MicroStrategy Reviews

We are Reynolds American. We work in product supplies scenarios. In our environment, we work with any kind of volume data. We use MicroStrategy to deliver reporting to our trade reps who go into outlets, so account-level reporting. That's going to be more of our embedded reporting. That is an application that we created in Salesforce that links into MicroStrategy and links back and forth between the in-house application we've created.

But then, a large majority of our reporting is going to be that enterprise application where we have a fixed reporting environment on a monthly basis. We deliver reports to a large majority of our cooperate departments, anywhere from 300 to 1000 users.

We also have second, ad hoc environment, which is more of a weekly environment, where we typically do the same delivery of those static reports. But there is that component of the ad hoc where we facilitate the back-end development of all of the objects going through the STLC to Git, to production, so our business users can actually utilize what's available to them in the production environment. They can then take the next steps, pulling back those insights off of the data that we provide them.

I think one of the greatest things about MicroStrategy is their holistic approach to business intelligence. They don't put priority on one component of report development over document development, over administrative functionality, and security. I think they have a very holistic application. 

They offer us a lot of out-of-the-box tools, which give us the ability to automate a lot of our administrative tasks. Some things become menial: user creation, restarting a server at 10 o'clock on a Friday - simple things that they really give you the tools to be able to do. That's one thing I really like about the MicroStrategy platform from an administrative perspective. 

Regarding our users, the insights that they can gain, how quickly they can gather information, has been a huge benefit for us from MicroStrategy.

I think ease of use is definitely a benefit to our users, from an administrative perspective, as well as a business end-user perspective. I found that it's very easy to get users into the system, get them familiar. 

The biggest part is the caveat of our data. We have more trouble getting people to learn our data than we do the structures, the navigation, manipulation, and all of these things that you do as a report developer and end-user. Most of them are familiar with Excel and it's just so similar that they can pick it up very intuitively. When you start talking about the really specialized data sets that we have, that's when it starts to become a little bit more hairy, so that's not really a MicroStrategy component.

In terms of self-service, we make use of Enterprise Manager. We've been trying to involve it a little bit more with some of our actual rep data, so we can start to look at that enterprise report utilization on a geographical scale, departmental scale. We've made a few enhancements to our Enterprise Manager system to allow that self-reporting to grow. We see that as a very useful system. It's been incredibly beneficial in diagnosing production performance issues, diagnosing what reports are running slowly, where the SQL could be optimized, opportunities or metrics where we see long-time running performance. Enterprise Manager has been absolutely vital in giving us some of the insights about our system. 

We're starting to open it up to more and more people to give them the ability and start looking at these things themselves, but it's not the most intuitive system, Enterprise Manager that is, so it's tough. We're trying to bridge the gap between usability and who we let in the system, because you're not going to come in and just pick it up.

Personally, looking ahead at 2018, we're getting into the administrative side of our cloud implementations. We're really trying to move to the cloud in 2018, so I see myself getting more familiar with MicroStrategy on AWS Console. And even if we intend to go to the on-prem on AWS, I see us getting more familiar, and it's not necessarily a MicroStrategy component, but structuring the infrastructure of the server in such a way that we're cost-effective, we're maximizing our utilization when we can. I think that is going to be a large component for us in 2018, though it's not necessarily specifically MicroStrategy.

Then I think we have a huge enterprise-wide push to Visual Insight. Our environment has transformed over the last year. We were a strong "grid to PDF," "document to PDF," that's all we did. And then they came in with these Visual Insights and everyone was like, "Wow, that's kind of cool." We created a static reporting portal behind it and now, it's just taken our reports to another level. The level of insight that you get in a 30-second glimpse, it just revolutionized it for us. It gives the user a larger subset of the data so that they can actually maneuver around, rather than being specifically pointed at whatever your document is designed for. 

So VI, Dossier. 

If we can get on 10.9 this year, I would like to but we're not big on feature releases and we had difficulty with 10.9 on sandbox, so were hesitant right now.

