MicroStrategy Usher provides intelligent data manipulation for high performance. It streamlines data analysis, integration, and reporting with hyper-intelligence and scalable access to diverse data sources.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| MicroStrategy Usher | 17.6% |
| Oracle Identity Governance | 21.5% |
| Salesforce Identity | 17.9% |
| Other | 43.0% |
| Title | Rating | Mindshare | Recommending | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oracle Identity Governance | 3.7 | 21.5% | 80% | 72 interviewsAdd to research |
| Salesforce Identity | 4.0 | 17.9% | 100% | 6 interviewsAdd to research |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 1 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 3 |
| Large Enterprise | 5 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 33 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 7 |
| Large Enterprise | 13 |
MicroStrategy Usher enhances data manipulation through its Intelligent Cube technology, allowing seamless analysis without frequent SQL executions. It supports user-friendly data discovery and integration, offering hyper-intelligence and comprehensive analysis tools. The platform excels in scalability and flexibility, benefitting non-technical users with features like self-service capabilities, ease of development, and customizability which simplify usage. Enhanced with mobile identity features, object reuse, and transaction services, it provides a superior experience. However, potential improvements include visualization upgrades, particularly in dashboards and graphics, and a more intuitive interface compared to competitors. Integration servers, deployment requirements, database documentation, and scaling involve challenges alongside pricing considerations.
What are MicroStrategy Usher's key features?MicroStrategy Usher is deployed in various industries for financial software, pharmaceutical dashboards, and enterprise data management. Organizations utilize it for project systems, soil surveys, analytics, and multi-year report generation. It's a vital tool for business intelligence in banking, aiding in self-service and revenue management data reporting. Some organizations are evaluating its customer engagement and consulting services.
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| System Implementer at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees | 4.0 | I use this solution for project builds, valuing its non-stop operation, strong analysis, stability, and scalability, which improved our data exploitation. However, the initial setup was complex, and its pricing needs improvement. I rate it 8/10. |
| Business Application Group Manager at OBASE | 3.5 | I've used MicroStrategy Usher for two years for reporting. It's stable with great mobile identity features, but scaling and installation are difficult. I rated it seven and wouldn't recommend it, as better solutions exist. |
| Sr. Software Developer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees | 4.5 | I use this scalable solution for pharma patient dashboards. While its dashboards are valuable, I constantly face bugs and need workarounds for missing features. Still, I recommend it, despite these challenges. |
| Analyst at a media company with 10,001+ employees | 4.0 | MicroStrategy is great for data insights and reporting, offering easy development and good scalability. I recommend it, but it needs better database connection documentation and cloud integration, plus some stability fixes. |
| Head of Business Intelligence Infrastructure and Operations at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees | 4.5 | My bank uses MicroStrategy for enterprise BI and self-service. Its self-service, dossier, and hyper-intelligence are valuable, and it's scalable. I'd prefer a more GUI-based development process. Overall, I rate it 9/10 for enterprise use. |
| Supervisor Tecnico at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees | 4.0 | I use this solution for financial software, valuing its storage and ease of use, despite the UI needing improvement. It's stable and scalable, with good support. I rate it 8/10. |
| Solution Architect at ixtel | 4.0 | I recommend MicroStrategy for its valuable hyper-intelligence and user-friendly dashboard. While stable and scalable with good support, I find its dossier formatting options limited and the canvas less impressive than Tableau's, impacting report presentation. |
| Business Intelligence Specialist at a construction company with 501-1,000 employees | 4.0 | I find MicroStrategy a stable, comprehensive enterprise BI tool with strong security and reporting, though its Visual Insight trails competitors. Initial setup is straightforward but licensing is expensive, and customer service is average. |
| Senior Business Intelligence Developer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees | 4.5 | I value the Universe Designer for simplifying data and enabling self-service BI. However, I find the Web Intelligence graphic capabilities quite basic, sometimes requiring workarounds. Stability is good, with rare issues, and technical support is helpful. |
| Manager, Business Intelligence Technology Team at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees | 5.0 | I find MicroStrategy highly scalable, flexible, and easy for non-technical users, transforming our operations. Despite a less polished web interface and slow initial support, I've used it for 20+ years without stability issues. |
We primarily use the solution for project build systems and soil survey.
