• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, June 6, 2023

MicroStrategy, one of the largest independent publicly traded analytics and business intelligence firms, has announced a multiyear partnership with Microsoft that will expand the availability of the company’s products powered by Microsoft Azure.

Cezary Raczko, executive vice president of engineering at MicroStrategy, which also provides mobile software and cloud-based services, believes the partnership will increase productivity for all.

MicroStrategy will integrate its advanced analytics capabilities with Azure OpenAI Service to help businesses realize the full potential of their first-party data.

Through the partnership, MicroStrategy will invest further to advance the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in its analytics platform, MicroStrategy ONE. The goal is to implement the technology that will allow business users to make more informed decisions and accelerate development of new applications.

The partnership will improve natural-language capabilities for generating new visualizations and dashboards. Productivity enhancements related to code, workflow, schema, and content creation are also on the agenda. And include the integration of MicroStrategy’s products with Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Teams and PowerPoint to provide businesses with enhanced analytics capabilities in the cloud.

This partnership represents a significant step forward in the world of AI-enabled analytics, providing businesses with a comprehensive solution for managing and analyzing their data in the cloud. MicroStrategy and Microsoft are committed to driving innovation and delivering value to customers through this collaboration.

MicroStrategy has been in the news lately linked to Michael Saylor, the founder of MicroStrategy, and his admiration for Bitcoin. One media outlet wrote that Saylor calls Bitcoin “a bank in cyberspace, run by incorruptible software, offering a global, affordable, simple, & secure savings account to billions of people that don’t have the option or desire to run their own hedge fund.”

Recently he has become one of the few Bitcoin maximalists to publicly embrace Ordinals Inscriptions, which are similar to NFT digital assets. Saylor and MicroStrategy are huge Bitcoin investors.

Saylor became a multibillionaire in the late 1990s as a result of his ownership of MicroStrategy. The SEC then filed accounting allegations against the company, and fined it with $11 million in penalties. The company’s stock value crashed as a result of reissuing the accurate financial data, and Saylor’s net worth decreased by $6 billion.