Then our cloud implementation, coming in 2018, is going to be a big play on the 10.9, I think. There's no point in us upgrading and then going up the cloud two weeks later. It's a lot of stuff, but that's our focus.

The problem is the way that their metrics are designed. It can be difficult to understand what you're actually looking at. Then when you're comparing a document against the VI, you can't actually do that properly. So there are components, and there is a huge learning curve in the Enterprise Manager space. I think it would benefit them greatly if they were to exercise a significant amount of research and development in that space.

They need to supply the support system that's just not there right now. They don't have Enterprise Manager classes. You need in-depth classes to understand what those metrics are doing, to understand the table associations from one to the other. You can't just go and pick it up and understand that DT_DAY connects to all of these tables, without going into Architect, looking at the source tables. I, as a analyst, a slightly technical user, I don't have the expertise to do that. Business users definitely don't have the expertise to do that. 

What can they do embolden that system, to make it more intuitive? But also, to supply that support system so that they can get a higher level of reporting.

I know they're working on the telemetry initiative right now, and they have given us some reports in that system, the Enterprise Manager space, that really do help us look at those insights. But the biggest piece is that we can't get to them by ourselves, that's the problem. We don't see it by ourselves. We can't get to them by ourselves because there are association-joins and things that we don't understand, that are causing either cross-joins or any other crazy thing that you could think of. 

It's kind of like a trial and error deal, to see what's coming back. You look at the SQL, make sure it's a synched. It can be a little difficult to get in there and really figure things out.

In terms of features for a future release, I have a whole list somewhere. Row-level security, column-level security, on attributes. I want to be able to handle full-scale security model from the semantic layer, flat out. 

I want to be able to have one report that's delivered to 30 different people and all 30 different people see something different. Now, you can do that today with metrics. You cannot do that with attributes. There's a component of that which, if an attribute is on granularity-one and another is on granularity-two, and you remove granularity-one, you're now going to be summing to a level that you did not expect before. 

They have a long road ahead of them to be able to accomplish it. But, being that we're in a very regulated industry, it is incredibly useful for manufacturing, for research and development, for those in Earth sciences, environmental sciences, those folks who have a lot of SPI, a lot of that data that they want to restrict users having access to, I think that's a selling point that they don't have right now. I think is going to take them out of the Earth sciences space as a true competitor. There are so many out there, and it's a space that they have an opportunity in, and that row-level of security was a big component of what we would do.

Then there's significant digits, which my client team will probably laugh about if I told you that, which gave us a lot of difficulty trying to get to a scientific way to look at decimals, but it's not straightforward and it's a pain. 

Then a few of those consolidations that I mentioned. 

Then, if they could beef up Enterprise Manager - if I could go to my client team and tell them this report has been run three times in the last three months by these three people and they say, "Well, those three people, what are they doing? Why are they running it? Get it out of our system. That's a waste of our time. It's a waste of our resources. It's taking up space." So if we can get to that next level in Enterprise Manager, I think that would be huge for us as well.

We are running into performance issues on the database side right now. We have MicroStrategy issues. We upped to the named user licenses, no issues. Then we introduced some new things to the environment, which is causing, again, database issues.

From a stability standpoint, from MicroStrategy, I would say it's fairly consistent. I would give it a "B" because there are times where we have issues that are just inexplicable. They go away and then we have no resolution. To me, that's not acceptable. There are just times where our users can't access things and we're not sure why, and that's a problem to me. 

We had some failures on data load, whether this is a component of MicroStrategy or how our service is configured, I'm not sure. We just had some issues keeping our data loads running from an Enterprise Manager perspective, but from the production Intelligent Server, stability is fantastic. We've really not had many issues.

Scalability seems great. It wasn't great when we were on the core licensing, to be completely honest, because we were restricted to a single core across 2,500 users, so we moved to named user licensing, giving us eight cores - no problems, whatsoever. You start to think about how you move to the cloud, those eight cores become 16, then become 64 very quickly - not an issue. Scalability on that end, of the Intelligent Server, I think that's huge. We need to figure out the database component of that, but I don't think what you're asking about.

