MicroStrategy Reviews

• Visual insights:
  
  • For ad-hoc and self-service visualization
  • Faster user adoption
  • Connection to different sources
  • Data blending / mashing: Blending and mashing is valuable since users right now are currently tied up with the traditional way of getting data from databases prepared by IT. This feature will enable business users to immediately have access to different data sources, whether from IT or from their personal files, and allows them to combine these sources, and create reports and/or visualizations quickly and easily.
    Saves time and empowers business users.
  • Visual data discovery / data visualization
• Developer: object-oriented BI modelling
• Web services: building highly customized BI applications
• Mobile: pixel-perfect mobile dashboards, building mobile apps
• Object manager: migrations
• Security: complete and secure for enterprise scale

• As a consulting firm: delivering BI solutions to customers effectively and efficiently at an enterprise level

• Developer: Simplify BI modelling features to increase learning curve and user adoption.
• Data visualization: Improve and add visualizations and features to prepare BI apps. Reduce clicks and steps.

I have been using it for 3-4 years, including earlier versions (9.2).

We have encountered minimal stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer support is great but can still improve TAT.

We did not switch from a previous solution. We use Tableau, Microsoft and MicroStrategy depending on the needs or requirements of the customer.

The setups I have done are all single-server deployments, both in Linux and Windows:

• I-Server
• Mobile server
• Web server

Further simplify the licensing scheme:

• Architect is expensive
• Match or beat the pricing of Tableau
• Tableau is still cheaper

All products have been used depending on the customer.

At the enterprise level, MicroStrategy is good but requires a longer learning curve to fully maximize the platform as compared to other traditional BI tools and niche products such as Tableau.

Mobile, Visual Insights, reporting and subscriptions with alerts.

From my experience, I see that it is definitely more useful for businesses to make effective decisions from the data used. One example I can recall is in healthcare, where it helps businesses to see hospital/facility level inflow/outflow information on a mobile device in real time fashion, and make decisions accordingly to improve the business.

Some of the basic features such as Axis Label formatting on Graphs, Quick Switch on mobile (iOS), properly updated documentation on their websites, and faster enhancement fixes when needed for customers/businesses that are simple in nature rather than holding it for longer durations to fix.

I've been using it for five years.

There are times where the installation cause problems – but those could be avoiding if we know the process or certified/supported items before doing it.

I would rate it as average as enhancements and defect fixes takes years or months to implement. Other than that, their turn around on issues will be quicker depending on the priority of ticket.

I’ve used Qlikview and Tableau – which is good in self service than enterprise delivery. I love MicroStrategy as it has full depth BI functionality inside right from Admin to End Users scalability. Hence, MicroStrategy is the best solution I have used to date.

It was straightforward to me and now they have made it much easier in v10.x with express install and a static licence key rather than updating it on every sub release within the versions.

I have done both as a vendor team and also in-house for my own organization. My advice is to read the complete install and upgrade guide that the product provides. This will help you to have a better implementation than doing it without this knowledge.

They should make it cheaper and add more value to the product by resolving small issues that are very key to businesses. Other than that, the current pricing and licensing model is good.

Understand your business needs and budget. In order decide whether or not to get this tool you need to know your the vision that will eventually help in growing your business.

The OLAP environment is valuable. The user can find all the data in a single place and through the web, without needing to install anything on their machines and, of course, once you have created the necessary metadata. That is not as easy in other platforms, such as Microsoft.

It gives people access to data in a single place (portal).

I believe they should move to the web completely and leave the desktop behind. Features available one time through one and another time through the other complicates things too much.

I have used it for three years.

We have had no stability issues.

We have had some scalability issues, but they have not been a big problem.

Technical support is poor. You have to read their manuals and that's pretty much everything you have.

The company I was working for chose that course of action. I'd rather we did a proof of concept with several vendors instead of choosing MicroStrategy up front.

The initial setup was complex, really complex! Lots of configurations and installations.

It's expensive. I believe there are others that can provide most of the features for a better price.

No other options were evaluated. My boss at the time didn't want to spend time with evaluations, unfortunately.

