MicroStrategy Reviews

We obtain all the data from different data sources and put them together. I report to different subject areas like finance, operations, product, etc.

The product is performing well.

Reports are very easy to create. It takes a very short amount of time to build a report, which is very useful. It is very easy to access them from my desktop and web (everywhere). When someone logs in, they can simply see all the reports. It is easy to schedule them.

We are running Self-Service to our business teams now. It is good.

We prefer a many point solution right now due to different areas of the business, because they are asking for different things. Some functionality is easier to be built in different products. Therefore, I have found MicroStrategy to be probably doing 80% of everything, but there is 20% left that is easier with other tools with different types of visualizations slicing and dicing the data.

In 2018, we plan on using Dossier.

The most valuable features are the Visual Insights and the visualizations.

We are using the mobile analytics of MicroStrategy. It is in production.

It's just very small technical things. Sometimes you can do something on attributes in documents RSDs, but then you can't do the same thing in Visual Insights or Dossier. Just being able to do everything across everything. Sometimes you can do something in reports, but you cannot do the same thing in documents. So, it is expected that you should be able to do everything everywhere. 

It is stable.

It is fine. Halfway there.

If you make it much bigger, some performance issues come up. On a smaller scale, it's performing well. For us, it is not that big, so it is good. However, we are not going to add more on it.

For technical support, it depends. Sometimes, they are very quick and very supportive. Sometimes, nothing comes back. Sometimes, I give them a 10 out of 10, and sometimes, I give them a two out of 10. The problems are mostly in L2 or L3.

I was not involved.

The initial setup was straightforward.

If you want an enterprise solution, definitely go with MicroStrategy. If you want something for a small business area, like your HR needs some reporting or your finance needs some reporting, go with a different tool.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Just price. First thing is price. For larger companies, maybe price is not a big issue, but for a company of our size, price is important. Being able to address all the issues or all the capabilities that we require, it is very important. The support, the training, and all these things that come with the product, that is also important. 

We use it in sales and product analytics. We are using it for reporting at a national level, so we use it for a lot of different reporting for a lot of different groups. It actually works really well.

It drives us away from Excel. For what it is for, it is good. You can't run a business on Excel.

Some things are easier, some things are harder. A lot of things are easier.

We have some self-service reports and some of those went really well. It depends on the level. When you get to the executive level, they do not want to go out and run a dashboard. They love dashboards, but they don't want to run them. They want someone to send it to them and that does not work well for MicroStrategy. If I am going to run it and send it to you, I did not need MicroStrategy to do it. 

We will probably shift away from mobile because we are doing away with iPads. We have tablets or convertible computers, so there is no need to use mobile on those.

The most valuable feature is the ability to build reports, then customize for different groups instead of having to build multiple reports. Therefore, the ability to build customization in the reports for different groups.

I am happy with the UI.

The analytic speed would probably be what I would look for in terms of improvement because we have super huge data, and if I do not build views on top of data, then reports render really slowly.

Higher management does not have time to run reports. They need somebody to give them the bottom line.

I prefer the capabilities of a single platform, but it does not always work. We are a huge company. Some areas do not use MicroStrategy, so you have to blend whatever systems they are using together to get the data points that you are looking for.

I have never had problems with the stability.

No issues.

I have not used technical support.

I was involved in the upgrading, not the initial setup. We did not have any issues with the upgrades.

We actually researched some of the other solutions. For options, price, and customer acceptance, this product has worked well for us.

We are happy, so far. It has worked well for us. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Ease of use
• Customer acceptance (my customers are internal), if I build it and they won't use it, then it is useless. 

Our primary use case is to use for the self-service analytics and data sense, mostly in terms of the analytical platform.

We cannot measure in terms of values or pounds. However, it definitely impacts people, who are excited to use it.

We are looking forward to distributing personalized alerts to our users using the native mobile push notification systems. We will also eventually configure our mobile apps to work offline.

• Visual Insight; now Dossiers
• Its robust, analytical predictor
• How we can enable program leaders, so they can be enabled to do their own jobs rather than depending on IT.
• We are using MicroStrategy's Writeback capabilities for retail.

Sometimes, it has become too complex to upgrade and adjust to the ecosystem in general.

Needs more visual essence and connectors for the ecosystems, which would be easy to use. Easy to use in corporate and to implement in the ecosystem, and not too complex in terms of implementing and enabling, then that is what we will do.

Stability is good.

Scalability is something which will need to be improved when it goes to a bigger audience. 

Technical support is knowledgeable. The right person gets back to us whenever we email them. I would rate them as an eight out of 10, most of the time.

No.