We have 24/7 technical support. They're incredible. We have the extended support plan, so we have actually an account rep assigned to us. If you go for the extended support plan, it's unbelievable. You email him and you've got someone talking to you within an hour; they're working to solve your problem. They'll go through iterations. Sometimes, they'll be taking shots in the dark, but it's IT, it happens; shut it off, turn it back on, things like, you've got to do the basics first. But they have some incredible resources on their team.

The majority of people that I talk to, that I get onboard with, absolutely understand our business model, how we incorporate MicroStrategy into it. But it's the occasional person who you get and you say, "Hey, I already did this troubleshooting stuff, etc." and they say, "Well, why don't you try this?" and you tell them, "Well, if you read my paragraph, I've done that three times." It's just like one in 10 that you get someone like that, but I think you're going to have that everywhere. Then you've got some people who know us by name, they know who we are. When we request support, they are the people who come to us. Creating that relationship with the support team has been absolutely incredible for us.

We have had production problems, Enterprise Manager problems, and they're right there every step of the way, going through our installations, making sure things are coming through properly. In the event that we do have problems, they are always there to support. I think that's been huge for us.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but I have been involved in upgrades. The upgrade from 10.4 to 10.8, simple click of the button, but it just didn't go through as we had anticipated. There's really no explanation as to why. We ran it again and it went through without a hit. Again, that was one of those problems where we don't really know what caused it, we don't know why our installation wasn't working very well.

Then when we attempted to upgrade from 10.8 to 10.9 on our sandbox server, we spent roughly a month and a half trying to do that, completely and totally unsuccessfully. I don't know why. Again, I think that might be a component of how our servers are structured, the way our registries are structured, the way our security interacts with MicroStrategy, but it's a problem. We're working on that.

Being in the position that I'm in, I see the benefit of having the disparate locations. I love web. Web is great for the business user. I love Developer. Developer is great for me. I do not want my business users touching Developer. I don't even want them to know it exists. 

Honestly, MicroStrategy came and did a demo for our clients, and part of the reason they didn't get the contract is because they showed Developer. The business users got so confused that it just was not good. But for someone like me, highly technical, there's just so much more functionality. I like that they're trying to incorporate Developer into Workstation and Desktop into Workstation, so you get the all-in-one encompassing, highly technical Developer Workstation where you can do the VI, you can do the Dossier. But then you have your business users' side. 

Then I think there's another component: You've got all of your administrative apps in the back-end like Enterprise Manager, System Manager, Command Manager, Object Manager, and they're disparate.

I was talking to them a little bit yesterday about trying to bring all of this together under one platform. They've done a touch of that with System Manager, but not to the point that it's easily replicable to just run Command Manager out of System Manager. The only reason to use System Manager is if you have a large workflow. Otherwise, it will be quicker to go to Command Manager. Now, if they could kind of bundle that all under one umbrella, I think it would be possible. I think it would be huge from an administrative standpoint, giving your developers, giving the DBAs that level of access in one location that would really bring it to the next level. 

Then if you want to take it even a step further, you can start to think of incorporating Workstation, but that might be a little bit too much in one application, so we'll let them bite off what they can chew for now.

In terms of mobile, I plan on pitching and pushing mobile pretty hard. We have an initiative coming in 2018. We're going to replace all of our trade laptops. We don't use mobile devices today, but we will then replace those laptops in two years. That means that we need to get into the mobile space within a year, we need to validate that everything works, and then, quite frankly, we're probably going to have to redesign many of the applications that we have around that mobile platform. We use Salesforce for some of our trade applications which then import to MicroStrategy to pull in some information. With the new Transaction Services, where documents are now, and where VIs and Dossiers are heading, we could get to a point where we're no longer using that Salesforce application, and we're running a full-fledged customized application out of MicroStrategy. So, I would like to get to that.

That will be a large-scale push on my company, but the mobile platform: absolutely. I will be pushing very hard for that.

