MicroStrategy Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am a database developer with experience using both MicroStrategy and Microsoft Power BI. I usually recommend MicroStrategy to my customers. I work at a service company.

The most effective features of MicroStrategy for data analysis are those that cater to user needs. However, I find Power BI to be more useful when comparing some features, but my company does not choose Power BI due to certain code restrictions. The MicroStrategy interface is not as good as Power BI, especially concerning the user-friendly aspects.

At our insurance product-based company, we are using MicroStrategy to develop organizational reports, including financial reports and other in-house project reports. 

The product simplifies and accelerates the attribute and maze creation process compared to OBIEE. The dossiers of MicroStrategy are more user-friendly than those of OBIEE. The visualization feature of MicroStrategy is also better than that of its competitors. 

I was an architect and developed a BI solution, and I used the transaction feature in MicroStrategy, which lets you write to the database. We used that feature heavily.

Almost all the features are great, but I was particularly impressed by the enterprise features. Security, like how MicroStrategy stores user passwords and the performance, especially the queue. It was very powerful. 

So, the core features of MicroStrategy, enterprise security and performance, were what set it apart, especially compared to other products at the time. Maybe Power BI and Tableau have improved performance now, but back then, MicroStrategy was exceptional. 

And the ability to integrate with PPT is another plus. The platform's ability to write back data directly to the database is also good. 

And, the interactive chart features are all common and valuable.

I use its Discovery Analytics feature, particularly in the context of KPI analysis for management.

It plays a vital role in establishing a connection with predictive continuous improvement. This approach proves highly valuable for teams involved in continuous improvement efforts, especially in early production and industrial settings, as it contributes to enhancing overall performance and productivity.

We use it mostly for business intelligence reporting, especially in personal lines of insurance, because of its pattern processing and other good functionalities, its key capabilities. It's a customer-friendly tool, especially with the Dossiers. And in the past we have had Visualization Galleries. So we leverage it, not only for reporting but for analytics and also for geospatial reporting.

In terms of its performance, when compared with other products that we have, Cognos, QlikView, Tableau, I would rate MIcroStrategy number one in the above terms.

Definitely in the past, when we had so many legacy systems, with Cognos and others, it was took multiple steps to get what we wanted. We used to extract data from Cognos, pointing to any database, load the data into Access databases, and then some BA or system analyst used to create reporting out of it. 

But now, it's a seamless integration. We can connect directly, in the form of In-Memory Cubes or live-publish cubes, to the data warehouse, and blend in the data with big data. Not only relational databases, but we can also integrate other third-party files, and create a single-source software. So, from that perspective, especially in personal insurance, it keeps BI, business intelligence, in the hands of everyone, rather than a developer or an analyst. Now mostly everyone in our area, the travelers, they have self-service.

The technical support is quite good.

We have a global scale business, where we're doing reporting on a global scale. We also have local businesses, where the countries have to report in their own local data warehouse and so on. They can all use MicroStrategy, however, I would say that MicroStrategy is a very good fit for global reporting. Their reports are excellent and thorough.

For global reporting, it's something that we're going to keep to report to senior management on a global level across all the 50 countries. 

The user has to have SQL knowledge and SQL skills.

What I think it could be very useful to have is quick measures, where it automatically brings you, let's say, three default calculations. It will be very useful and it will be very, very important maybe for the future for Power BI to have more additional quick measures there. Instead of the user having to think about, "okay, how am I going to calculate this measure? How I'm going to meet this measure?" If you already have a list of all the measures there in the quick measures, it'll make the life of the end-user much easier.

The solution is lacking some of the interactions that Tableau or Power BI offers. They have visualization points. They have good process cubes and a semantic layer on that point. However, I think they are missing the parts of user-friendliness. 

There needs to be better integration with other platforms. You can connect to several sources, but then you cannot integrate it into the suite that maybe Microsoft offers or other products offer. That said, everything depends on where your company wants to drive the business in the future. 

The end-user interaction is lacking. It's not as intuitive as Power BI is, or, in certain cases, Tableau is on virtualizations.

It's not interactive. There's a lot of filters on the page. 

The solution's reports are not very flexible.

Using this solution means that a company will need to find people with special skills. It's very difficult. When you're trying to find someone with a skill maybe in Tableau, Power BI, or Sapio, it's much easier because there are a lot of people like that in the market. Even if you're looking for a data scientist, it's very difficult to find a suitable candidate due to the fact that they have to have skills in MicroStrategy. If you don't have a resource that really understands the tool, then it will lose the purpose.

The solution should be re-designed so there is less coding and more drag and drop functionality.

Our customers use it as a BI tool, and we handle end-to-end project development. We use MicroStrategy for the front end to develop metadata and dashboards.

MicroStrategy's OLAP data site is a significant advantage for BI tools. We are able to manage to get very in-depth and detailed management of the data model on the backend. It makes dashboards more powerful in terms of performance. It also enables more efficient data management.

Data Security and Multi-User Capabilities

MicroStrategy's security management is very powerful. We can use various security filters for role-based security and it has a direct connection to Active Directory, allowing us to manage numerous groups effectively.

AI Capabilities

I haven't had much chance to use the AI capabilities, but I know that only licensed parties can use these features.