The initial setup is in-between straightforward and complex. It is not too complex.

We did it on our own, but sometimes we had some challenges, such as you do not know how it will react. This is one of the things which comes with usability. We would try to reach out to technical support for their help when this happened.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We look for their capabilities, what they have developed, and what they are up to in terms of innovation and creativity. Mostly, we consider that if you are creative, you can do anything.

Currently, we are using MicroStrategy to provide Self-Service to clients. We have different departments in our company, like finance, accounting, and so on. We provided different projects for them and they are loving the product. We have approximately 200 users, and they have different roles from user to analyst to power users.

It improved a lot because coming from using Excel files, then using Oracle OBIEE, there is more flexibility now. The product is more scalable. We can support multiple platforms and different users. It is really good.

In 2018, we will be looking at Dossier and it collaboration aspect, which will be good for us. 

The future plan is to also introduce mobile, but right now we are in the infancy stage. We are trying to introduce the ad hoc reporting, and once we get in-depth in it and we make it sticky enough, then we will move to mobile.

• A single version of the truth.
• Having the analytics capabilities on a single platform.
• The usability for users to be able to drag and drop, then create their own reports.

• There is room for improvement on the graphs. 
• They need to improve the web. 
• I know we are not competing against Tableau, but MicroStrategy needs to step up its game on the GUI side.

I have been using MicroStrategy for a long time, so I know how stable it is. It depends on how you structure it and how you architecture it. Once you are done with the basics, it is pretty stable

I have had a lot of projects where we had a lot of users, like thousands of users, and the data was in one report which could bring in six million records. MicroStrategy is doing a good job on scalability.

It has gotten better. Before you had to go through Level 2, then Level 3 of support to get your questions answered. Now, even Level 1 could answer your intermediate questions, though there is still room for improvement.

I did not do the initial setup at this company, but at my previous company where I did installation, upgrades, and configurations.

The initial setup is straightforward for me, but it could vary from person to person. It is pretty straightforward, but you have to know the key words and so on, like project source. There is definitely a learning curve, but once you get to know it, everything is straightforward.

Give the product a try.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Flexibility
• Performance
• Scalability. 

It is performing very well. We meet once a week in the organization and talk about the performance of the prior week. There are a lot of things going on. We sell a lot of product to a lot of customers for a lot of different reasons. Therefore, MicroStrategy gives us the opportunity to dig into the data and find out what the story was.

It has certainly given people the ability to ask more questions and get more answers. It has made them even hungrier for the data.

In 2018, we are eager to start the mobile platform, because we are going to create a sense of urgency in developing more tools, then just creating more reporting solutions.

I like the user interface and the experience has been great.

The subscription model is excellent. About half of our reporting comes out of the subscription, and from there, the ease of use in dragging and dropping reporting objects.

Business systems are always going to have reporting solutions. A single platform is a good way to centralize it. I do not want to take data out of the database system unless I need to. When I do need to, that is when I am going to use MicroStrategy.

We have rolled out Self-Service to our business teams. It has been pretty good. It can be a challenge and change, but when people see why we are offering them a solution that is governed by the analytics team, they get a better sense of saying, "Okay, all the work is done for me. I can just get this, and access it."

There are a lot of offerings, and we are not fully using everything to its advantage.

There are some challenges in our organization on how we store the data. However, if you are throwing something at it and expecting it to give you the one true answer, you got to do some homework before that.

Their business practices and the solution itself are in sync with our business strategies, so I am very confident.

The scalability is great. It was one of the selling points for us on MicroStrategy.

We have not scaled yet, but we should be soon.

Tech support has been great, very responsive. We usually hear back within a day. We usually email them and that works out perfect. The right person always gets back to us.

We usually hear about updates every couple of months. 

We were actually giving people SQL access to the database and certain people had it, but not everybody. While we had bottlenecks before, the bottleneck just got wider and the need to consume data got bigger. We really needed a more holistic solution that was governed and defined by a team to get the one single truth.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We had some help installing it, but it made sense for what we were doing.

The price was good. We have had great support along the way. 

We actually had Birst and Qlik on the shortlist. What made us choose MicroStrategy was its longer term benefits. While the other solutions seemed flashier, we would actually grow out of those solutions within a year or two.

The biggest thing is to think about the people involved with the software process, not just the people installing the software or administrating the software, but the people who are going to use it. Then, you need understand how you maintain adoption throughout implementation and post-implementation. 

How do you keep people hungry for the data? You have to make yourself available. It is critical for whatever solution you choose, because if you do not offer adoption, ways to help train, or think about the end use cases, then you are dead in the water.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Scalability
• The administrative tools
• Managing the reporting solutions
• The user interface. 