One of the beautiful things about getting into the cloud space is, it's already there. It's just a matter of us getting it tested, messing around with it, getting the credentials squared away. We've been through conversations of how to get security for people who don't have Active Directory on an iOS device. That's where we are in our talks right now, but mobile is definitely a big, big thing in our sights.

What I appreciate in a vendor is integrity. It's a fault and it's a benefit. Our team at MicroStrategy is honest. When they can't do something, they will very easily, flat out, come out and say, "I don't think I can do that. I will put this amount of effort into trying to figure out how we could do it. I'll put out a tech note, see what kind of pickup I get back." That's one of the incredible things, because you're not having someone who's saying, "Well, I can do this. I can do that. I can do this," and then you're thinking, "Well, he said he could do it," so now I could do it. Let me go out and spend X amount of hours to go and do something where he's going to pull in a third-party, spend $60,000, and complete something. 

I think that it has been great for us to be able to level-set our expectations as to what we can and cannot accomplish, what's realistic, what is pushing us to the next level. When they spot something, they'll say, "That's wrong." They'll laugh at us and literally say, "What are you doing?" and I love that. I think our client team is fantastic. They're unbelievably knowledgeable. Integrity, intelligence, and honestly. Those are my criteria right there.

Overall I rate MicroStrategy a nine out of 10 because of a lot those things I mentioned before. We have issues where we don't really know what's going on. I think it goes back to that "B" rating I gave earlier. There are a few pieces that we're trying to get a handle on that we just can't. I think there are a few enhancements that they could do to make their system better. A "B" rating - I am very judgmental, I do not take things lightly. 

Then also, they need to work on their license structure. They are not competitive against somebody like SAP BusinessObjects.

We had a quote that was almost a third the price, coming from SAP BusinessObjects, and it's not a better platform. It's not cheaper. They do concurrent user licensing, while MicroStrategy does named user licensing, and that was literally the only difference. But it made a $500,000 difference. They've got to do something to make themselves more competitive. Maybe it's assessing your business users and what you really expect them to use, and maybe giving a reduced price on that. But they are already giving us a 60% discount and they were still a million or so above, over a three-year time period. That doesn't account for synergies as we get from on-site resources that are already available, and things of that nature, but I thought that that was a big, big deficit for them.

Regarding advice to a colleague who is looking to implement this type of solution, first, if you can get support online or at least aware that you're doing an installation so that they can be ready for some questions, that is absolutely huge. I know most people only get support for "nine to five," but that, for us, has been absolutely vital.

Also, planning and testing. It's really all you can do. It's just a typical installation. I don't think there's anything out of the ordinary. There are no caveats about MicroStrategy that are different than anybody else. It's relatively straightforward. You've installed a disk before. You plug it in, you pick what you want out of the drop-down box and then you go, boom. But then, when you start to get to the security setup and things like that, you need to be thorough. You need to plan properly, and you think of your use case down to the end user.

I think that one of the most important things that we may have overlooked is getting to: What are you going to do in your two, what are you going to do in your three, where are we going with this? Not, "What do we have now." You've really got to think about, are we structuring this in such a way that in two years, we're going to be so disoriented that we don't know where anything is in the system. I think that ensuring that you have a vision for what your three-year or five-year plan is, I think that's huge.

Again, coming from a project management background I would say plan, plan, plan, plan, and then plan again. That's the best thing that you can do, because implementation is not that long. It's not that hard. As long as you've gone through the settings, you know what you want, it's not going to be a 20 or 30-hour process where you're setting up. You'll install, it'll take 15 minutes, you come in, you set your settings, 30 minutes, and then, boom, you restart the server and you're done. It's just planning. Making sure you know exactly what you're going to do when you do it.

I have always admired how MicroStrategy has continued to strive on one particular aspect, simplification, yet not compromise on its robustness. The mobile features have proven to be the most valuable to me. Their Mobile solution is one of the best in the BI industry when it comes to quality, presentation, out-of-the-box features and ease of development. My client has fully adapted to this solution and we are extremely pleased with the end results.

