MicroStrategy Reviews

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MicroStrategy

June 2026

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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

What was our ROI?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

When a customer wants to implement BI, there are lots of options available in the market to choose from. The decision depends on various parameters such as scale of implementation, costing and performance. They can either go with the open source options, or they can plan towards a paid BI tool. The decision can also be driven based on strategic factors of the company. I personally don’t believe in tool agnostic approach, I feel every customer has his own BI needs and has some specific requirements. No tool in this world can meet each one of these requirements, but in my experience MicroStrategy provides a complete product, which meets most of the customer requirements. This would be my first product review on a Business intelligence tool “MicroStrategy”

MicroStrategy is a solution provider for enterprise software platform on business intelligence.When we talk about MicroStrategy the first thought that comes into my mind is the core focus of the company, which is to deliver Business intelligence solutions, unlike other companies, which have their focus on different horizons. This, according to me, is the core strength of MicroStrategy as a company. Mike Saylor (CEO) gave similar insights in the MicroStrategy World conference. According to him the biggest advantage of MicroStrategy as a company is that they are the largest independently owned BI platform. There are lot of companies in the market who acquire small firms to improve their technology and product,but MicroStrategy is not one of them. The fact that MicroStrategy has resisted the temptation to build a technology portfolio through acquisitions has become their core strength. They always believed in their core framework and everything was developed by their own team. According to the BI Survey 12, conducted by German-based Business Application Research Center (BARC), MicroStrategy has received the highest ranking in numerous KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) such as total Performance, user Recommendation, mobile, query performance, data volumes and big data.With the release of 9.4.1 they have integrated various current technologies with PRIME to support ultra fast processing of data.

MicroStrategy has a deep market penetration and is regularly used for industry level solutions in different domains such as Retail, Healthcare, Banking, Manufacturing, Social Media etc. There are lots of key advantages of using MicroStrategy which I will elaborate verbosely.

