MicroStrategy Reviews

The most valuable features are:

• A single integrated architecture: develop once, deploy anywhere.
• MicroStrategy Mobile: best in class mobile integration
• MicroStrategy Office: no need to connect to MicroStrategy web/mobile; open Microsoft Office documents, worksheets and refresh data as and when required
• MicroStrategy BigData Gateway: seamless connectivity to major Hadoop distributions
• Pixel perfect dynamic dashboards: high quality dashboards for board-level and management reporting
• Intelligent Cubes: load data once a day, no need to connect to the database.

We tried one of the leading reporting/BI tools in the market, but was it was not scaleable for enterprise levels. MicroStrategy does scale for enterprise levels.

There are a couple of areas that could be improved. Formatting the dashboard takes lot of time, which increases IT costs.

1. Dashboard development is time consuming, if you are doing corporate themes with a similar look and feel across all your visualizations. Starting Version 10.2, MicroStrategy provided features to re-use themes and templates across multiple dashboards. This does helps a little when you have grid/graph types of dashboards. However, when every visualization is different, it takes time to achieve pixel perfect visualizations. Having a Visualization Expert in the initial design stage helps with annotations and scales used within different panels, borders, etc., but it does take time to develop.
2. Tableau visualizations provide targeting from different data points to very different visualizations. There are some visualizations in Tableau which are much better than MicroStrategy.

We would also like to see more visualizations within Visual Insight. The existing visualizations are not at par with Tableau. I believe they were supposed to match Tableau capabilities, but they fall short on that. However, Visual Insight is better for end users who want to develop their own analysis and visualizations.

I’ve been using this product for 13 years; from version 7.5.2.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would rate technical support a six out of 10 (one-worst 10-best). Based on the level of support (Gold) we had, I have found tech support a bit sluggish. We had already resolved issues with workarounds before technical support came up with solutions.

We were using Tableau, but it had scalability issues and per-user licensing costs.

We did have some issues, but good documentation from MicroStrategy and the Technotes helped resolve most of them.

Pricing/licensing is little bit on the high side. Businesses buying this product should plan in advance what licenses to purchase. I would advise you to hire a contractor or free lancer with previous MicroStrategy experience to plan your project correctly.

If you have a user base that is going to increase over time, this product is best suited. Web-user licenses are unlimited for users who do not wish to create their own reports or dashboards and just want to view, download, and use.

MicroStrategy has what they call the Semantic Graph — an enterprise-grade semantic graph — and I think the technology is fantastic. 

MicroStrategy needs to do some more development to make the platform easier to use. It's a complicated platform that requires a lot of skill to effectively utilize. So they could work on reducing the complexity to make it more accessible for a broader community of people.

If you have a skilled individual to make sure all the settings are correct, it is stable. Once the setup is configured correctly, it's a very stable system.

MicroStrategy is scalable. It's built for enterprises.

MicroStrategy support could be more responsive. About 10 or 15 years ago, they were winning technical support awards, but I've not seen anything like that in the last few years. So I think there's a lot of room for improvement in their technical support.

If you have the right skills, it's not a difficult process. However, as environments change and become increasingly complex, it's harder to keep everything aligned on the administrative side, especially in large institutional settings. It's challenging to keep the backend administration of the system in line with those changes. Larger organizations have complex environments that the technology needs to interface with. So that's where it gets complicated. 

All BI software vendors' list prices are high. It's about a price that fits the customer's needs. And I think MicroStrategy has some flexibility in its pricing model where we can easily demonstrate a total cost of ownership comparison against any of the other players. But you could do that from any BI vendor's perspective.

I rate MicroStrategy nine out of 10. Doing business with MicroStrategy is relatively challenging because of the processes that are involved. But the technology is probably the best in the market overall. I think they could add a lot more graphs and charts into their standard product. At the moment, you have to go to third parties to get some of the latest charts and graphs. 

I would recommend it. But if you're going to implement it, you need to invest in educating and training your employees on the product because it is complex. Data literacy today is a big topic, so companies investing in BI technologies should also invest in promoting data literacy among the staff who will be accessing and consuming that information. Right now, most of the training goes to BI professionals. However, companies should also train people who need to consume the data coming out of those departments.

Our primary use case is to use the business intelligence tool for court data, to make the court and judges work more efficiently, faster, and less expensive.

It's performing well, we are expecting a major breakthrough this year regarding the analytics bot.

The flexibility.

And looking ahead in 2018, we expect to be using dashboards and, hopefully, Dossier.

I would try to make it a little more basic, user-friendly. In terms of the UX, it's a bit sluggish there.

You should ask me this question when we get to version 10.10.

We have had downtime with the current version but I wouldn't put that on MicroStrategy. Maybe it's MicroStrategy's fault, but I wouldn't it put it that way.

I think the scalability is excellent.

We haven't used tech support directlly, we have our partners to help us.