Compare, and if you're going to spend a lot of money anyhow, there are better options, surely!

In addition to its dashboard, reporting, and scorecard development tools, MicroStrategy has more than 10 tools in its product suite which help to integrate with other technologies and products.

• Enterprise Manager tracks the usage of the MicroStrategy environment. This helps management to know how well the stakeholders, such as sales and business users, are using the tool for decision making or for daily sales tracking. They can know if there is an ROI for this tool.
• Visual Insight helps top executives with little or no technical background to find the insights and visualize the data in no time. Multiple formats are supported: Excel, CSV, text, and more.
• More than 50 data connectors include connectors to relational databases, NoSQL databases, social media, and other BI tools. This enables MicroStrategy to connect to any other data source to extract insights from it.
• MicroStrategy's Distribution service is so robust that it can send notifications, emails, and send to FTP to different sets of users and locations with a different personalization for each subscription.

Our Finance team has to send alert emails to stakeholders for the open due balance during the first week of every month. The details include the bank account details for transfers, invoice details, and the repo rate.

This used to be done manually. MicroStrategy’s Distribution services became a game changer for us. We send around 1000 emails in 10 minutes. It also provides a mechanism to track the delivery of emails and notify the administrator in case of failure.

Compared to other BI tools in the market, the development time for dashboards, reports, and scorecards for this tool is high.

It has developer and web components that are that the other has. It becomes difficult for a developer to switch between them for development.

Many BI tools enable you to develop a dashboard once, and then view it on various devices, such as web, mobile, and iPad. MicroStrategy dashboards are not auto-sized based on the device. A separate dashboard has to be developed for each device.

For every release, there are new features with new bugs equal to them. The vendor has to come up with quarterly releases, which is good; but the applications in a production environment are unstable because of the frequent upgrades being done.

I have been using MicroStrategy for more than five years.

Until version 10.2, the environment was quite stable. After that, MicroStrategy started releasing new versions on a quarterly basis. This means that more upgrades need to be done on the production environment. This makes the system a little unstable.

With recent releases, MicroStrategy introduced the “Work Fencing” concept for hardware scalability.

MicroStrategy uses PRIME (Parallel Relational In-Memory Engine), which it claims as the “interactive exploration of terabytes of data with millions of users.”

MicroStrategy has been very good in upgrading itself to handle Big Data, both in terms of hardware scalability and the volume of data it can handle. We did not come across any problems in terms of scalability.

Technically, the support team is very strong in terms of troubleshooting the MicroStrategy logs and other system logs. They also suggest a few best practices for better performance and maintaining a stable environment.

However, they ask for too many logs and files if a help request is raised. It would be helpful to have a centralized log.

The time zone of the support team and the development team is usually different. This delays the resolution time.

Prior to switching to MicroStrategy’s Business Intelligence tool, we were using Excel and SQL queries to track business metrics. These solutions required more technical knowledge. There is no centralized ecosystem which can integrate and troubleshoot if there are issues.

We purchased MicroStrategy licenses, expecting our business users to like the seamless experience. MicroStrategy has a mobile component which helps our sales team track and showcase insights to stakeholders without any problems.

MicroStrategy setup requires a few hardware prerequisites, and a few other installations in the system. This include the .NET framework, IIS, etc. Once the prerequisites are met, it is straightforward.

Also, we can install different MicroStrategy components in different servers, assuming that those servers are able to communicate with each other. This avoids the overhead of having traffic on only one server.

I don't have much information on this. MicroStrategy offers two types of license: per user and per device. The licensing is a litter higher compared to other BI players in market.

Apart from MicroStrategy, there are a few other players in the market which are actually doing good. There are the in-memory BI tools like QlikView and Tableau, and traditional BI tools like Cognos.

We have found some aspects of MicroStrategy which actually suit our business model, so we went with it.

There are around 10+ good BI players in the market. All of them have their own strengths in terms of visualizations, predictive analysis, self-service, mobility, scalability, etc.

