MicroStrategy 2019 introduces “HyperIntelligence” contextual BI

MicroStrategy, the long-standing Enterprise BI pure-play is — literally — ringing in the new year with a new version of its platform. To celebrate the new release, appropriately dubbed MicroStrategy 2019,  MStrat’s Founder and CEO Michael J. Saylor and his team are ringing the bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square this morning.

I hope MStrat can bring good luck to the markets this morning, but the company certainly has some interesting new features to make their customers happy, even if Nasdaq investors end up having a rough day.  As explained to me by Marge Breya, MicroStrategy’s CMO and Hugh Owen, the company’s SVP of Product Marketing, these new features fall under three pillars: “HyperIntelligence,” “transformational mobility,” and “federated analytics.”  While these names are clearly the result of carefully crafted product marketing, there is genuine merit and utility to be found in the MicroStrategy 2019.

Let’s start with HyperIntelligence, which is all about augmenting documents and applications with contextual BI-driven information.  Much in the way some Web sites will automatically underline certain words and let you hover over them for definitions, MicroStrategy’s HyperIntelligence feature will underline words it recognizes and summon “HyperCards” — content that you can think of either as really small dashboards or really big tool tips.

The content must be explicitly authored — but that can be done with drag-and-drop customization of HyperCard templates.  And once the authoring is complete, anyone with connectivity to the MicroStrategy server who’s running Google’s Chrome Web browser, and has the HyperIntelligence browser extension installed, will see the feature light up, be it on news Web sites, browser-based apps like Salesforce, or even competing browser-based BI platforms (MicroStrategy actually demonstrated how the feature can manifest in Microsoft’s Power BI service — though not in the Power BI desktop).

While the MicroStrategy 2019 HyperCard technology is not directly related to Apple’s HyperCard — first introduced in the late 1980s and itself a precursor of the World Wide Web — there is some thematic unity, in terms of contextual cross-referencing.