Pretty much everybody needs to be pleased.

We use it for reporting. The performance is okay.

We are eventually looking to automate everything in our process.

What we are trying to do is eliminate the need for them to actually do anything Self-Service. We are trying to establish interface agreements so we no longer have to deliver Excel files, and things will just be there when they need it. 

For example: They tell us what we need. We put it in the batch. It gets put to them right when they need it, right where they need it, then they can just process it. Therefore, we can automate everything. 

In 2018, we are going to be using the pretty charts and graphs. What I want to do is move us more towards using machine learning artificial intelligent type capabilities in order to process all our data. It is a 100 terabyte database. You can't just aggregate everything up to a day or a month and say you understand everything. We are going to have to have some automated features. Therefore, we can actually parse the data and do some doppelganger analysis, then we can get some of our things solved. 

It is always nice to have one solution in a single platform. I think that was part of the reason for selecting MicroStrategy. You can do pretty much everything, instead of having to get a little bit here or a little bit there.

I don't think we have actually taken advantage of anything that differentiates it from any other product. All the reports are very simple and straightforward. We probably could have worked with any application, but we chose MicroStrategy. 

I hate the user interface. I hate having to sit down and put in every little thing. It is almost like we are always having a start from scratch in order to build something new or to build something similar to what was there before. It seems klutzy. 

We would like access to more storage and access to more metadata to build the right programs that can construct all the stuff for us instead of us having to type it in all the time. 

We have the mobile server. We have not used it. That is because the people on our team have not been trained on it yet, but that is something that we want to do. We would like to have everybody with a phone, but again, this gets into what KPIs are you going to put on this phone that are going to be immediately accessible and actually usable because we have got thousands of them. If we put two or three on there, we do not have one RF engineer that is just going to use two or three. 

We are unable to boil everything down to a number, like Nike did with their shoes, your exercise, your workout routines, etc. We don't have that capability. We are really going to have to lead the realm of pretty charts and graphs and build an AI. 

It has performed fine. There have been instances where we wish it could have perform better. My suspicion is a lack of expertise on our end. We probably need some consulting help. We have not had time to go out and try to acquire it, but performance is fine for right now.

We have seen that it scaled in other places, and it works, so it is possible. 

I have not used support, but I know a couple of my team members have. They did come through for us. I am not sure if it was tech support or if it was sales support. I can't remember when they did that, because there was a person that was helping us almost full-time to get the product implemented and get some of our first reports to them. 

No. We were producing Excel spreadsheets and putting them out in order for people to consume, then we produced those. Now, they are just in reports that we can access over a website instead of pulling it down from our file server. 

I think that trying to get into all the analytics and all of the visualizations is what turned everybody on: the colors, the pretty charts, etc. I do not think they really know how to use it yet, but we will get there eventually. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

At corporate, up in the C-Suite office, they had chosen MicroStrategy. We wanted to fall in line with them. That ended up being the primary reason why we chose MicroStrategy rather than just going to jQuery and making a web page with some jQuery objects in it. 

MicroStrategy is probably overkill for what you are going to use it for. Just like when we were in school at tech studying electrical engineering. We studied all calculus, then finally, you get up into the upper echelons of electrical engineering at a bachelor's level and it is all algebra. 

You did not use your calculus. That is what this product is. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Functional capabilities
• Tech support.

We are using it for operations analysis and sales data analysis.

We are still getting it setup, so it is hard to say how it is going to perform. We are not really live yet. We are in the setup and test phase.

We do plan on rolling out the Self-Service to our business teams.

The dashboarding is probably the best feature for us. It is something that we have not had in the past.

We prefer having our analytics capabilities in a single platform, which MicroStrategy's offers.

In 2018, we will probably be using the documents and dashboards.

MicroStrategy seems to be very easy to use; user-friendly. Getting our data to work with it is where we are having issues.

We have not really scaled much.

I have not used technical support yet.

I was more on the data side getting it ready, not the administration of the product. The complexity is with our data, not really MicroStrategy.

Probably Tableau and some others, but I was not really involved in the decision process.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They need to fit what we are trying to accomplish.

Reporting on some daily sales activities. It works well in this task.

It is convenient having it right there on the phone. They do not have to login. They can get it from anywhere they are.

The convenience of it. Having it on the mobile, therefore someone has it right there in their pocket most of the time.

It is a pretty simple solution so far, so we have not really gone beyond where it is.

It is actually pretty complicated to use. It is complicated enough that user adaptation is sometimes difficult. We developed more experts rather than people using it.