I would definitely recommend this product, but I would suggest that companies identify what exactly the business users are looking for in a Business Intelligence tool, and try to evaluate the tools abilities and licensing cost before actually purchasing the tool.

The most valuable features are:

• A single integrated architecture: develop once, deploy anywhere.
• MicroStrategy Mobile: best in class mobile integration
• MicroStrategy Office: no need to connect to MicroStrategy web/mobile; open Microsoft Office documents, worksheets and refresh data as and when required
• MicroStrategy BigData Gateway: seamless connectivity to major Hadoop distributions
• Pixel perfect dynamic dashboards: high quality dashboards for board-level and management reporting
• Intelligent Cubes: load data once a day, no need to connect to the database.

We tried one of the leading reporting/BI tools in the market, but was it was not scaleable for enterprise levels. MicroStrategy does scale for enterprise levels.

There are a couple of areas that could be improved. Formatting the dashboard takes lot of time, which increases IT costs.

1. Dashboard development is time consuming, if you are doing corporate themes with a similar look and feel across all your visualizations. Starting Version 10.2, MicroStrategy provided features to re-use themes and templates across multiple dashboards. This does helps a little when you have grid/graph types of dashboards. However, when every visualization is different, it takes time to achieve pixel perfect visualizations. Having a Visualization Expert in the initial design stage helps with annotations and scales used within different panels, borders, etc., but it does take time to develop.
2. Tableau visualizations provide targeting from different data points to very different visualizations. There are some visualizations in Tableau which are much better than MicroStrategy.

We would also like to see more visualizations within Visual Insight. The existing visualizations are not at par with Tableau. I believe they were supposed to match Tableau capabilities, but they fall short on that. However, Visual Insight is better for end users who want to develop their own analysis and visualizations.

I’ve been using this product for 13 years; from version 7.5.2.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would rate technical support a six out of 10 (one-worst 10-best). Based on the level of support (Gold) we had, I have found tech support a bit sluggish. We had already resolved issues with workarounds before technical support came up with solutions.

We were using Tableau, but it had scalability issues and per-user licensing costs.

We did have some issues, but good documentation from MicroStrategy and the Technotes helped resolve most of them.

Pricing/licensing is little bit on the high side. Businesses buying this product should plan in advance what licenses to purchase. I would advise you to hire a contractor or free lancer with previous MicroStrategy experience to plan your project correctly.

If you have a user base that is going to increase over time, this product is best suited. Web-user licenses are unlimited for users who do not wish to create their own reports or dashboards and just want to view, download, and use.

The aesthetic capabilities of the dashboarding functionality are probably the most impressive. It enables designing really great looking widgets that I have not seen in other offerings.

A single management dashboard is visible on the big screens of all the company chiefs. This enables them to easily refer to it during meetings. They are able to drill down on specifics. It provides a view of the current position of the companies KPIs, and provides the main source of ‘true data’.

Licensing costs are extremely high and prohibitive for smaller to medium size businesses. This makes it the enterprise-wide reporting tool for larger corporations.

I have been using MicroStrategy for seven years.

I did not have any issues with stability.

I did not have any issues with scalability.

In South Africa, the level of support is very limited to Johannesburg. Very few local partners exist that support the application, compared to other tools in the market. I would, therefore, rate the level of technical support specifically in South Africa as mediocre.

Previously, the company used SAP Business Objects. I made the decision to switch over to MicroStrategy because Business Objects was acquired by SAP at the time. Most ongoing development on BusinessObjects became SAP-focused. This didn’t help us because we are an Oracle-centered organization. MicroStrategy seemed to be the best fit due to its being major database agnostic.

The setup was straightforward and relatively simple.

It’s very expensive. If the pretty picture isn’t one of your core requirements, then most other tools would fit the job.

We evaluated BusinessObjects, Cognos and QlikView.

It is essential to have resources available in the organization for harnessing the true potential of the tool.

I found the ability to create self-reports very valuable. This solution gives a lot of flexibility to analysts and support staff, in order to create reports on-the-go which do not need a fixed-forever template.

Combined with a data governance, it helped us to share information across the organization, to provide a unique source of relevant information, and to avoid duplicities.