In the past, our sales VP and directors will bring their laptop loaded with Excel sheets whenever they meet with their clients, but that has now been replaced with an iPad using the MicroStrategy Mobile solution. The BI application now is able to provide the analytics and visualizations required to empower our VPs and directors to make informed decisions in real time with their clients. The application has also helped identify the weak links within the sales structure.

If I were to pick a few areas with room for improvement, I would suggest the following:

• It would be nice to have more visualizations available for the user community right out the box instead of using the D3 plugin.
• It would be nice to have more features packed with the ESRI Map engine that is supported right out the box.
• MicroStrategy Operations Manager needs improvement from a visualization and stability perspective. (This is a new feature that was introduced in MicroStrategy 10.)

I've used it for 12 years, implementing MicroStrategy solutions for both government and corporate clients.

I have been involved with implementing MicroStrategy Solution for over 12 years and I have worked with other BI solution providers (IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, SAS BI) while contracting for the government. In my experience, MicroStrategy have had the greatest uptime percentile when it comes to stability compared to the rest of the tools. I've seen great improvement in stability, especially in versions 9 and 10. It is a stable tool when it’s deployed and configured as recommended.

The MicroStrategy solution is very scalable. An organization can start out with limited licensing and grow more robust without compromising on the performance.

I would say their technical support quality has been a little questionable lately and I have brought up our concerns to their regional director. MicroStrategy has acknowledged my concerns and assured me that they are working towards providing a better quality of support.

I started my career with MicroStrategy and have not worked with a different solution before. On the other hand, I was involved in a project where we switched from another BI solution, Cognos, to MicroStrategy, while contracting for a government entity.

MicroStrategy’s implementation has always been very straightforward and the organization has continued to strive to simplify the whole deployment process. It requires minimal support from other IT personnel.

MicroStrategy licensing structure has been recently revamped and in my opinion, they have done a great job. From a cost perspective, it’s pretty competitive, but one thing to keep in mind is the fact that you don’t need to hire a ton of consultants to manage this application.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

MicroStrategy has always been one of the top leaders in the business intelligence industry and they have worked hard to provide new breakthroughs in the industry. There are other BI tools that can potentially provide a better solution for various reasons but in my opinion, they are very much focused on a specific area. If you are looking into a tool that offers the full suite of business intelligence needs, you will never go wrong with MicroStrategy.

Hands-down: Object-oriented metadata architecture.

Why? Allows the re-use of objects throughout the platform, resulting in fast development, need for smaller staff, and faster ROI.

Example: Create a filter for Latest Month.

You can add that filter to any metric, use that filter in any report, add that metric into any other metric (such as Latest Month Highest Performers). Any metric can be added to any report. Reports can even be used as filters within other reports.

It can be used in any platform MicroStrategy offers: Developer, Web, Office, Mobile, Dashboards, Data Discovery… This is the same for metrics, reports, dashboards, etc. Build it once, use it anywhere (no need to create duplicate objects for Web and for Mobile, for instance).

If a change is needed in an object, the change is permutated throughout the system. For instance, if the definition of the Sales metric changes, you change the Sales metric and wherever the metric is used, the change is expressed.

This feature saves a lot of time in development and support because you don’t need to keep re-creating objects (and in re-creating them, introduce possible errors). A very small team can support many more users than any other platform, saving the organization money in the long run. In my opinion and experience, this gives MicroStrategy the edge over any other BI system.

Truly provides a single version of the truth. Once you create a metric or report that is correct, it is always correct, no matter where it is deployed. When a company I used to work for first rolled out MicroStrategy, there was a lot of suspicion by the existing DBAs and the traditional SQL report developers about the system’s results. If a report would show incorrect results one month, there was a lot of finger-pointing at MicroStrategy and ‘AHA!’s. In every case, the MicroStrategy team was able to prove that the error was due to incorrect data in the database.

Over time, the MicroStrategy system grew to be the ‘system of record’ and used to validate data loads for other systems.

