MicroStrategy Strategically Relocates to Tysons Corner, Va.

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A fast growing software company will relocate its corporate headquarters and all domestic employees to Tysons Corner, Va., on Oct. 1. MicroStrategy Inc., with 65 people, is making the move to tap the area's professionally rich labor market, said its president.

For a company that needs to hire 50 software developers, "Wilmington, Del., can't meet the demand," said Michael Saylor, who founded MicroStrategy five years ago. "We needed to pick a place conducive to high-tech software development, and we narrowed it down to Boston, San Francisco and Washington. San Francisco was too far away from eastern markets and Boston is too cold."

A fast growing software company will relocate its corporate headquarters and all domestic employees to Tysons Corner, Va., on Oct. 1. MicroStrategy Inc., with 65 people, is making the move to tap the area's professionally rich labor market, said its president.

From the beginning, executive vice president and co-founder Sanju Bansal -- a native of Fairfax, Va. -- has maintained offices in the Tycon Towers building in Vienna, Va., where the company's new headquarters will be. It also has an office in Barcelona and is in the process of opening one in London.

MicroStrategy's business is client/server decision support systems, and it provides software development, systems integration and consulting. Its specialty, Saylor said, is developing complex decision-support systems against extremely large databases, or data warehouses.

The company works in Oracle, Sybase and Informix environments as well as DB2.

"We architect front-end applications," Saylor said, "and we also design back-end architectures to support extremely large data warehouses."

Customers for the 100-plus gigabyte systems are banks and retail companies, he said.

Simultaneous with its relocation, MicroStrategy will launch a new software product, DSS Agent, with features that include data surfing, dynamic SQL creation, multidimensional data views, complex filtering criteria support and automation via desktop agents and alerts.

Although revenues are undisclosed, they have been doubling every year, said Saylor. MicroStrategy sells directly and through distributors and VARS, but for custom applications teams with consulting firms.

Along with Saylor, other executives relocating include co-founder Thomas P. Spahr, director of administration; Director of East Coast Operations David Sherwood; Stephen Trundle, director of technology; and Manish G. Acharya, director of marketing.


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