The following are areas for improvement:

• Self reporting
• Metadata library / dictionary
• A better security implementation (in terms of usability, it is difficult as hell trying to set up security.)
• Ability to create big reports (e.g., tables are limited to 65000 rows, which is a limitation of the previous century).

We have used this product for about six years.

The servers fall quite easily.

There are some scalability issues. The solution is unable to respond quickly to big reports. I had to switch to Tableau, or perform pre-processing and then import data outside of the model.

We were evaluating Tableau, which everybody found to be a better solution. However, MicroStrategy is the official reporting tool in my organization.

Make sure you design the exploitation layer very carefully. If you don't, everything will turn into a mess. You will need technical gurus to understand the metadata, and the reports will be generated very slowly.

MicroStrategy is an enterprise-wide Business Intelligence solution. There are various components of the software which are independent modules, but which work in conjunction to give a holistic enterprise-wide solution.

The most significant product feature is its robust data warehousing capabilities and metadata management. MicroStrategy lets the user create a different data model on top of the actual physical data model, according to the project requirements. This is a very helpful feature for modelling data and managing the metadata from different data sources in a single place. Any changes in the project data model or inclusion of new data fields is fairly easily accomplished.

Another key feature is that MicroStrategy is mobile-ready. This is one of the few software applications in the BI field which is mobile-ready. It is easy to build visualizations for mobile phones and iPads, and deploy them to end users.

The server architecture is very robust and enables the user to blast company-wide emails with BI reports.

The product has enabled the organization to blend data from different business units of the organization and product reports on it.

It has also replaced the manual process of sending out reports in an Excel sheet every Monday to specified users.

The product needs some improvement in its visualization capabilities. A fair amount of training is required to use this product.

The product is not business-user friendly. It has a lot of IT components which require special expertise. Ad-hoc reporting capabilities can be improved.

I have been using MicroStrategy for three years.

The product is stable. However, performance issues could be encountered if the server architecture is not set up appropriately based on usage and requirements.

Product scalability is easy and MicroStrategy provides additional support if required.

This software requires some training and technical expertise. MicroStrategy provides training sessions for users. They also provide technical support while installing the software and setting up the architecture, which is helpful. Technical support is very responsive and helpful. For larger organizations, they usually have a technical support specialist assigned who would answer any question via email or phone.

I have used many BI solutions other than MicroStrategy.

The initial setup is complex. However, MicroStrategy sends technical support to assist with the initial setup. These consultants work in conjunction with the company's employees to get it set up.

The pricing and licensing is a bit different than most products due to the suite of standalone tools that exist within the entire product. A sales representative would be able to assist with the pricing.

I reviewed IBM Cognos along with MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy was a better fit for our company needs due to its robust architecture, mobile-ready dashboards and a good pipeline of features coming in the future.

I keep learning new technologies and products to stay relevant in the ever evolving BI market. MicroStrategy has a good place in the market right now and is used by many enterprises as their primary BI tool. It also has better in some capabilities (handling large databases, server architecture, mobile-ready) than other tools in the market and has a good pipeline of upcoming advancements.

This is an enterprise-wide solution for which the return on investment is long term rather than short term. Evaluate the product appropriately with others based on your needs.

The OLAP functionality of this product is best in class. The cubes created in MSTR can utilize all cores of the server and thus can be configured to use MPP architecture.

Another feature to highlight here is the latest Big Data Engine; MSTR's BDE is a Yarn based application that embeds right on top of Hadoop FS providing direct access to files in FS without need of any other language - Pig/Impala/Hive. I believe this is the closest a BI tool can embed on top of Hadoop FS.

The last one (not a feature though) which I would like to mention is the SQL that MSTR engine creates to retrieve data from warehouse. The multi-pass SQL is a very effective tool that provides lot of VLDB settings to tweak the SQL in regards to database, load and multiple other factors.

We were able to automate multiple repetitive tasks in the BI environment using administrative tools provided with this product. This helped the team focus their energies on critical work tasks.

Version control is still a major concern in MicroStrategy. I am aware that MSTR is working on it as an enhancement.