• Core functionality and Ease for Development- Having worked on different reporting platforms, I feel that most of the functionality is directly available out of the box in MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy platform supports distributed development so many developers can work on the project at a given time. Most of objects are reusable and there definition can be reused across other business areas. It also has extensive control on formatting of reports / dashboard. It supports as many number of databases and next generation database along with multi sourcing. The security architecture of MicroStrategy makes designing and implementation very powerful. You can have row level, object level, application level, and all different forms of security. Any developer with a fair amount of development experience in MicroStrategy would be able to list down product features and limitations. Although limitations of the tool are not much but there are functionalities which can be handled using SDK.
• Visual Data discovery-For any BI tool, the ease-of-use is very important along with the sophisticated analytics which can be presented using the best visualization framework. As the size of data is increasing day by day, this is not going to decrease in the near future as well. It has become very important for a BI to analyze these enormous data volumes in a best representable format. Data visualization is driving demand in the business intelligence (BI) market because it's intuitive and accessible to business users who aren't schooled in query languages or statistical analysis. MicroStrategy has a strong stand in these areas due to large number of visualizations in their library. This separates MicroStrategy, as a tool, for visual exploration from other competitors. Features like flash widgets and interactive flash PDF export make it very versatile tool. The advance dashboards visualizations make the dashboard appealing and are best way to represent data in a more intuitive format.
• Impromptu BI- There are customers in the market who look for Impromptu BI as a solution for their BI needs. MicroStrategy provides a solution called as visual insights which meets this purpose and is best suited for such cases. MicroStrategy Visual Insight empowers you to discover insights from your data using compelling visualizations. Users can use any of the out of the box Visualizations or they can create their own custom Visualizations using SDK. Once the base cube is developed it hardly takes 10-20 minutes to create visualizations for the analysis and this is what most business users want these days. They are the people who understand their data and want to play around with the data. Other than visual insights there are solutions developed using Object prompt where user has an option to select what they want to view in a report. This makes MicroStrategy stand out in front of other competitors.
• Mentoring and support offering-For any business intelligence tool the level and depth of customer support is becoming increasingly critical as BI becomes more integrated into organizations’ operations. Better product support results in higher application success rates and helps to ensure customers get full value from their Investments. MicroStrategy on that note has one of the best customer support offering in the industry. This helps you to report your issues and business cases enhancements to MicroStrategy which can be taken into consideration for the subsequent release/hotfix/patch depending on your business impact. The support offering also helps in providing solutions to MicroStrategy developers and Administrators for the issues they face during the development. Striving to maximize the business benefits of a MicroStrategy one should prioritize customer support strategy. Apart from the excellent customer offering MicroStrategy hosts customer trainings events at different Geographic locations as it is important to keep decision makers across the company educated on the tool. End user training and mentoring is very important for success of any BI tool. MicroStrategy also hosts their annual user conference called as “MicroStrategy world” which consists of lot of sessions; it is also a good opportunity for individuals looking for more networking opportunities in MicroStrategy.
• Performance and stability- MicroStrategy provides unmatched Performance and Stability on a Consolidated BI Platform
• Social media and big data- MicroStrategy is one of the first vendors to certify integration with Amazon Redshift. MicroStrategy constantly demonstrates leadership and innovation in both major dimensions of Big Data analytics. They are one of the leading innovators in big data space. When we talk about BI, social media analytics cannot be neglected. Many market research firms rely on data from social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to get some insights. MicroStrategy’s social intelligence platform includes a number of applications that help enterprises harness the power of social networks for marketing and e-commerce.
• MicroStrategy Mobile- Michael Saylor who is the founder of MicroStrategy has also written a book called “The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything” and I believe that its Saylor’S vision on the Mobile technology that has made MicroStrategy to grow on the Mobile Side. The Mobile App Platform transforms business intelligence reporting from paper or the desktop, to the mobile device. Workers are no longer chained to their desk, or reliant on paper-based documents that are obsolete by the time they reach their target audience. Mobile applications provide functionality that is unmatched by paper or a web browser. MicroStrategy has created some really amazing apps for IOS and Android users. They also have a program called Mobile Quick strike for 10 days where they would come up with a fully functional app. It gives customers the confidence in the overall strength of the tool. MicroStrategy’s mobile intelligence platform helps companies and organizations build, deploy, and maintain mobile apps across a range of solutions by embedding intelligence, transactions, and multimedia into apps.
• Integration and certification with other platforms- MicroStrategy tool is certified with various reporting databases and platforms which makes it easily usable across the organizations. MicroStrategy team adds new certification and support with every release of the product.

Although every tool has some limitations, MicroStrategy is no exception. I will list down a few:-

• Sometimes it can be hard to quantify the ROI (return on investment) on software as the returns come indirectly through the better informed workers and decision makers across the company. The tool can be of limited use for some companies. MicroStrategy system still cannot be afforded by most of the companies. When they plan to buy this product they have various purchase options wherein the cost would be around some hundred dollars per user if they plan to go for a user based license or it can go as high as a million dollars for a CPU based license depending on the performance they want from their system. Although, in the past few years MicroStrategy has started modifying their services towards medium and small sized industries, but the fact is that many of such firms do not consider them to be highly essential as its hard to quantify the ROI.This stands true for other paid tools as well and that is the reason open source tools are getting some market share these days
• Having worked as a developer on MicroStrategy I see Impact Analysis as a pain point area in MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy is an object oriented tool and in this world of business, change is something which is inevitable, so in case there is a request for change and you need to find the impact of the object in MSTR, it does a recursive search and doesn’t give the list of objects in one view which makes very difficult for any developer to know the overall impact of the object inside a big project implementation. Unlike other BI tools which list down all the objects dependent on a particular object in a single view which can be exported into excel for tracking the change and validation of test cases.
• Version control is not a strong point for MicroStrategy and I feel there is a scope of improvement in this area.
• Development in MicroStrategy is done mostly using desktop though they have included lot of features with their latest release in web but I feel full support of web based development is important and would improve with the future release.
• A pain point for some organizations these days is to find a good MicroStrategy resource. Getting a Cognos/BO/OBIEE expert from the IT market is comparatively easier than finding a good MicroStrategy resource.

These are some advantages and disadvantages of the tool.Compared to the advantages the disadvantages are some minor improvements which i feel would be taken care in future releases. I haven’t listed granular details as I wanted to keep this review at a high level for product understanding. There are lots of features which one can explore. When you do the contemplate MicroStrategy is a great product over all. To conclude you should never forget "Owning a supercomputer gives you a special feeling but the question is, Are you really using it for what it is intended to?”

