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MicroStrategy Exec: Company to Mount Major Promotional Push for Version 11

MicroStrategy will back the release of the latest version of its MicroStrategy suite of software with a major marketing blitz, according to company CFO and COO Phong Le.

The company had previously announced its plan to deliver Version 11.0 of its MicroStrategy Intelligence Enterprise platform this month, followed by the major platform release of it, Version 11.1, in December.

“It’s going to be, from my point of view, a much more significant product and marketing launch than we’ve seen MicroStrategy do in the past — definitely more significant than our MicroStrategy 10 launch,” Le said Sept. 12 at the Deutsche Bank Technology Conference in Las Vegas.

“We’ll be much more coordinated across” the company’s sales, services, technology and marketing departments “when we do the launch,” he told attendees.

The company is also “going to use it as an opportunity to reposition” the MicroStrategy platform as a new business intelligence (BI) tool that “can really support the growth of digitally focused enterprises,” he said.

In comparison, he told the conference: “Version 10 we sort of rushed out the door” in June 2015, but “we’ve learned a lot from that [and] we’re going to make the upgrade path to 11 a lot simpler, we’re going to make the out-of-box experience a lot better, and it’s going to be a lot more feature-rich at the same time.”

After the release of Version 11.0 this month, there will be a “major release to the market” of 11.1 in December, he said. The December release and sales “kickoff” at the annual MicroStrategy World conference, Feb. 4-6 in Phoenix, Ariz., will be “where you start to see the energy in how we’re positioning the product much more,” he told the conference.

Version 11.0 and 11.1 will represent the “most significant releases of MicroStrategy’s software in over three years,” he had said during the company’s recent earnings call with analysts for the second quarter (ended June 30). He added at the time that its “efforts were made possible by our investments in technology, where we’ve added 125 people, or 24 percent, to our headcount year-over-year.”

MicroStrategy has invested “heavily in growing our organization,” he said, noting it added 196 employees in the past year and 74 people in the last quarter. The company recently named Marge Breya its CMO.

In marketing, the company’s “significant investments improved market brand awareness, generated high-quality digital marketing and field marketing leads and added more net new prospects to our marketing pipeline,” he said, adding MicroStrategy also “worked hard to improve” its “social media presence and introduced persona-based and solution-based marketing.”

The company is, meanwhile, “ready to be much more aggressive in the marketplace” with its cloud service offerings, Le also said Sept. 12. But he told the conference: “We need to train our salespeople to go to market effectively and have the right messaging for our customers.”

MicroStrategy, however, isn’t looking to “push everybody to the cloud,” he noted, adding: “We’re not that type of a company because we don’t believe we want to push customers who don’t want to move to the cloud. But we’ll have much better offerings and, I think by the way, [MicroStrategy’s cloud] offerings are better than what our competition has.”