If there was a server down, we are not allowed to use it offline. Therefore, if there is a server down, then it’s down.

They are pretty good most of the time. There have been a few times that I have left a message and not been called back for at least a day or two.

Previously, we did not know we could have a mobile app. We looked at having a mobile app with MicroStrategy when we found out that we could, then we tried it out.

The mobile setup was not too bad.

We set it up in-house.

Most important criteria that I want to see when selecting a vendor: One that provides good, stable software. MicroStrategy does this.

We use it primarily for reporting. Most of the reports are grid reports. We do slice and dice, and use pivot tables on the reports. The data goes up to the level of CEO. Basically, we use it for basic grid level reporting.

It has helped our modern developers. It has helped the business users to design their own reports. They know exactly what the need, so the power is now in their hands. They do self-service and develop their reports. Dependency on development teams, as well as managing the platform, has reduced a lot with Visual Insight.

Visual Insight gives you the capability of doing self-service analytics. This has been the most powerful and valuable feature.

We have rolled out Self-Service, and the rollout has been smooth so far. Customers are happy. When I say customers, the consumers of the report. 

Maintenance and manageability becomes easier with a single platform. You do not have a complex environment for four or five different vendors to serve different purposes.

We are developing a mobile platform. Until now, I have not worked on it. There are plans in development of introducing a mobile BI with MicroStrategy.

In 2018, we plan on significantly using the Dossier feature. It comes with MicroStrategy 10.9. We have set up a platform in that version, and we are exploring the Dossier option.

I would like to see some enhancements in distribution services and the way reports are delivered currently. It is mostly static reports. We want to be able to do dynamic subscriptions and all that stuff in distribution services.

They need to improve on distribution services. There are lack of features which were there earlier with Narrowcast, but they are not there in the distribution services. Then, they need to improve on having more professional, well-equipped premium support.

It is stable. I have worked on three different BI tools. I find MicroStrategy the most suited to the enterprise-wide BI platform, because of its scalability and stability.

It is scalable.

I would give them eight, eight out of 10. Sometimes there is a delay, because I am based out of Asia Pacific region. The support is usually done during the US business hours. There is a delay and it is difficult. 

If I am facing an issue today, then I have to wait for the US folks to come on and look at my problem and provide a solution, which I may see tomorrow. There is a one day delay. This goes on for different cases that I open. We are planning to take the Asia Pacific support license as well. We will see how it goes.

No, I recently joined my company.

I would suggest to explore MicroStrategy. It is a good tool. I have been working on it for seven years now. 

I would definitely recommend my friend or a colleague to use it, and implement it in their company.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

1. Security.
2. Stability.
3. Scalability.

We actually have two industries we service. We service the transportation industry, as well as the healthcare industry. We typically do patient transports for emergency and non-emergencies. We do them by helicopter, that is our airmen division. We have a number of other businesses that we serve, like alarm system companies and the like, but primarily we use our analytics to look at patient transport counts and volumes, by the day, by the week, and by the month.

We also look at specific parishes (we call them battalions) to see how we can expand businesses out in Texas and Louisiana. We have a large market in Louisiana, Mississippi, and the surrounding areas. Therefore, we do a lot of proof of concept reporting as well, and we use the Enterprise Manager for other things as well.

We literally have some issues with the high-end users using the data and trusting the data. A lot of it gets dumped into certain areas, therefore we made a central repository for it. Then MicroStrategy reports off of that central repository, so we can validate the data relatively easily. Thus we can say, "Look, this is what we are seeing for Louisiana. This is what you guys have from the communication center. It matches one for one."

It builds a lot of rapport between the top end users and us. When I say that, I am referring to the "C" levels, the executive committee people, and other high end users.

MicroStrategy self-service is on the horizon. We have a couple of groups of people that we are trying to test out self-service with right now, specifically, our quality improvement group and our business development group. The problem for us is we do not want self-service to become this thing where there are reports everywhere and we can't manage it, so we are trying to develop some auditing processes to make sure that we are not throwing ourselves to the wolves. However, the plan is definitely to move towards self-service. We want the users to be able to be intelligent enough to make what they need and see what they want.

Dossiers are going to change the name of the game for us. We want to be able to have the executive committee go into a meeting and tell a story. We want them to tell us a story, not us. I do not want to go in as an IT guy and say, "Hey, this is the story." We really want the executive committee to be able to understand that this is a way of telling a story with data, because data without information is useless. If we can get them to that point, which I am confident that we can, then MicroStrategy will have done a great service to us, and rendered time back to us to go spend on other places. 

