioritized lower. And as usual, every quarter, we certify our new versions of various databases, and we now have new certifications for IBM DB2, Yellowbrick and IAS as well. As I think it was Nida or somebody that talked a little bit about the EMM functionality and the road map for HyperIntelligence. Well, we've actually added a native Intune support in Q2, in Update 2 for the MicroStrategy mobile library. And so that basically allows you to have much more precise control over the library through Intune without having to necessarily control the entire device. And that really just helps you if you have Intune and you have library, and you want to make sure that users can bring their own device and you're not managing the entire device, you're just specifically managing the enterprise application. This allows you to manage specifically the MicroStrategy Library without having to manage the rest, which is a nice win for your users. So that is a quick overview of the hundreds of new features that we have in MicroStrategy 2020 Update 2, improvements across our user experiences, user -- improvements across our open architecture and improvements across our enterprise-grade administration functionality. As I mentioned before, the big 3 are the new MicroStrategy application that's instant on your desktop, the new search and sharing functionality in HyperIntelligence that makes access to information instant in a browser and in Office, and instant access to our experts through Expert.Now. And so if you want to get started with any of those things, we have upgrade programs, so we strongly encourage you to check that out. We will do HyperIntelligence pilots for you as well. And we also have a 30-day trial of the architect pass. You can just go to our website. All these things are pretty easy to find there. And if you click the Expert.Now button and if you don't have an Architect Pass, automatically, you can just click a button to get your 30-day trial. And get in touch with one of our experts. You can ask about these new features or any of the other features that we've been building over almost 3 decades now, over 3 decades now. So with that, I'm just going to open it up for any Q&A. I'm hoping that there's lots of great questions in there. Jackie, I'm going to hand it off to you. Hopefully, you've seen some interesting ones, and you can just throw them out there for us.

Sounds great. Thank you, guys. That was excellent. We do have a ton of great questions. Probably not time for all of them, but don't worry, we will follow-up with you directly via e-mail. So all right. Let's see what we got here. The new MicroStrategy app, where can we find this?

Holly, all yours.

Great question. So the new app is going to be able to be found on our download site, so at microstrategy.com. On the community site, you can go to support and then download site, you'll see that there. So you can download for Mac or Windows. Or you can go directly to the Mac store or Windows store to get the app. So the team is currently planning to officially launch the app today. So you guys heard it first. So be on the lookout and stay tuned.

Thanks, Holly.

Thank you, Holly. Okay. Another question is MicroStrategy/PowerPoint connector on the road map?

Maybe I'll take that one. It's something that we get a request for. It is not, as of today, on the immediate-term road map. But we do track requests for it. And at some point, it will hit a tipping point, and we'll prioritize that.

Thank you. Does free-form layout support come for iPhone?

Yes. Yes, you can design a free-form layout Dossier. And one of the unique things that we had to do was support free-form layout while also supporting responsive design. That was really the trick. That was the technical challenge that the team had to overcome. And so yes, you can do free-form layout, you can group items, you can tell us things that you want to keep together and so forth. And then that layout is appropriately supported on various device sizes.

Yes. And then from the Dossier authoring side, I'll also just add that there's improvements coming soon that will allow you to move and have control over the layout on the small form factors, so such as completely hiding specific containers or group of containers of the free-form layout for mobile. So keep an eye out for that, because that's going to be really helpful.

Yes. Thank you.

Thank you. Will Python scripting be full-featured? Right now, I have to write Java JARs to do some procedures.

I'm not going to guess at that. I think we should maybe take that offline. Unless, Suchi, you know the answer to it.

Yes. Yes, and let's not answer that. We are still working out how to solve that issue. But it will not -- the idea is that we want to make it as simple and you don't have to write your Java procedures as you are currently doing. But we are still in the designing phase, so the answer could change.

Thank you. Any plan to add schema object development in Workstation?

Absolutely. Those are the next steps that we are doing. In fact, hopefully, this year, without promising anything, we would have some of the schema object editors in Workstation. If not this year, then early next year.

Thank you. Do we have a bar graph for other visual stations in hyper cards?

Nida, you want to take this one?

Yes. So that's on the -- on our road map. We are looking into adding more visualization support. But here, we have to be a little careful so we are looking into different types of visualizations like Spark lines or micro charts that are -- that cannot do that much heavy lifting because we -- for us, performance is key on HyperWeb and Mobile in different other clients. So if we create a mini dossier, so we don't want that subsecond performance to be affected. So here, we are taking small steps. So we came up with ring charts. But yes, in the future, we are looking into using more other small visualizations.

Yes. Just to drill a little bit further on that. Priority 1 for hyper visualizations are visualizations that don't require calculations in the client or aggregates because we want like subsecond response times. And so as Nida was pointing out, ring charts and things like that, we can support much more easily than bar charts, which often require aggregates.

Yes. Does the Workstation come under default licensing?

I prefer -- and I know Suchi's there. I prefer not to get into licensing on this call because all of our customers sometimes have various contractual differences, and I don't want to speak more -- too generically about it here.

Cool. Okay. Question about Library and Workstation. Is there now a filtering by project? If I have the same -- if I have same naming of dossier in 2 different projects, I can't make out which dossier is from which project?

Good feedback. Yes, it's not currently in Update 2. You can absolutely sort by application to get to that, but I know that's not like the perfect solution. We are looking into ways to add easy filtering into each of those navigation, smart folders within Workstations, so stay tuned.

Does access to Expert.Now apply to people with analyst pass as well?