Documentation and training: Though the basics of the platform are well documented and the in-house training offerings are the best software training classes I have ever attended, MicroStrategy falls a little short when it comes to some of the lesser-known/used features. For most, this will not cause a problem. But if your situation calls for the need to work with System Manager (a workflow application), for example, you'll be stuck searching thru Google and YouTube looking for information.

I have used it since version 5 (1998); 18 years off and on.

I occasionally encountered stability issues. If the metadata becomes extremely large, I have seen instances in which there are internal inconsistency errors. By this, I mean that it’s not that the system suddenly returns incorrect data but rather the internal definition of an object (could be any object: metric, filter, fact, report, hierarchy, etc.) becomes ‘corrupt’. MicroStrategy provides an easy-to-use tool, ScanMD, that finds and fixes these issues should they occur.

The inconsistency is due to the way the MicroStrategy metadata is structured. It is a relational database with many tables. These tables have foreign keys to the other metadata tables. For example, an Object table and a Where Used table. Sometimes the deletion of an object or an update in an object might not be cleanly expressed throughout the metadata database and the relational integrity is broken for that object, throwing an error message when the object is used.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Like any technical support group, it depends on which individual you are working with. Some have been stellar. Others make you wonder if they’ve ever really worked with the software beyond basic training. Overall, they are better than most I’ve dealt with.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Set up can be complex, though not as complex as SAP, for example. The most important thing, the very most critical thing, is that the data model is correct. Attributes need to be clearly understood and their relationships to each other and the various facts needs to be carefully defined BEFORE you begin. An ER diagram, be it in Visio or a tool like ERwin, is invaluable and in my personal opinion a must have. Going back to redefine attribute relationships and table structures can be very difficult. Do not think you can ‘figure it out as we build’. You’ll need a person who is an experienced data modeler on the team.

Software installation and hardware configuration is fairly straight forward.

MicroStrategy can be very expensive compared to other platforms – at first blush. The cost of purchasing the software and licenses has frequently been identified in numerous surveys as the factor most often cited for not going the MicroStrategy. The initial buy-in can be expensive; however, the platform is so much cheaper to run over the long haul than most other enterprise systems. A very small dedicated team of developers and quick development times (after initial setup) result in a much-lower yearly platform cost than other systems.

From a licensing viewpoint, there are basically two ways to go: per CPU or per user.
Per CPU: If you will have more than a few hundred users on your system or foresee a very dynamic user base where the number of system users can grow rapidly then shrink then grow again – use per CPU. You can have virtually unlimited users.

Per user: If you have a well-defined user base that you anticipate to stay roughly the same or grow slowly over time this may be your best option. Also, if you anticipate a very high workload (many thousands of reports run per day), this option allows you to add hardware without incurring licensing costs.

FYI It is easier to renegotiate your licensing with MicroStrategy if you go from per user to per CPU than to go the other way around.

I do not know if/what other products were evaluated prior to MicroStrategy.

• Do not attempt to ‘learn as you go’. It is a powerful platform and thus complex to understand. Attend MicroStrategy training classes. MicroStrategy offers on-line and in-house options, but take the classes at a MicroStrategy-sponsored training center; you need to be fully immersed. Those who’ve attempted ‘learn as we build’ are never satisfied.
• Your team needs to have at least one person who is an experienced data modeler and that person needs to take MicroStrategy Architect training and should become MicroStrategy certified in that.
• Your team should have a medium proficiency in SQL. They don’t need to be SQL wizards but they should have a solid base.
• Your initial developers will need to be dedicated MicroStrategy resources. Do not expect them to be supporting and developing a variety of other software/platform initiatives.
• Have a very good working relationship with your DBA staff. Communication is key.
• Document, document, document. Documentation is not for you and your staff – it’s for the poor developers that come in afterwards. Have an ER diagram available for all your source databases. Have flow diagrams showing data loads, schedules, events, outputs. Maintain your system server diagrams (including ODBC connections, etc.). Besides helping new staff with on-boarding, it will help analyze impacts of system changes and is a virtual requirement when doing upgrades.
• In your project plan, expect to utilize at least 25% of the timeline in building the data model (if one does not already exist).