License cost is also on the heavier side. Perhaps the desktop version that launched recently, might help ease pressure on budget.

I have been using it for 7 years.

There are no issues with the stability of the product. It works well even with huge datasets and under heavy workloads.

Scalability is not an issue. Administrators can make use of clustering feature to balance out loads on MSTR I-Server. MSTR can scale vertically as well as horizontally.

Technical support has improved a lot in terms of response time as well as technical know-how. The trend was observed with the release of major version 10.x.

I have used some other solutions simultaneously and also at previous work places but I have never switched from one tool to another.

The initial setup is quite vast. Users need to install & configure a lot of components in the MicroStrategy toolkit. Starting from version 10.x, enterprise manager console is embedded in the operations manager console which requires additional configuration.

License cost is quite pricey with loads of add-on functionalities and tools. Organizations possessing an enterprise-wide vision should be the right customers for this tool.

The new addition - MicroStrategy desktop can be used as a standalone application and can help ease pricing pressure.

I did an assessment of Microsoft and MicroStrategy but I realized that both fall into quite different leagues. Microsoft is an ideal fit for low to mid-level companies while MicroStrategy is perfect for huge enterprises. The assessment is a part of market study and will be used for future prospect engagements to position MicroStrategy.

MicroStrategy requires a heavy dose of training and experience to master it. Prepare yourself with an experienced team before jumping into any project.

• Analytics power on a large scale.
• Unified metadata.
• Fully integrated platform covering all styles of BI.
• We deal in TBs of data and MicroStrategy works well at high data volumes with complex analytics and with high user concurrency.
• The common/reusable metadata, whereby many objects (e.g., attributes, metrics, hierarchies, custom groups, etc.) are defined, validated, and provided once and can be reused throughout the platform and use cases; a single truth is realized and maintained.
• The various components of MicroStrategy are fully integrated and built upon a single code base providing for optimal exchange of objects and deliverables across the various platform components. E.g., you can build an exploratory dashboard using Visual Insight and hit a button to convert it on the fly to a Report Services Document.

Most of our SaaS products are analytic in nature and against TBs of data with users accessing a broad array of standard reports, guided ad-hoc queries, data exploration, and dashboards. For our high volume (both data and users), MicroStrategy continues to be the backbone of these SaaS solutions.

In general, MicroStrategy objects within their metadata object model roll up to “project” as the highest level today. Given that most users equate a project to a BI “application”, if you need a Microstrategy object (e.g. Single panel objects, graphs/visualizations/reports/templates including depicted data, schema objects, templates, etc.) to be used across projects – you have to duplicate/build and maintain copies in each and every project using them. There could be several possibilities for handling this.

One option could be to create the concept of a “global” project in which all consistent, build-once-use-everywhere objects would be built and maintained and a corresponding option within each specific project to decide if/what “global” project objects should be inherited. To maintain the integrity of these global objects, they should not be modifiable within each specific project. Today, the only option to achieving this would be to have a single "mega-project" encompassing everything – this would not perform, would not be advisable, and would create dependencies that no organization could navigate successfully.

I personally have used it since 1997.

9.4.1 HF9 has been quite stable; 10.0-10.1 was somewhat unstable but 10.2 delivered a very stable environment for us. We’re moving to 10.4 soon as that is the MicroStrategy “platform” release, where they will be issuing multiple hot fixes and will remain the core until they create a major new/next release.

I have never encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support continues to struggle a bit, although our recent downgrade of support level from Elite to Premium has been a good one. Our assigned technical account manager (TAM) has been doing a great job shepherding our various issues/enhancement requests effectively.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Installations/upgrades have been somewhat complex in the past and time-consuming; however, the increasing versions of 10.2 continue to reduce the number of total, and especially manual, steps.

The new licensing model is straightforward; I’d recommend to any new customer to push for CPU licensing to avoid having to track/count specific user licenses.

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

Ensure you have a solid/local sales engineer to watch over your initial and continued success, and ensure you subscribe to a technical support level that offers a technical account manager to be your voice into technology.