Celebrating Customer Success at Strategy World 2025

World 2025 is officially a wrap! However, we'd be remiss if we closed the chapter without acknowledging the 4 customers who won our 2025 customer awards and thanking the 42 incredible customers who shared their stories at this year’s conference.

Each year, Strategy honors the accomplishments of 3 exemplary customers at our annual user conference. Strategy's executive leadership team considered over 25 customer story nominations before arriving at our 2025 winners announced during the opening keynote address.

• Innovation Award: Cisco
• Customer Experience Award: Diageo
• Global Business Impact Award: Emirates

We also added a new award for Best in Show to recognize this year's best breakout session according to attendee votes. The win went to B&H Photo, who shared the business impact of their successful cloud migration.

_{President & CEO Phong Le announced the 3 award winners selected by Strategy’s executive leadership team during the opening World 2025 keynote address on Tuesday, May 6. Cisco, Diageo, and Emirates took home this year’s top honors and received their awards at an exclusive Speaker Appreciation Luncheon on Wednesday, May 7.}

Innovation Award Winner: Cisco

Cisco took home the 2025 innovation award for how they successfully embedded Strategy AI into Webex Space, offering conversational access to trusted insights across their global finance organization. Their CFA AI (Cisco Financial Analyzer AI) solution uses Strategy One REST APIs to seamlessly integrate Strategy AI as an agentic AI solution within WebEx. 

"Strategy One has revolutionized management reporting for Cisco's finance office with its scalable platform, delivering timely financial metrics to global leadership for data-driven decisions. The AI-driven conversational analytics provide instant insights, and the platform's REST APIs integrate seamlessly with Cisco Webex Space to enhance user experience," said John Varughese, Senior IT Director for Cisco’s Financial Planning & Performance team. 

Cisco's transformative WebEx AI feature embeds Strategy AI to elevate routine interactions into intelligent decision points with context-aware insights, enabling hundreds of team members to conversationally analyze KPIs, understand trends, and ultimately make more efficient financial decisions.  

_{Cisco team members accepted the 2025 Innovation Award from Strategy leadership at a luncheon for customer and partner speakers. After lunch, they had some fun showing off their new hardware.}

"Our great partnership with the Strategy team enabled Cisco Financial Analyzer to become our leading management reporting platform for our team, empowering faster, data-driven decision-making," said Badri Subudhi, Senior Director in Cisco’s Finance Transformation Office. “This award is a well-deserved recognition for the team’s great work on the CFA AI solution, and the value and insights it brings to Cisco Finance,” adds David Murray, Senior Director of Finance IT at Cisco.  

Cisco is also an integral partner in Strategy's ongoing efforts to enhance the enterprise BI experience with AI. As An early adopter and co-innovator, Cisco’s collaboration is helping to shape the future of the Strategy AI feature within the Strategy One platform. 

Customer Experience Award Winner: Diageo

Diageo, who uses the Strategy One platform to support global sales, was honored for its successful embrace of cloud technologies to ultimately enhance UX and performance across its global team. 

By centralizing their data analytics system on Strategy One, the Diageo team improved forecasting accuracy across geographies, achieved 25% faster performance, and grew user adoption and satisfaction. The impressive impact of their cloud migration includes 3x improvement in end user NPS scores and hundreds of thousands in annual savings generated by decommissioning outdated systems and infrastructure. 

_{Előd Fejér accepted Diageo’s Customer Experience Award from Strategy Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer Kip Amedeo. He also presented 2 "lightning" breakout sessions about Diageo's success story during the conference.}   

“I am extremely proud of my team for both our successful migration and the resulting user experience enhancements from our move to the cloud,” said Előd Fejér, Head of Finance Data Analytics & Insights at Diageo. “We really appreciate Strategy’s partnership and support, so it means a great deal to receive this award from Strategy leadership and have our accomplishments recognized.” 

Global Business Impact Award Winner: Emirates

Emirates won our 2025 global business impact award for the reach of their successful data analytics strategy across a suite of solutions serving 12,000+ users worldwide.  

“We’re honored and delighted to have our work validated by Strategy leadership,” said Naveed Memon, Vice President of Enterprise Data & Analytics Solutions at The Emirates Group. “We take pride in what we do. Every day, we serve our business to enhance data-driven decision-making across Emirates. This award is another way of demonstrating that what we do is making an impact.”

_{Nine members of Emirates’ enterprise data analytics team attended World 2025. Each team member enjoyed a private luncheon with customer award winners and breakout session guest speakers, where Andre Delgado accepted their 2025 Global Business Impact Award.}  

The global aviation luxury leader leverages its enterprise data foundation to power its iconic brand. Known for luxury and world-class hospitality, Emirates harnesses data in incredible ways from predicting aircraft maintenance needs to proactively planning engineering work or enhancing flight safety by enabling pilots to perform pre-check activities with mobile solutions used by pilots in the cockpit.  

Emirates also harnesses data impactfully to empower a customer-centric commercial approach, tailoring in-flight services and experience recommendations to specific customers. It also leverages KPIs about conversion rates, booking lead times, fare class upsells, and more for advanced analytics use cases that enable it to offer dynamic pricing across travel platforms and booking channels, optimizing revenue streams.  

In partnership with Strategy, Emirates is also exploring how cloud technologies and new innovations like HyperIntelligence and AI will help it fuel additional innovation—further improving operations, enhancing customer experiences, and redefining the future of travel. 

Best in Show Award Winner: B&H Photo

The inaugural Best in Show award for the top customer breakout session according to peer votes from fellow attendees went to B&H Photo. Business Intelligence Director Yesroel Gruber and BI Administrator Zvi Weinstock presented Creating a Picture-Perfect Cloud Migration alongside Emma Lawrie from Strategy’s cloud product management team.

B&H’s session explained how they seamlessly and rapidly migrated to Strategy Cloud, the platform's managed cloud environment (MCE), during the busy Black Friday season, maintaining flawless performance without disruption. Attendees appreciated the snapshot of success strategies B&H shared that will help them similarly ensure business continuity during their own migrations.

Get Inspired & Join Us at World 2026

When we ask attendees what they like most about attending World, one of the most common refrains we hear is that the conference offers an compelling opportunity to connect with data analytics peers. Many customers even share that some of their own successes were inspired by what they learned from fellow customers at Strategy events—so we’re truly grateful to the 67 speakers from 42 different customers who shared their inspiring stories at World 2025.  

Our customers' diverse breakout topics ranged from strategies for establishing an AI+BI Center of Excellence on a united data fabric with the Strategy One platform to unlocking impact through successful cloud migrations and driving business value for frontline workers with Strategy AI, HyperIntelligence, and mobile solutions. Each customer’s breakout session will be published in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for further data analytics and AI inspiration.

If you already can’t wait for Strategy World 2026, we encourage you to register this month for the best event rate you’ll see all year. Next year’s conference will take place from February 23-26 in Las Vegas—and we can’t wait to see you there!