Hope this review helps customers who are preparing their BI strategy. In case you need more insights, or you are planning for a BI implementation and have some questions do write to me on my Email. I would be more than happy to help.

Disclosure: The company I work for is partner with Microstrategy

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What was our ROI?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

What was our ROI?

MicroStrategy Mobile BI- “Smart Analytics using Smartphone’s”

The day is not too far when everyone on this planet will stand connected. With another five billion people set to become a part of mobile users community, the digital revolution promises to redefine and improve lifestyle in terms of productivity, health, education and myriad other avenues of the physical world. The introduction of this small, compact but empowering device has undoubtedly filled in the digital divide across the globe. Mobile computers are spreading faster than any other consumer technology in history. Mobile telecom has been witnessing a decade of depreciation in prices of devices as well as calling rates, making wireless services affordable for masses.

In the year 2007, the average price of a phone was $120 and is continually falling; analysts predicted that the consumer market for mobile phones has reached its saturation as everyone who could afford one had one. Revenues from mobile handset sales have been doubled since 2007. Today, one can own a smart phone with all the high-end features for as low as $60. More and more people are getting their hands on the latest phones available in the market. The major implication of mobile phones whether it be a feature phone, smart phone or tablets lies in its connectivity. More than eighty percent of the world population remains underserved that present’s immense potential for mobile telecom to provide the much-needed connectivity. An array of value added services to trigger another technological revolution in developing countries. Just as consumers in the developing world skipped from traditional landlines to cell phones, they are soon going to skip large PC screens to land on tablet, Smartphone’s and the feature rich phones capable of running internet given the fact that most of the people in developing countries have their first web experience through a mobile. A whole new era of convergence towards devices is being witnessed as PC makers and electronics makers turn to manufacturing mobile devices. This would take care of their dwindling revenues and add another promising stream of revenue to their portfolio of businesses. Microsoft acquired Nokia, Intel has come out with a new series of smart phones called Xolo, similarly Intex and Lenovo have launched mobile devices, yet another instance is HCL 'Me' tablets by HCL. Among electronic manufacturers Panasonic and Videocon are some companies considering mobile device segment very aggressively.

The business opportunities in the Smartphone arena are endless. From the makers of the Smartphone to wireless service providers to tiny application developers, all are in a relentless pursuit to squeeze every cent out of this technological gold rush. Wireless carriers make money at a greater scale. Globally 900 of them make 1.3 trillion dollar in revenue each year; about four times the revenue of major technological providers such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Intel combined. Micromax, India’s only indigenous Smartphone maker has successfully established a

reputation for itself in its home country and is now trying to take on the international market by signing Hollywood starlet Hugh Jackman, as its brand ambassador. Application developers have a smaller proportion of share. Mobile advertising brings about$9 billion as of now. But here is where the opportunities lie. Over sixty percent of people access Facebook from their phones and tablets. WhatsApp, a US made messaging app has 300 million users worldwide, out of which 20 million users are in India. WeChat, a messaging app by Chinese company Tencent has over 200 million users. This is where there is a latent need for ‘Business Intelligence’ providers. All these apps are not just restricted to smart phones and tablets, a huge chunk of feature phone users are being seen as an explored market. For instance apps like FB, Nimbuzz are developing Java versions to serve this set of customers who would slowly mature on a technology adoption curve and shortly become Smartphone users. Mobile phones are not just voice any more, they can deliver over and above one's imagination. Gesture control, robotics, connected homes, navigation, task management, virtual wallet and what not. Mobiles have not just impacted lives personally but much more professionally. Workplaces have not remained intact of this mobile revolution.

