By William Fellows
MicroStrategy Inc will roll out its OLAP for the masses, or personal intelligence network today, anointing the service Strategy.com. The company is essentially leveraging its OLAP engine against financial, news, sports, traffic, weather and other data, which it will deliver in personalized form to consumers who subscribe through partner sites including USAToday.com, Nasdaq, Washingtonpost.com and Earthlink. The idea is that on top of the usual feeds, users will receive information not available elsewhere, such as when a company they are following has outperformed its sector by 10% but is trading below its 52-week average.
It’s a bold move for MicroStrategy which has spent a year as a public company selling its software as a tool for enterprises to analyze huge data stores, identify opportunities and make strategic decisions about their businesses. Chairman and CEO Michael Saylor expects Strategy.com to be generating at least 25% of the company’s revenue within two years. MicroStrategy earned $1.9m on revenue of $35.8m in its first quarter. It’s been pouring money into building out its personal broadcast services and internet interfaces. It estimates 70% of revenue is done on its web-based product.
The company has explained elsewhere that it could theoretically take a subscriber’s equity portfolio and in the background monitor the options market. The Strategy.com service could then calculate the cost of portfolio insurance and tell the subscriber that if he or she were to follow a collection of synchronized trades, they would either hedge out this amount of risk or lock in this downside or lock in this amount of upside with no downside. Most of the 8.5 million online stock portfolios in the US don’t trade in options. Mainly because they are not understood. Saylor explains they are a good way of having a capital gain built into an equity portfolio.
The investment ‘channel’ goes live on July 16 with other channels expected later in the year. It will also build support for making transactions so that in addition to stock alerts, subscribers can also buy shares immediately.
Clicking on the personal news services on an affiliate site will lead viewers to Strategy.com, although there is no change in the user’s experience – they’ll still think they are at USAToday or wherever. The site maintains a real-time catalog of user preferences and profiles on which the delivery of content and data analysis is based. The email delivery service will be free – although the company’s partners might choose to add the service as a premium, paid-for extra – while a small charge will be made for wireless, fax and telephone delivery. The internet system will be paid for by advertising.
MicroStrategy will apply its own DSS Suite software against S&P, Zacks, Media General and Briefing.com for financial data; National Weather Service and Accuweather for forecasts; AP, Comtex, PR NewsWire and BusinessWire for news; and ESPN for sports. MicroStrategy will manage all the content, billing and delivery and royalties from the site will be divided with partners.
