MicroStrategy Reviews

• The ability to work directly on top of almost every known data source, while creating optimized queries for each data source type.
• The ability to take the load of the DB with cubes while still baeing able to access the raw data at the db level when needed.
• The ability to "complete" missing features in the big-data platform with mstr features.
• The ability to create very complex queries logic automatically.
• The flexibility to integrate various data sources without ETL.
• The freedom to generate reports and use both cubes and relational data in the same dashboards seamlessly.
• The ability to create simple but good looking dashboards easily while still being able to implement very complex logic and UI in more complex documents.

The ability to investigate high-level data in cubes and once an issue is found, you can directly drill to the row-level data within the same platform. No coding or integration is needed between different tools. It is all done within the same platform, using the same objects, which allows the best of both worlds, especially while working on large-scale projects (big data).

• The default color pallets could be improved, and they are improving with each version.
• Simplification of the various configurations: The product offers a huge amount of options and configurations. It takes a while to get a good grasp of it all.

I have used MicroStrategy very extensively for over five years.

We encountered a few stability issues in the early 10.0 and 10.1 versions. Since 10.3 was released about 6-8 months ago, it has been stable.

version 10.4 was the first "platform version" and is more stable , while creating complex dashboards in 10.3 you might encounter various UI bugs , for most there are simple workarounds though.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. The only thing is that if you plan on using cubes as a solution, prepare the servers with enough memory; processing the cubes is heavy on memory.

The platform now supports a cluster of eight nodes, which should be enough for over X *10K users.

the customer service is usually pretty high , support responses to cases within a day or 2 , even for cases which are not P1 priority.

Technical support is at a high level. Most of the time, they are quite accurate; most issues are solved within 2-3 iterations, even without remote login to the servers, which is not possible most of the time.

• I previously used Panorama on top of Microsoft SSAS cubes. I think that in today’s world, the cube is just a fragment of the performance tuning, rather than being the complete solution. Therefore, when people keep asking for the raw data, the cube simply does not contain it.
• In today’s big data projects, nobody thinks about taking all the data out to a cube, with very limited capability to drill back to the actual live data.
• Regarding SSAS cubes, today’s dashboards are complex, and only a small number of developers actually write MDX queries correctly. Therefore, each additional logic requires a very experienced developer and takes a lot of time.
• Panorama had stability issues.
• I also worked with Qlik, but I do not think it is meant for today’s big data projects. Nobody wants islands of data completely disconnected from the original data (no way to drill for further details, and no way the detailed level will be extracted from Hadoop/Vertica into an in-memory application).

The initial configurations of the server and the project require a high level of experience. The installation is rather straightforward, but the configurations require deep understanding of the product and the environment.

Most high-end tools cost roughly similar, but the TCO of MSTR is said to be lower than others due to the reuse of objects and the ability to work with the dependencies between the objects, instead of guessing which report/dashboard uses which metric.

Of course, we evaluated Qlik, Tableau and MSBI Suite.

If you are not a MicroStrategy expert, use one, especially in the initial phases of the projects; it will save you a great deal in the long term.

• 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.

• Perfect reports, dashboards and widgets for end users
• Mobile and web access

Management can see how the business is going, financial stuff and analyze all sales processes. It is possible to build advanced beautiful reports, decorated with different graphs, charts, which is so liked by management, though this beauty can be infinitely improved, especially in mobile apps. Also, we can present analytics in dashboards, combine elements in a document, animate them, visualize them and more.

As an architect and implementation specialist, I think it must improve component integration, troubleshooting and diagnostics.

The evaluation possibilities for developers are very bad. Obtaining the installation key and activation code is a complicated procedure; there are problems with the extension of the evaluation period. Unfortunately, it sometimes takes a long time for customers to understand the benefits of the product and in this way, MSTR is less convenient for developers.

We had some problems with EM statistics ETL, Architect, and Operations Manager.

I have used it for two years.

I have encountered stability issues: unstable Architect mappings, IS crashes without diagnostics, and so on.

I have not encountered any scalability issues, because we did not risk using it for large projects. We use Oracle BI instead.