Regarding rolling out self-service to business teams with MicroStrategy, we have been thinking about it, but I doubt that we will.

As for having the analytic capability in a single platform like MicroStrategy, versus many-point solutions, we naturally prefer one platform. This is because of a single, standard mode. We don't have to scatter and search through eleven different platforms when there's only one there.

We are thinking about investing in the mobile platform of MicroStrategy but I can't say positive, we will, or negative, we won't. I don't know at this point.

For me, the most important criteria when selecting vendor, in general, are 

• flexibility
• and their Interest in work with us - I like devotion to our interests.

You should have a clear goal, and focus on a single thing for the tool, to yield the best results as fast as possible.

• Sharing objects, which helps the end user with self-service reporting.
• Security filter controls the data-level security in the report for sharing with more than one partner.
• Access Control List controls the object-level security for accessing by user.
• OLAP functionality:
  
  • Multidimensional analysis: OLAP helps the user gain an insight on the data coming from different sources.
  • OLAP helps faster execution of complex analytical and ad-hoc queries.
  • Allows trend analysis periodically.
  • Drill down abilities.
• MicroStrategy Desktop is one of the popular analytic tools that can be migrated to a server for publishing for other users.

• * Reduced IT dependency. *
• Using template
• Users (Business Analyst) are using this canned report template for their reporting based on their info and save that report in their own folder. And they are using subscription to deliver that report to their stakeholder.
• Allowing user to create report from scratch. Train them what to use and what to not use. Once they familiar these then they don’t dependent on IT.
• Introducing the Dashboard; provide enough information in the dashboard. Once user started using those dashboard then they don’t dependent on IT.
• Now most of the request from users like below;
• - New metric (custom metric)
• - New filters (custom filter)
• - Complex reports where they can’t create by themselves.

• MicroStrategy Desktop: Personal analytical tool that helps users to do their analytical work using multiple sources of data. However, this tool needs to improve to add more analytical functions, and an easy solution to use third-party graphs and maps.
• Multi-level security: Currently, MicroStrategy provides multiple ways of access (Standard, Windows, Database, LDAP, etc.) the MicroStrategy tool (use either one of them), but not combined solutions.
• Big data solution: Currently, MicroStrategy is providing a very good big data solution for MicroStrategy Desktop but not an easy server-level solution.

* Reduced IT dependency. *

n Using template

o Users (Business Analyst) are using this canned report template for their reporting based on their info and save that report in their own folder. And they are using subscription to deliver that report to their stakeholder.

n Allowing user to create report from scratch. Train them what to use and what to not use. Once they familiar these then they don’t dependent on IT.

n Introducing the Dashboard; provide enough information in the dashboard. Once user started using those dashboard then they don’t dependent on IT.

Now most of the request from users like below;

- New metric (custom metric)

- New filters (custom filter)

- Complex reports where they can’t create by themselves.z

We have been using the solution for about eight years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

I would rate the technical support as about 7/10.

We were previously using Crystal Reports. We switched because of the analytical solution offered with this product.

Initial setup is straightforward. Step-by-step configuration information has been provided by the vendor.

I would advise others to go for the Named User license instead of the Server Level license initially. License pricing is moderate.

I am not aware of any other evaluated solutions.

Go for it.

• Visual insights:
  
  • For ad-hoc and self-service visualization
  • Faster user adoption
  • Connection to different sources
  • Data blending / mashing: Blending and mashing is valuable since users right now are currently tied up with the traditional way of getting data from databases prepared by IT. This feature will enable business users to immediately have access to different data sources, whether from IT or from their personal files, and allows them to combine these sources, and create reports and/or visualizations quickly and easily.
    Saves time and empowers business users.
  • Visual data discovery / data visualization
• Developer: object-oriented BI modelling
• Web services: building highly customized BI applications
• Mobile: pixel-perfect mobile dashboards, building mobile apps
• Object manager: migrations
• Security: complete and secure for enterprise scale

• As a consulting firm: delivering BI solutions to customers effectively and efficiently at an enterprise level

• Developer: Simplify BI modelling features to increase learning curve and user adoption.
• Data visualization: Improve and add visualizations and features to prepare BI apps. Reduce clicks and steps.

I have been using it for 3-4 years, including earlier versions (9.2).

We have encountered minimal stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer support is great but can still improve TAT.

We did not switch from a previous solution. We use Tableau, Microsoft and MicroStrategy depending on the needs or requirements of the customer.

The setups I have done are all single-server deployments, both in Linux and Windows:

• I-Server
• Mobile server
• Web server

Further simplify the licensing scheme:

• Architect is expensive
• Match or beat the pricing of Tableau
• Tableau is still cheaper

All products have been used depending on the customer.

At the enterprise level, MicroStrategy is good but requires a longer learning curve to fully maximize the platform as compared to other traditional BI tools and niche products such as Tableau.

• 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.

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.