Not yet. Not right now. It's something that we're looking at. Let us know. If there's demand for it, we could look at that. But today, it's the Architect Pass.

Would you please talk more about Our Studio and Notebook's integration?

Sure. Yes. So many of our customers -- what actually happens in the real-world is that you've got the BI team, and then you've got like this data science team off somewhere doing kind of their own thing. And they're using our and they're using Python, because that's the primary languages that data scientists use. And nowadays, they're using specific IDs, they're using the Jupyter Notebook ID or the Our Studio ID. And what we really want is to give them a place to get trusted data, which is MicroStrategy. And then once they have done their thing in those tools, built their models, create their output, push that data back. And so what the connectors allow them to do is to open up -- let's talk about Jupyter Notebook. You can open up Jupyter Notebook, and now, you can connect the -- there's the connector that allows to log into MicroStrategy. It supports all the normal securities so that you can only see the objects and things that you're allowed to see. You can pick your data set that you want to import from. You can actually apply filters and so forth. And that then is imported as a data frame in Jupyter Notebook. And then you can go on and do what you want with it, right? You can merge it with other data, you can build your models, you can do a cluster, predictive or regression whatever it is that you want to do. And once you've done that and you're happy with the output, you can then push that back into MicroStrategy. And then what's really cool is that, that -- those new objects just appear as new objects in the MicroStrategy system. And so you could use those predictive metrics in -- or cluster that can be attributes as well. You can use them in HyperIntelligence. You can use them in Dossiers. And so it gives data scientists a really easy way to continue using the tools that they use all the time, but leverage the trusted information in MicroStrategy. And then push that back to MicroStrategy so all the analysts out there can use those predictive objects in the downstream, whether the reports or documents or HyperIntelligence cards and so forth. So that's what we've done. And we released that in Q4 of last year, and we've continued to enhance that over the quarters.

Is the new MicroStrategy app using Library?

Yes, that's a great question. So good observation there. So it's used -- the MicroStrategy app is using a lot of the same functionality as Library, but there are new features that make it this new premier viewing tool. So that fast switching between libraries, the speed in and of itself is super impressive. And you can also see multiple windows at once, like Saurabh showed earlier. And you have that main menu functionality that we'll continue to revamp, that allows you to get insights faster even when the app is not actively being used. And I know I saw a few questions earlier about how this interacts with Workstation and what the plan is. So this does not at all replace Workstation. In fact, they were kind of built -- I'd like to explain it kind of like as a power couple. So you have this main tool for admin and analysts, which is Workstation, right? And now, we have this new lightweight MicroStrategy app for our business users that is just purely for getting insights. So hopefully, that kind of clears that up for you guys.

Awesome. Thanks, Holly.

Thanks, Holly. There is another question about Library. Is there a way to organize library objects via folder structure in the MicroStrategy Library?

Yes, good question. This is actually one of my favorite questions. So we actually are currently working on this with the dev teams. Now the question we get from customers a lot is, can I use this on the admin side? Can I push default groups to users? But we're also trying to balance that with the ability for the end users to also create groups. So if you have a preference of which your organization would be using, please feel free to put that in the chat because it's a helpful piece of detail for us.

Thank you. Exploring grids from a dossier is now easier, but are there plans to be able to export an entire dossier to Excel?

I think we should probably take that one offline. That's a really tricky question because it really depends on what you're trying to do. I found -- I worked on a number of different BI tools, and what I found is, if you do like a graphical export to Excel, which is usually what people mean when they ask that question. It's not really that useful. Like you're better off just exporting to PDF or something. And the reason it's not useful is because when we do a graphical export. All the aggregates start getting kind of messed up and things don't behave the way that you would expect. And it also doesn't even look the way you expect where you're trying to convert objects in one tool, in this case, Dossiers, into objects in another tool, which is Excel. And so as you convert the pie chart over, what do you do? Do you convert it to a pie chart in Excel, or do you just generate a picture? Honestly, there's historically not been a great answer to any of these. And so what we found is, for the most part, what is most useful is that people want to export the data to Excel so that they can then use the data to do other things. So that's where we are right now on the subject. It does come up every so often. And I've been part of projects that I've actually tried to solve that problem and build that. But every time we do it, when you look back, it tends not to be that useful. Because it tends to break too many things. So anyways, if you're interested, please do contact us, we can dig into more detail. And Jackie, with that, I know we have only 1 minute left. So...

Yes, I know. There's so many great questions. But yes, I think we've got to wrap things up. Can we just do one more?

Sure. I'm...

What about the types of authentication supported in Workstation?

The types of authentication supported in Workstation. Suchi, this is yours. You're on mute, Suchi.

I'm sorry, guys, I just -- in time. So we support standard Hadapt badge, obviously, SAML plus [ software ] clustered plus [ BIN ]. I might be forgetting some, but I can share the community article with you guys. So Jackie, I'll send it over to you and you could possibly maybe forward it.

Sounds great.

Yes. All right.

Thank you. Okay. With that said, we are going to wrap up. Saurabh, I have 1 more slide after this, if you wouldn't mind pushing it. Thank you. So just as a friendly reminder, we do have a survey. I've put it in the chat. We'd love to get your feedback. We want to shape these webinars based on what you guys want to see. So let us know. A recording of this webcast will be sent to you in the next couple of business days, along with some really great related resources that could help you with your next steps. Questions, contact Saurabh. His e-mail is right there, and I've posted it also in the chat. And so thank you. Thank you to our presenters. You guys did an excellent job, and we hope to see everyone online again soon. Thank you.

Everyone. Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Thank you.