Technical support is a six out of 10. For example, MicroStrategy closed their office in Russia. Before that, customers could solve problems with the product through us, due to the lack of a Russian-speaking support line. After the office closure, they simply did not renew support.

Initial setup was relatively straightforward. However, beginner users can suffer from a lack of information and help from the community after using Oracle products.

The product has a nice price.

Usually, we use Oracle BI, MSAS or Pentaho. For only two projects, MSTR was the best choice for our customers. We also can use SAP BO.

Read the documentation, have patience and good luck in looking in the knowledge base.

Design and development of the product lines in the apparel industry with its unit pricing info,customer demographics details,Customer profile,competitor info and analysis over a time period..Store wise inventory details of each product line across the region,state and country level

• Enterprise wide reporting capability.
• Self-service reporting & analysis.
• Extensive analysis of business units function: It provides various metrics and by using drill through and drill across functionality.
• Ease of understanding of various performance measures using widget features.

Schema updates help us to cope up with enterprise business definition changes.

Reports auto-styling allows us to design stunning report output, differentiating the result set for better understanding of the business users.

VLDB properties allow you to customize the SQL that MicroStrategy generates. These settings affect how MicroStrategy Intelligence Server manages joins, metric calculations, and query optimizations.

The flexibility to work with agile data model updates.

We have used MicroStrategy for 10 + years.

We have encountered stability issues with regards to Metadata db being crashed and need to reload the Project and configure it to various Project repositories

We have encountered no scalability issues.

Technical support is very good.

We worked with IBM Cognos and its business adaption due to its rich data visualization capabilities, widget creation, etc.

Setup was easy. By creating a unified project model with the organizational standards, business rules, and project design, the underlying data model design is streamlined resulting in consistent reporting and analysis across the enterprise.

It’s cloud version pricing is competitive and in sync with market demand.

For an enterprise-wide DWBI implementation, MicroStrategy is a great choice. Evaluate your organizational needs to go in either for on-premises or cloud version of the product to control your project budget.

Primary is the enterprise reporting. That's our baseline. Everything else is "nice-to-haves."

It performs very well.

If you provide the necessary data to make decisions in a timely and visually stimulating way, then you can make better decisions. It profoundly impacts the organization.

It's such a rich platform, it's got so much to offer: it's mobile, In-Memory Analytics, and there are data connectors to just about everything you can imagine. It's a total package.

If they didn't do their enterprise reporting very well then it wouldn't be as successful.

I would say what's unique is that it's a comprehensive package, and wasn't done piecemeal. It was built internally. They didn't buy products and stitch them together. Everything works really well together. It's such a powerful platform and I've worked with it for a long time. It's amazing that I still continue to learn and discover new things even to this day.

We have rolled out self-service to business teams. Data governance is the biggest challenge.

Looking forward, for this year, mobility is something I think we'll utilize most. We're currently on the mobile platform but we're looking to use it more. It's going to continue to be a strong push.

I don't think that they will, but I'd like to see parallel processing, scalable parallel processing. 

Also, there are minor features, that I've already logged with MicroStrategy, nothing major.

It's one of the most stable platforms I've ever worked on. I've never had it fall on me, never.

It scales well. It used to have only a max of four I-servers, but I think recently, somewhere in version 10, they doubled that, so you can have eight I-servers now.

The only problem with that - yes it's a cluster, they raised it from four to eight - but your jobs aren't distributed. Your job goes to a single server - one of the eight. If you have a really huge job, it'd be nice to distribute it across all eight and cut the response time significantly.

They're actually pretty good. It's support, it's a difficult job. They're actually really good.

Windows implementation is pretty straightforward. Linux is pretty easy. High-level, it's very easy.

Take the time to find an experienced consultant. A good consultant can increase your adoption and lower your overall cost by saving you from costly missteps.

I would prefer having analytic capabilities from a single platform, rather than from many-point solutions, but in reality, I don't think that's very possible. 

I can give you an example. MicroStrategy, was very early to do In-Memory Analytics. I think everybody else is catching up to that. It doesn't really set them apart anymore today, but it did at one time. But beyond that, with MicroStrategy you're still limited to a single server, and to really crunch through a lot of data you need to parallel, across servers. MicroStrategy doesn't currently offer that so you have to go to something like Spark.