Usher has improved the way to exploit and analyze data.
The most valuable aspect of the solution is it's non-stop application. It continues to run so there are no interruptions to customers. It's also able to reach many people.
The solution has good analysis features to make sure there's good sizing (so that it's not too big or too small) and allows room for growth if a company needs it.
The pricing needs improvement, it need to lower prices per user to make it more accessible.
In terms of new features, I'm not sure what can be improved. I need to do more research before I comment on anything like that.
I've been using the solution for one year.
The solution is very stable.
The solution is scalable. Right now, we have about 60,000 users. We use the product quite extensively and we do plan to increase usage.
Technical support has been very good. We use technical support from a local advisor but we typically tend to manage our own technical support in house.
Neutral
We didn't previously use a different solution.
The initial setup was complex. It's a new technology, so sometimes there are problems with customers not understanding what things mean. We're still in the process of deploying the solution and estimate it will take half a year to both implement and analyze how well the solution is working for us.
We used a reseller in our country that assisted with the implementation.
There is a free desktop version that provides powerful self-service analysis, I really recommend it.
We use the cloud deployment model.
I'd give the solution an eight out of ten.
We use this solution for reporting purposes. At our company, I manage our business application solutions. I have to provide reports to the managers and directors on a quarterly or monthly basis. We report on things like revenue, profits, problematic cases, etc. My company decided that next year we may drop these services. We are checking or we may talk with the customers, why they don't buy new products or new solutions or new consulting. We want to check that these are services actually, consulting services.
The mobile identity features are great.
Scaling this solution can be difficult.
This solution is very stable.
MicroStrategy can scale up and scale out, but it's done manually. Still, to do this on-premise is very hard; you may need help from your IT department or support. On the cloud, scaling is easy.
We employ 100 staff members that act as consultants for our customers; they provide them with support.
There are three ways to install this solution. Which method you choose all depends on your environment. Commonly, installing the reporting platform is not like installing an application because this reporting tool focuses on enterprise companies. It has to be configured and reconfigured.
MicroStrategy provides us with plenty of functionality, but the installation part is not easy for enterprise customers. You need some serious tech knowledge in order to install this solution — not just anyone can do it. There are a lot of settings and configurations that need to be considered. Installation is easy for us, but it's not easy for the end-users.
Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven.
I don't think I would recommend this solution to others. There are better reporting solutions out there.
I've primarily used the solution when dealing with the pharmaceutical domain where the solution was used to create the dashboards for the patients who were suffering from a particular disease.
The dashboard, documentation, dossiers are all valuable features.
There are many features that have been suggested by the community that aren't in place yet. The solution needs a Top 10 reports, for example.
Right now, we have to apply many workarounds for the solution to do what we need it to do. There are a lot of bugs.
In the future, I would love to see machine learning achieved through MicroStrategy.
I've been using the solution for five years.
The solution is stable.
The solution is definitely scalable. Right now, we have more than 50 users on the solution and those users are both IT managers and admins. We do plan to increase usage in the future.
I've never been in touch with technical support.
The initial setup is straightforward. I can install it as many times as I want.
I handled the implementation myself.
We evaluated both Tableau and Power BI before ultimately choosing this solution. They're good competitors to this technology.
I do find I need to use a lot of workarounds and reach out to the community a lot to ask questions.
The company I work with is small, so we don't require too much strength from the solution.
I would definitely recommend the solution to others. I'm still working with MicroStrategy and want to grow more on the MicroStrategy front. There's a lot to learn with new features coming out soon.
I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.
MicroStrategy is an application which is used to give a proper reporting of data. It can be used to visualize, analyze, and make something more out of the data. This is precisely what we are doing in our environment. We are generating reports that cover several years and adding some meaning to the data.
