1,500 Employees Assessing Sales, Merchandise & Marketing Information

McLean, Va (October 13, 2003) –

MicroStrategy® Incorporated (NASDAQ: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence software, today announced that the fifth-largest global retailer, METRO Group, has successfully deployed the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform(TM) enterprise-wide.

“MicroStrategy meets the METRO Group’s demanding requirements for a highly flexible, stable and scalable business intelligence platform,” said Silvester Macho, Division Manager, METRO Group Information Technology. “The MicroStrategy-based system enables our employees to track the performance of the entire company, optimize product assortment and make decisions that increase revenue and profitability.”

Approximately 1,500 employees across the METRO Group organization utilize the MicroStrategy platform as its business intelligence standard to perform analyses against a 20-terabyte Teradata® data warehouse. MicroStrategy is the anchor of numerous business intelligence applications, including merchandising, marketing, customer, market basket analysis, and category management.

“In today’s competitive global economy, a real-time understanding of a company’s business performance has never been so important,” said MicroStrategy COO Sanju K. Bansal. “MicroStrategy’s industrial-strength platform lets companies the size of the METRO Group gain a holistic view of their business performance and make decisions that can increase revenues.”

End users can run reports to track sales trends and margins as well as perform ad hoc analyses to understand the drivers behind product-line performance. The company also uses MicroStrategy technology to provide its suppliers with scorecards on product planning, forecasting and replenishment. METRO Group is a platinum subscriber of MicroStrategy’s Technical Advisory Services, a comprehensive program of advisory services, knowledge capital and corporate support.

“MicroStrategy is well-known for its user-friendly reporting features, data scalability and its ability to be Web-deployed to thousands of users securely,” added Bansal. “A large number of the world’s top 200 retailers have standardized on MicroStrategy for business intelligence. Our capacity to provide insightful reports on critical data — drilled down to the customer-transactional level — has proven invaluable to our retail clients.”

About The METRO Group

METRO AG is the management holding company of the METRO Group in which are pooled the strategic management functions of the world’s fourth largest retail enterprise. The holding company sets the performance targets for the METRO Group’s sales divisions. The sales divisions Cash & Carry, Real, Extra, Media Markt, Saturn, Praktiker and Kaufhof run their operational business autonomously in line with the decentralization principle and are independent corporate entities under German company law. Cross-sectional service companies (purchasing, IT, logistics, clearing) produce synergies across the whole Group.

Today, METRO AG is at the head of a capital market-oriented, efficient business corporation with an international profile. The METRO Group’s legal and operating structures and also its corporate concepts and strategies have come a very long way from the idea of a conventional-style retail company focused on the domestic market.

MGI METRO Group Information Technology GmbH is a subsidiary of METRO AG. As a company-internal IT-service located both in Germany and abroad, its 700 employees provide IT-services for the METRO Group. Among these services are for example the development of user interfaces in the national and international context, the operation of computing centers in several locations, as well as IT-Consulting, e. g. as regards the implementation of IT-systems.

About MicroStrategy Incorporated

Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a worldwide leader in the increasingly critical business intelligence software market. Leading Fortune 2000 companies are integrating MicroStrategy’s industrial-strength software into virtually all facets of their businesses. The MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform(TM) distills vast amounts of data into vital, probing insight to help drive cost-efficiency, productivity, customer relations and revenue-generation. MicroStrategy offers exceptional capabilities — excellent scalability, powerful analytics, user-friendly query and reporting features and an outstanding, easy-to-use Web interface. Top companies are using MicroStrategy to cost-effectively harness large, multi-terabyte databases; empower thousands of employees at all operational levels; and extend the benefits of business intelligence enterprise-wide and beyond to customers, partners and suppliers.

MicroStrategy has over 2,200 enterprise-class customers, including General Motors, Best Buy, Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse, Yahoo!, Visa International, Wells Fargo, Telecom Italia, AT&T Wireless Group and Aventis. MicroStrategy also has relationships with over 500 systems integrators and application development and platform partners, including IBM, PeopleSoft, Sun, and JD Edwards. MicroStrategy is listed on Nasdaq under the symbol MSTR. For more information or to purchase or demo MicroStrategy’s software, visit MicroStrategy’s Web site at www.microstrategy.com.

This press release may include statements that may constitute “forward-looking statements,” including its estimates of future business prospects or financial results and statements containing the words “believe,” “estimate,” “project,” “expect” or similar expressions. Forward-looking statements inherently involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results of MicroStrategy Incorporated and its subsidiaries (collectively, the “Company”) to differ materially from the forward-looking statements. Factors that could contribute to such differences include: the Company’s ability to secure financing for its current operations and long-term plans on acceptable terms; the ability of the Company to implement and achieve widespread customer acceptance of its MicroStrategy 7i software on a timely basis; the Company’s ability to recognize deferred revenue through delivery of products or satisfactory performance of services; continued acceptance of the Company’s products in the marketplace; the timing of significant orders; delays in the Company’s ability to develop or ship new products; market acceptance of new products; competitive factors; general economic conditions; currency fluctuations; and other risks detailed in the Company’s registration statements and periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. By making these forward-looking statements, the Company undertakes no obligation to update these statements for revisions or changes after the date of this release.

MicroStrategy is a registered trademark of MicroStrategy Incorporated in the United States and certain other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Marc Brailov
MicroStrategy Incorporated
(703) 770-1670
mbrailov@microstrategy.com

Source: MicroStrategy