So I would love that on one platform, but in reality you can't get everything you possibly want in one platform. But MicroStrategy is smart. They have data connectors to open source applications. That may provide the functionality that you need to fill in the gaps.

Most important when selecting a vendor is 

• the support 
• their stability, are they going to be here tomorrow
• release schedule, a fairly stable, consistent, high-value release schedule.

I give MicroStrategy a nine out of 10. It's pretty solid. It's not perfect, but it's pretty solid. I think it is probably the best solution out there right now.

Do your homework. Shop around. Really understand MicroStrategy and the alternatives. Do enough research to realize where the real value is at. It's a mature product, it's a mature suite. It's more than just pretty dashboards. If you look past that, the administration, mobility, the analytics, if you look at all of it and rate each of the categories, I think you'll realize that MicroStrategy is at the top of the list.

There is a steep learning curve with it, a skill set that goes with it. But they've balanced that with the new Data Discovery module that is fairly easy to use by anyone.

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.

MicroStrategy has a lot of features. If the developers and end-users know how to use it in depth, it is one awesome BI tool.

MicroStrategy Architect is kind of a data modelling tool available in the MicroStrategy Desktop. It is used to maintain the relationships among the attributes. It is a really useful tool, especially when you have to modify the relationships/hierarchies; you do not need to go to the database to do the changes. Instead, you can use this architect to define them.

MSTR generates SQL automatically for every object you pull on to the report. It has many options available in the VLDB properties where you can optimize the SQL.

Web is an amazing tool for end users. You can customize the reports, create new ad-hoc reports, modify the existing static reports and apply sorting, filtering, pivoting, etc. Admins can define the access levels to the users based on their right to view/modify the sensitive data. Access levels can be defined at many levels; at project level, folder level, report level to the developers, standard users, project owners/directors.

The security filters concept was very useful for our requirements. It was like we had to use same database tables (backend) and report structure (frontend) for different countries but each country should not see the others’ data. In this case, we can apply security filters in the web environment to the user groups specific to the country.

Data blending is also a good feature. With this, you can insert objects from more than one dataset in a single grid or graph in the dashboard. This allows users to create their own custom dashboards from multiple datasets.

The visual insight tool can be improved further. When I tried with Tableau, it has a wide variety of graphs to generate quick and easy.

The graphical interpretations developed from the reports are not directly usable for dynamic analysis and formatting takes longer. the graphs do not indicate trends on their own. Whereas in Tableau, developing dashboards from the scratch is easy and super fast and dashboards look great without formatting.

But I heard MSTR version 10 has come up with many features; yet to try.

I have used it for five years.

I have not encountered any stability issues so far.

I have not encountered any scalability issues so far.

I am not really a great fan of tech support, because my project’s issues didn't get solved or the response was not quick.

However, there is a discussion forum on the MicroStrategy Community site. You can post any technical/tool-based questions and you will get a fast response. It also has a knowledge base, which has many posts/tech notes written to provide solutions to the different kinds of problems. This community is really awesome, with many blogs/articles on MSTR.

MicroStrategy was the first tool I worked on in five years. But I would probably switch to Tableau if I needed to work on visual insights and utilize a variety of graphs.

Initial setup was quite straightforward and easier to me.

The price is too high. They could at least increase the software evaluation period.

We didn't evaluate any other tools; the requirements we received from customers instructed us to work with MSTR.

MSTR is a great tool for reporting. Especially for big organisations, it is very stable. Training is a must for the developers who want to play with the options available in and out of the tool.

Caching and report bursting, as it offers the phenomenal ways to access the info at a blazing speed.

With this, we have been able to provide consistent reporting with ease, after the efforts put in the initial schema setup.

Visual Insight, as I see, has improved a lot but it still lacks the analytics capability of other tools such as Tableau.

I have used it for seven years.

I have not largely encountered any stability issues, but upgrades at times have been little shaky.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is decently good.

I previously used SAP BO, but it was moving here and there between companies and becoming a bit too much to handle.

We use the Cloud edition, so N/A.

Pricing is bit less transparent and high.

It takes a while to set up properly to reap the benefits fully, so don’t rush up.