The most valuable feature is the ease of development in MicroStrategy. For example, we can treat URLs as objects, which is very easy to use for end-users, business analysists, or other professionals. Anyone can find it very easy to develop.
The number and type of different settings that can be used for optimizing pulled data are valuable. For example, if a report is taking a lot of time to retrieve data from the database, there are settings in MicroStrategy that we can change to help.
As a BI tool, it is helpful in finding different templates for the users and using the same standard operating procedures on how to operate different pulls and micro strategies.
The documentation of how to make different connections to different databases needs to be more centralized. It becomes confusing when we have to search for this information on Google and elsewhere.
I would like to see more clarity with respect to the cloud integration because it is a hot topic right now.
I have been using this solution for about a year and a half.
There are a lot of issues that occurred while I was using MicroStrategy. We created some cases that caused problems and we had some discussions with them over the course of time. We found some answers to the problems, but we found some that were the fault of the product. I think that it was about 50-50 in terms of whether the problem was solvable. MicroStrategy was told about the limitations in the product and I think that they will be fixed in future releases of the solution.
This product is easily scaled. We can use it for 100 users or we can use it for over 10,000 users, depending on the licenses.
We currently have between 800 and 1,000 employees.
The technical support for this solution is good. We normally reach out of them by email and then we can set up a WebEx meeting.
In general, the initial setup is pretty straightforward. There are some issues related to the setup that make it a bit complex, but overall, it is a simple setup process.
Using the documentation, we were able to perform the installation on our own.
I'd say if any user or any set of users are looking to get more insights from the raw data that they have collected over the course of years, one of the best BI tools in terms of analytics and data management would be MicroStrategy. You can develop pretty much everything from scratch. If you are looking to get more meaningful information out of data, I would recommend this solution.
From an architectural perspective, this is a good solution. However, there are a few things that can be improved.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
I'm the head of business intelligence for infrastructure and operations at a large bank. We are a customer of MicroStrategy. Our primary use case of the solution is for enterprise data management as well as self-service and mobile. We also use transaction services for apps.
The most valuable features would probably be the self-service and the dossier components as well as the hyper-intelligence.
I think they are working on improvements and are in the process of changing the development to be more GUI-based rather than code-based. I think that will be good, we're waiting for that transition. I think the skills needed now are very niche and quite low level and they need to simplify the development aspect of it.
They have a feature called transaction services and as an additional feature, I'd like to see that in the dossier, which is your build-it-yourself front-end. If we can get to where you can build forms and write back and transaction services from that interface, it would be great.
We've been using the product for six years.
The newer versions of the product are far more stable than the older ones. We haven't had any problems.
It's definitely a scalable product, we've been able to scale to over 5,000 users. That includes finance people, IT, business users, service management, and also our HR department. They all use it.
Technical support is very good.
We previously used Microsoft Reporting Services and SharePoint. We switched because I think the self-service component was a very big factor for us as well as the data governance component which was key for our needs. The semantic layer that MicroStrategy has, is what we were after.
It was pretty straightforward. We're a large organization and we used a partner and were able to deploy in three months.
I can't comment on setup cost but we pay an annual maintenance fee and that includes support and upgrades.
Prior to purchasing we had a look at QlikView, at Microsoft Business Intelligence, and we looked at Tableau.
There are a lot of visualization tools, but not many enterprise BI tools. If you are going to run an enterprise shop for a big organization, don't pick the small tools designed for small team reporting otherwise you're going to really encounter barriers. MicroStrategy fits best in an enterprise setup.
I would rate this product a nine out of ten.
We primarily use the solution to deploy financial software.
The storage is the solution's most valuable feature.
Overall, the solution is an easy product to use.
The user interface needs improvement. It needs to be more intuitive.
The solution needs to enhance its integration servers.
The requirements needed to deploy the solution could be improved.
I've been using the solution for six months.
The solution is stable.
It depends, but mostly the solution is scalable. Right now, we have 20-25 users on the solution. We occasionally use the product but do plan to increase usage in the future.