It’s very scalable, the most scalable BI platform that I know of. By that I mean data scalability as well as being able to support a large number of users. The product is mature and stable. It supports a broad range of analysis styles and presentation formats.

We have deployed multiple BI solutions using Microstrategy, ranging from standard reports to dashboards to ad hoc analytics.

Microstrategy works best against a star or snowflake schema. While in principle it can work with a more normalized data model, it struggles with schemas other than star or snowflake.

Over 3 years. It had been installed before I started with the company.

Nothing major

Nothing major

The tool itself scales well, however in our experience the scalability of the entire solution is 90%+ a function of the underlying database.

Customer Service: GoodTechnical Support: Good

We used Cognos before. The main reason for switching is that at the time when we made a decision to switch, Cognos was unable to handle the data volumes that we required. Latest versions of Cognos have improved in this respect.

I can’t comment on this because initial setup had been conducted before I joined the company.

We used a mix of MicroStrategy Professional Services and in-house staff. Their consultants were superb.

We don’t measure ROI.

It depends on how you count costs and what you include.

The other option was to stay with Cognos.

Make sure your database design follows dimensional modeling principles. Avoid API-level customizations, they may break when upgrading product versions.

• Multi-user development environment: allows several power users to be changing the metadata, which accelerates development. Oracle BI doesn't allow this, for instance.
• Stability
• High-performance queries
• Flexibility
• Internal analytical functions
• Ease of integration with other systems
• Ease of dashboard design

• Quick time to market of analytical solutions
• In-depth, user-friendly business analysis

Simplify dashboard design; it is very powerful, but sometimes it might be like using a cannon to kill a mosquito, depending on the situation. Perhaps it is simpler in the newer version.

From my experience, the Dahsboard design from Microstrategy v9i was
very powerful and flexible. It was a "pixel perfect" design, but comparing
with other reporting platforms like Tableau and Qlik and OBIEE it is more
complex. I believe it is very good, but it needs some technical expertise
(Power User) to be fully autonomous.

I have used it for nine months.

I encountered minor stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is quick and efficient.

This depends on the client's needs and existing IT systems.

Initial setup is straightforward.

It is expensive, but there is a good quality-price relationship.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated QlikView and Tableau.

Consider it in terms of flexibility to manage and develop user-friendly and powerful interfaces for end users.

• Mobility
• Ease of use
• Multi-sourcing ability

Many of my users have iPhones and iPads, and being able to deliver mobile dashboards to them is a great asset for them. The coming years will prove that traditional desktop reporting and even working will be a thing of the past. All industries are moving towards mobile reporting and away from physical reporting (paper). Being able to deploy mobile reports on our user’s iPhones puts the necessary data they need at their fingertips. And actually, in 2017, I plan on pushing some Apple Watch reports.

I have created some transaction services reports that allow the field to comment on issues that the c-level might have questions on. This in turn creates a very open and productive environment.

https://www.itcentralstation.c...It would be great if MicroStrategy could incorporate into the Reporting Services dashboards the adaptive response that a Visual Insight dashboard has; being able to auto-adjust to the peripheral. When you create a Visual Insight dashboard, it would auto-adjust according to what the user is using to see the report; be that iPad, iPhone, or laptop.

The drawback to a Visual Insight dashboard is that it doesn’t come with as many reporting options as a Reporting Services dashboard. The drawback to a Reporting Services dashboard is, if you have users that span multiple ways they see the data – laptop, tablet, or phone – you have to create a specific dashboard for each.

I have used it for 12 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

The level of technical support depends; if it’s an easy question, then they will quickly answer the question. I find the majority of my help via the knowledge base.

Up until a year ago, I used ProDiver. We switched because our company merged with another and they were using MicroStrategy.

We are a Windows environment, so set up was very easy.

Before choosing this product, We didn’t evaluate other options.