MicroStrategy, a leading BI tool is relentlessly betting on mobile Business Intelligence Apps. Saylor who is the founder of MicroStrategy has also written a book called “The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change everything” and I believe that it’s Saylor’s vision on the Mobile technology that has made MicroStrategy to grow on the Mobile Side. The Mobile App Platform transforms business intelligence reporting from paper or the desktop, to the mobile device. Workers are no longer chained to their desk or reliant on paper-based documents that are obsolete by the time they reach their target audience. This is a leading innovation, imagine your organization printing dozens of stock ledger reports every day and maintaining those paper copies. This caused a lot of wastage of resources; not even that imagine you as a CEO of a company who is scrolling through those pages every day. A complete transformation in people’s lives by what I call the 3E’s; Everyone, Everything, Everywhere. There is a big moat for BI companies in Mobile Advertising. Market penetration has significantly increased with the Mobile era. As an example of mobile Internet growth, you could see that increasing number of people use their mobile and tablets rather than their personal computer to connect to the Internet. Mobile business intelligence application can take huge benefit from this considering a lot of companies earn their revenue through advertisements. These companies become the ideal customers for Mobile BI as they would be interested to see such analysis. In this way Mobile is helping them with new opportunities to reach out engage and connect to more people; in highly relevant contexts and environments. However, there is a big problem visavis opportunity in mobile advertising. Facebook, which now has 60 percent of its login from mobile and tablet devices, is limited to small screen for its ad revenue. Hence, in order to boost their income many small app development companies will be in a dire need of more targeted marketing. Mobile analytics companies, such as MicroStrategy, can have a unique selling proposition here by creating a lot of values for application developers

Mobile applications provide functionality that is unmatched by paper or a web browser. Smartphone’s and tablets allow Internet and its digital affordances to flow into every hand, everywhere, in every circumstance. MicroStrategy has created some really amazing apps for IOS and Android users. They also have a program called ‘Mobile Quick strike’ for 10 days where they would come up with a fully functional app. It gives customers confidence in the overall strength of the tool. MicroStrategy’s mobile intelligence platform helps companies and organizations build, deploy, and maintain mobile apps across a range of solutions by embedding intelligence, transactions, and multimedia into apps. Having worked on different reporting platforms, I feel that MicroStrategy holds a distinct advantage by making most of the out of box functionality directly available to its users in a lucid development framework. MicroStrategy Mobile platform supports distributed development for many developers to work on a project at a given time. Most of the objects are reusable and their definition can be reused across different business areas. For any BI tool, the ease of use is very important along with the sophisticated analytics which can be presented using the best visualization framework. It has become very important for a BI tool to analyze these enormous data volumes in the best representable format. Data visualization is driving demand in the business intelligence (BI) market because it's intuitive and accessible to business users who aren't schooled in query languages or statistical analysis. MicroStrategy Mobile has a strong stand in these areas due to a large number of visualizations in their library. This separates MicroStrategy Mobile, as a tool, for visual exploration from other competitors.

MicroStrategy Mobile can be a big game changer in all the Market areas. For instance imagine yourself shopping in Walmart, when you do the transaction an E-commerce software would capture the data which would then be processed using some ETL tool to create sophisticated analysis for Business Users. You might end up filling some consumer experience survey which would then be manually fed into some application for capturing consumer trends information. With the birth of this Mobile Intelligence imagine how all of this can be transformed using a single solution MicroStrategy BI. A transaction report replacing the E-commerce software in retail sector for every point of sale, an automated report to take surveys in iPad. This is a more engaging and interactive consumer experience and provides increased speed of delivery of actionable business information. This example can very well be related for an everyday customer and can be termed as everyday BI.

For organizations like Banks that have data security as their prime focus. Everyone wants to have access to the data they need at all times, from any location, in order to make real-time decisions. While this is appealing it poses security and other troubles for tools to provide the level of access. MicroStrategy mobile App development framework gives you power to develop and deploy “In House” Organization specific apps. This is a big step towards data control and security as only employees would be able to see the critical data. For sectors like healthcare imagine a doctor taking advantage of this cutting edge technology on their iPad to study the current disease and medicine trends. His decision makes a big impact on the patient’s life.

Now the interesting question why this Mobile BI is a very hot topic and why do you think MicroStrategy Mobile BI standout? The answer is simple, till now ease of use for end user was always the priority for BI tools and the reason smart phones and tablets are becoming so popular is because even a 4 year old kid could operate them. Hence the bottom line is the interface should be unique and simple which MicroStrategy Mobile pretty much achieved and is the reason for their success in this particular area.

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?