Technical support has been good. So far, we're satisfied with their level of service.
We didn't previously use a different solution.
The initial setup was easy. To deploy the solution takes a week or less.
I handled the implementation myself.
We didn't evaluate other solutions before choosing this solution.
We use the cloud deployment model and use both Microsoft as well as AWS as providers.
I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.
The hyper-intelligence is the solution's most valuable feature.
The dashboard is user-friendly.
Users don't have to log in to the system to see the reports. That's a very good advantage of the solution.
In the dossier section, they have something called documents, which is very good, but they are implementing something called dossiers also. If we compare it with the BI tools like Tableau, the canvas which MicroStrategy provides is not that great. The formatting options are limited is dossiers. In terms of formatting and making the reports more presentable, it's lagging a little bit behind.
I believe in a future release they already have scheduled hyper-voice and hyper-screen features. It will be very good when these are added to the solution.
I've been using the solution for four months.
The solution is stable.
The solution is scalable.
Technical support is very good. We're satisfied with the level of assistance.
We are using Power BI as well, but MicroStrategy is implemented at the enterprise level. Which solution we use depends on the project requirements.
The initial setup was straightforward.
We handled the implementation ourselves.
We're using the cloud deployment model.
I very strongly recommend the solution. I'd rate nine out of ten.
Visual Insight/Desktop: It is trailing behind competitors such as Tableau or QlikView, which have more functionality.
The Developer app could get some UI enhancements.
I have used it for about six years.
I have not encountered any scalability issues.
Technical Support is average, 7/10. It depends what kind of issue you are facing.
We were using legacy apps with really little opportunity to perform data analytics.
MicroStrategy (Enterprise): It takes some time to setup the metadata (mapping tables and creating the objects). Once you have this in place, it’s really nice to start working on reports and dashboards. Overall, I’d say it’s straightforward.
MicroStrategy has improved the way they license the modules, but I still consider it expensive.
Before choosing this product, we evaluated IBM Cognos, Oracle, and SAP BO.
If you are looking for an enterprise BI app, MicroStrategy includes:
All you need in one enterprise app.
The Universe Designer is this product’s most valuable feature because it functions as a semantic layer that allows the users to manipulate data without facing databases' inherent complexity.
It allows self-service business intelligence, empowering the users and decreasing their dependency on the IT people. It also allows the developers to focus on more value-added activities, so in the end, I consider it a win-win situation.
The Web Intelligence graphic capabilities can be improved. They exist, but they are quite basic. These days, users require more advanced graphic capabilities than the ones provided by this version. One example that I can use is that once, we required a waterfall graph and it wasn't available, so we needed a workaround in order to overcome this limitation.
I have used it for three years.
We have encountered stability issues, but only rarely.
I have not encountered any scalability issues.
Technical support is good.
I did not previously use a different solution.
Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.
Evaluate Power BI & MicroStrategy.
Our customer service team had someone who was manually querying several databases, putting the information together into Excel spreadsheets and emailing them out, usually requiring most of the morning for that individual. Now, we have a dashboard that runs early each morning and is automatically emailed to the supervisors each morning. It also contains additional data that they previously did not have access to.
Some of the web interface is still not as good as it could be. I've seen more advanced and cleaner-looking interfaces. Some features available in the thick client are not available in the web client.
I have been using it for 20+ years.
I did not encounter any stability issues.
I did not encounter any scalability issues.
Technical support is 7/10. It takes too long for initial technical support cases to get action on. Once you get an engineer working with you, they stay with you until it is resolved.
I previously used Essbase and Cognos, both of which required too much technical knowledge by the user, are not scalable, and with neither is it easy to access multiple different data sources.
Initial setup was straightforward.
Don’t bother looking at CPU-based licensing, and get a good idea from the start as to how many true super users (or power users) you need and then just get simple web analyst licenses for the others.
We evaluated OBIEE, SAP BusinessObjects, and IBM Cognos.
If you are a small- to medium-size company, go with Windows based servers.