MicroStrategy depends heavily on your data, so don’t purchase it if your company doesn’t plan to make investments to warehouse its data.

• In-memory cubes (aka Intelligent Cubes)
• Intelligence Server capabilities (SQL/analytical/etc. engines)
• Web
• Developer

Creating objects/reports in MicroStrategy is quite easy and is one of the main reasons for its success. The product also allows non-technical folks to create reports/dashboards with relative ease, which would explain its high adoption rate.

With MicroStrategy, organizations can allow their end-users to create their own ad-hoc reports/dashboards/visualizations, which greatly reduces their dependence on a dedicated development team. While a development team is still necessary for designing the schema and long-term solutions, this product reduces the burden on developers by empowering end-users to be self-sufficient.

The administration tools (primarily System Manager, Enterprise Manager and Operations Manager) need a major overhaul. These tools are generally used by MicroStrategy administrators to monitor the usage and bottlenecks in the system.

Enterprise Manager is one tool which is provided out-of-the-box by MSTR. It's basically a pre-built MSTR project with reports/dashboards to monitor usage at the user, project and system levels. This is primarily useful to see which objects are used most frequently and which reports need to be modified for improved response times, etc. Setting up Enterprise Manager can be cumbersome and it's a buggy product. A ground-up redesign of the EM project would be ideal. It is still a very powerful tool for its current design.

System Manager is also buggy (various workflows don't work as expected, documentation is lacking, etc.).

Operations Manager was a tool that MSTR released a couple of versions ago, but it was riddled with issues (a lot of errors during setup mainly). I believe OM has been scrapped in newer releases, if I'm not mistaken.

I have used it for 6+ years.

While the core feature (Intelligence Server) does encounter stability issues on rare occasions, it's still a very stable product.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. MicroStrategy has been quite friendly when it comes to scalability.

I would rate technical support 8/10. I used to work in tech support at MSTR. It is a very well-run department; very efficient, lots of smart and hardworking people (from technical and non-technical backgrounds). The support engineers aren't always given all the tools necessary to do their jobs and sometimes; they're working with certain black-box components, which makes troubleshooting very difficult. This in turn can increase the case/issue resolution times. But these are only a small percentage of all cases. All things considered, it's a terrific department/team to work with as an employee and customer.

We have always used MicroStrategy.

The initial setup is straightforward but can get complex as the requirements change. The product is quite flexible when it comes to accommodating special requirements.

Before purchasing licenses, be absolutely sure about the number of users that will be using the product. This will be useful when deciding to go with a named-user license (better for a small user base) or a CPU-based license (better for a large-er user base).

I wasn't involved in evaluating the various options. I joined when the decision was made to go with MicroStrategy.

Make use of their manuals and user community. There's a vast amount of knowledge out there in their community.

Recovering session finally works for all report types. Also, fundamental issues with ODBC causing involuntary restarts has been resolved. It has a couple of very useful end-user and developer features, such as copying panel stacks inside RS documents and the ability to attach images directly to a dashboard. They are pretty useful.

End users are able to work more on their own, so it lowers the cost of BI department.

The developer is a long-ago obsolete tool. Its interface and functions should be completely redesigned. The fact is not only is the user interface far obsolete (for more than 10 years), it is also quite often repeating tasks like dragging because it handles the actions incorrectly (like moving objects from report objects are to a grid). Also, it does not work properly when the resolution is too high, and the integration architect tool is far from being bug free.

They are working on a new tool with codename Workstation so we will see.

I have used it for three months.

We encounter fewer stability issues now (version 10.3 hf2); before that, there were pretty serious issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is getting better; there has certainly been progress over the past year, but it still could be so much better.

We switched because MicroStrategy is the most-advanced and feature-rich tool.

Each release (even a minor one) is unique, so initial setup is definitely complex; each installation has its own specifics.

Negotiate at least a 30-40% discount.

We also evaluated SAP BusinessObjects and Tableau.

Get a person who has some skill and has already done several installations.