CVS Selects MicroStrategy as Enterprise Platform for Decision Support and OLAP Applications.

VIENNA, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 26, 1996--MicroStrategy, the largest relational on-line analytical processing (ROLAP) vendor, today announced that CVS has selected MicroStrategy's DSS line of products as its corporate standard for developing category management applications designed to analyze data on more than 25,000 different items sold in its 1400 stores in 15 New England and Mid-Atlantic states.

CVS, the premier drugstore chain on the East Coast with annual sales of $4.9 billion, is using MicroStrategy's 4.0 products to implement a wide array of Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) initiatives. The new applications are giving CVS a significant competitive advantage in a number of areas by providing category managers with a more accurate understanding of category performance, determining the effectiveness of promotional strategies on different market segments, and improving the ability to forecast how item-level pricing changes will affect net revenue. CVS's category management applications are built using a combination of the CATMAN-Do! data model -- a category-management-specific data model from Strategic Decisions, Inc., based in Cincinnati, Ohio-and MicroStrategy's 4.0 products.

"CVS has aggressive growth objectives, and we believe that MicroStrategy's 4.0 products and its 'no-limits' architecture are critical in providing us with the technological infrastructure to achieve those goals," said Greg Bosco, CVS's director of supply chain management. "By using MicroStrategy's products, we will be able to provide our category managers with the information they need to better understand how brands are performing and what decisions need to be made to increase profits."

CVS is taking advantage of many of MicroStrategy's 4.0 product features, including DSS Agent's powerful ranking capabilities which enable managers to see how sales are distributed across product categories, and its advanced charting and graphing functionality which allows a variety of business questions to be answered on a single, easy-to-understand report. As part of the development effort, CVS is using MicroStrategy's DSS Objects, an OLE API, to integrate MicroStrategy's ROLAP engine with SAS statistical software that lets CVS pricing experts do decision support against predefined pricing regions.

"We are pleased that CVS has chosen MicroStrategy as its standard for all of its enterprise DSS needs," said Sanju K. Bansal, MicroStrategy's chief operating officer. "The data warehouse, which will approach 700 GB when fully loaded, will provide complete access to corporate and industry information for over 50 users. MicroStrategy is the only company who can provide all of the products CVS needs to meets its DSS objectives."

About MicroStrategy, Inc.

MicroStrategy is the leading provider of industrial-strength decision support products for developing and accessing data warehouses.

As the Relational OLAP (ROLAP) industry pioneer, MicroStrategy was the first vendor to deliver high-performance, multidimensional OLAP analysis directly from relational databases without requiring any proprietary multidimensional databases. In addition, MicroStrategy has engineered many data warehousing breakthroughs: intelligent agents; VLDB drivers for terabyte-range scalability; a dynamic, multi-pass SQL generation engine; DSS metadata CASE tools; a VLDB-savvy OLAP report writer; a mission-critical ROLAP server; and most recently, OLAP over the World Wide Web.

MicroStrategy's contributions have been recognized by the data warehouse industry through several awards including the KPMG High Tech Entrepreneur of the Year and the Database Programming & Design Database Dozen, while MicroStrategy's clients have been recognized as finalists in the RealWare awards and Best Practices awards.

MicroStrategy's worldwide customer base includes industry leaders like Kmart, MCI, CVS, Glaxo Wellcome, Federated Department Stores, Bank of America, AT&T, USAA, Sara Lee Direct, Victoria's Secret, and Hallmark. The company has partnered with strategic value-added resellers and leading software and hardware companies including AC Nielsen, IMS America, NCR, Tandem, Oracle, Informix, Sybase, Red Brick, Sun, and Software AG.

More information about MicroStrategy can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.strategy.com/ or by calling 1-800-927-1868.

About Strategic Decisions, Inc.

Strategic Decisions is the leading provider of Category Management Data Warehousing Solutions. Strategic Decisions' CATMAN-Do! is the optimal solution for a company seeking a full-functioned Category Management application suite. It offers an open and integrated set of Category Marketing, Merchandising, and Supply Chain analyses that allow Retailers, Distributors, and Manufacturers to jointly manage Categories as Strategic Business Units.

More information about Strategic Decisions can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.strategy.com/ or by calling 1-800-362-4232. -0-

DSS Agent and DSS Objects are trademarks of MicroStrategy, Inc. All other product names are trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such.

CONTACT: MicroStrategy, Inc.

Lisa Houde, 703/848-8692, [e-mail]