That is really what we are shooting for. Dossier is a big thing for us. Geospatial analytics is huge for us. Anything that we can do with self-service is big for us. Those are the top three goals for 2018, in general.

The one thing that we have wanted to get more into, and we have touched a little bit of, is the Esri out-of-the-box: Esri mapping geospatial analytics. In fact, our presentation includes a piece of how we were able to leverage placing that airmen station in Texas for the first time, based upon transports from a geospatial map. 

There also are a few others that we have taken advantage of recently. I think the chat feature inside of 10.10 is huge, especially if you are doing collaborative dashboarding.

We mostly do MicroStrategy, so we prefer the single platform for analytics capabilities. There are some use cases to do multi-platform. We just have not been at a point where we can overutilize it yet, or even utilize it at all. The cases for us that come up, they are so far and few between that we really have to take advantage of it and spend a lot of time on it, so that we can sell it. I imagine in the future that we probably will have multi-platform stuff.

We have some mobilize licenses right now. We have a small amount: 25. We built a couple of mobile apps. We have not jumped on the mobile bandwagon just yet. We have some use cases for it. We have not really identified where we can get the most bang for our buck. I imagine 2018 might have some of that as well, as a minor goal, possibly 2019. This being a huge issue for us, our getting into it, because a lot of our trucks, our medics, our people who drive on our trucks, and do the transfers, they all have iPads. If there is something that we can give them which says, "Hey, avoid traffic here," or do something to make a decision, that could be huge. Use cases are always a challenge.

If I had no issues with the tool ever or if I did not have any problems when I upgraded, then I would probably give it a higher rating (a perfect 10). If the Enterprise Manager was a little bit less quirky when you build out-of-the-box customization reports for it, I probably would give it a 10, but just those small things bring it down a little bit for me. However, it is a good tool.

Let us say that you have someone who comes in who does not have a strong programming background and they want to use Enterprise Manager to do some things. It is sort of the way the warehouse is set up, they might need the statistics warehouse when they first get in and they could be very turned off by the UI. Just the way some of the reports tailor themselves out-of-the-box, it does not really lend itself to be helpful. 

Then you have to customize, and when you start customizing, you bring in these attributes that sometimes do not even fit together. You may want to see something and how it gets done, then you are kind of stuck. That can make you leave the tool alone completely. Luckily for us, we have found ways to work with our consultant, and just really try to tackle it as much as possible. We have found ways to get around it.

I actually enjoy MicroStrategy a lot. When it came to Arcadia Data, it was sort of dead in the water, a Lazarus project. It kind of came up from the dead. Mostly because people did not understand the tool. My grandfather always had a saying that you got to know the tool before you can use the tool. That is what we did. My colleague and I took MicroStrategy, and said, "What does it do, what is it?" 

We just started building simple reports from scratch and went from there. Now, that we understand it, people are like, "Oh, okay. I get it. It's not that bad, it's actually great."

I am a fan of MicroStrategy and other tools, but I think MicroStrategy is a great tool. It does really well for what it serves.

We like the tech support. They have done a number of things to help us out. They have sent us to rapid response before, when we really needed them. They have gotten back to us as early as a day, maybe half day, and even within an hour. 

We have had positive experiences with them. There are areas that I can specify that they can improve in, but I think that is with any help desk or technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup. 

I came in three years after its inception, and it was in the Lazarus stage. They were not going to spend any more money, get rid of the tool, phase out of it, and since then we have brought the tool back:

• We have bought 100 new licenses.
• We have ramped up user adoption.
• We have run on trips to do symposiums.
• We have found that it is starting to fit together.

Do not walk away without taking the time to get to know the product or the people intimately. If you are trying to do analytics, it is a fantastic product, a top-tier product. We have dealt with a number of other products. I worked with folks who have dealt with Tableau and others. Especially with what they are doing with Dossier and all the things that are coming out, MicroStrategy has really started to lead the way with analytics in the future. I would court MicroStrategy and spend some time with them. Get to see what the tool does and what can it do for you. Do some proofs of concept.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We try to court them as much as possible. We want them to come and see how we do things in Louisiana. We are very much a down to earth folk. I will say that. People mention the Cajuns. We are kind of rambunctious, too. We got to get to know the person that is selling the product before we even get to know the product, then we look at the product, and say, "What does it do? What can it do for us?"

We do a lot of proofs of concept. We are doing telemetry in our trucks, ambulances, and vans, possibly. What we found is the MicroStrategy reps travel a great distance to see us, and we appreciate that. We need to see them face-to-face. If there is a quote, it is amazing what you find face-to-face. That is huge for us. We have to have that.

MicroStrategy is just readily available for us.