MicroStrategy Reviews

Architecture

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In a nutshell, Microstrategy (or MSTR for short) architecture is composed of three layers

1 - Web/Mobile interface that connects to any given Intelligent Server (middleware)

2- Middleware (Intelligent Server) that

a. connects to data layer (many connectors included in the default license)

b. executes created SQL/MDX queries, OLAP functions

c. Generates pre-loaded MOLAP cubes (aka Intelligent Cubes) to speed up results (if defined)

3 - Data Access: Access to your DataWarehouse (no need to be dimensional model, but recommended) using any of the several included connectors

Attributes and Facts definition

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Using Microstrategy Architect you basically define:

a. Attributes and attribute forms (which corresponds to the Dimensions in the Dimensional Model)

b. Facts (which corresponds to Facts)

c. System Hierarchy or relationship of Attributes to Facts. Here it is where you also define your Star or Snowflake model for your attributes. Also (and this is a really cool feature) same Fact can be located at different aggregation levels either because you have it in the datasource (e.g an agg view) or because you ask a given FACT in MSTR to extend the value to another level. This is interesting to enhance performance using tables with pre-processed aggregated data, instead of letting MSTR calculate aggregations "on the fly"

d. User Hierarchy: or drill-in paths to see the information in your reports / Documents

Report and Dashboard Generation

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Then you can start creating :

- Measures: Formulas (e.g KPIs) that uses Facts or other measures

- Reports which are data sets of attributes and Measures (here you can also use other type of objects like filters, consolidations, custom groups,etc...). You can see and export these datasets in a variety of formats (Excel, PDF, etc...) However the top use case for this report is as datasource for Documents/Dashboards

- Dynamic Documents and documents: You include "n" number of reports as your datasource and then represent using the widgets (Tabs, Tables, Heat Maps, ESRI Maps, ...) These are ultimately the Dashboards or final reports that end user will see and - here it comes the most valuable feature of MSTR from my point of view- either from Web or from mobile device - So you can quickly compose a mobile dashboard in few clicks if (and only if) you have created the right data model (e.g a solid DWH schema). At this point it is worth to mention that MSTR allows you to iteratively enhance the model and reports/dashboards (so no big-bang deployment needed)

- You can also create predictive analysis (datamining) using some of the techniques and gadgets provided as well as interactively play with data and come to conclusions using MSTR Visual Insight (kind of an 'slice and dice data' tool). Outputs from those analysis may be dashboards/documents.

Scheduler

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Reports and Documents can be run on demand or can be scheduled to be generated and sent to target audience. Scheduler is also responsible of the Intelligent cubes refreshing (MOLAP recreation at a regular basis)

Microstrategy licensing model allows:

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a. Access to all tools available (recent change, one year ago more or less) - before you had to license certain tools, now you have access to all tools in either on-premise installation or Cloud. Interesting Tools

b. In the on-premise installation model, licenses per user and therefore have high scalable BI solutions: In this licensing model you can deploy your architecture (Web Front-end and Middleware or Intelligent Sever) in as many servers you want.

Before we used Microstrategy at Xerox Services (HR services) we used to analyze data using Spreadsheets, to calculate and report on service SLAs and KPIs.

No need to mention how using MSTR has enhanced the process since then but a couple of the key benefits are:

- Data access not affecting transactional systems (data sources)

- Complex calculations (SLAs, KPI rules) right there on time when needed and always right or always wrong but centralized in a single place where formulas can be corrected if needed

Probably this is not MSTR's fault but BI tool in general: sometimes trying to follow MSTR rules to get some formulas and data using MSTR techniques is harder (and less performant) than just prepare yet another DWH view collecting needed data (with needed inner or left outer joins and aggregations) and just model that new view in MSTR.

Also MSTR, as all these BI tools, generate automatic SQL code from the model defined in the architecture tool so sometimes you are getting weird results but are easily trackable (MSTR reports in all SQL generated code) to be fixed.

No ETL comes with the tool, either you have your own solution (MSTR SSIS, Informatica) to model your DWH or you connect MSTR to the datasource / transactional (which is not good)

When we were using it before, it was mainly for some types of reporting, primarily sales reporting. We also use it for external reporting and that went out to our customers to allow our member hospitals to view their own purchasing data, for example, who they're buying from, what vendors, what kind of pricing they're getting. Mostly its reports on things of that nature. It was and is used for both internal reporting and external member facing reporting.

We moved to Tableau and we're still using it a little bit for some of our solutions.

The security is quite robust. It is more of a true enterprise solution. That made it much easier to deploy out at the time to our members. 

The common metadata, the library that MicroStrategy has made, makes it much easier to reuse components and not have to recreate them for every dashboard. That was something we really liked and still do.

The product is very mature. It's quite robust and an excellent enterprise-level solution.

Overall, we found the solution to be quite stable.

At the time we moved away from relying on it, the solution was really lagging as far as visualizations and ease of dashboard creation. It took much more of a MicroStrategy expert to design dashboards. It wasn't really something users could do on their own. The self-service component was really lacking.

The cost is pretty high. It was a little pricier than Tableau, for example.

The learning curve is quite steep. A company should consider a third-party service to help with implementation.

We've been using the solution for 20 years or so. It's been a very long time. We have a lot of experience with it.

Overall, we were really happy with it. As far as an enterprise solution goes, it was very stable. It was very mature and had many robust features, as far as building applications and alerting, et cetera. The thresholding just had a very robust feature set, which is what we liked about it.

We didn't really deal with bugs and glitches. It didn't crash and freeze. It was very reliable for many years.

The solution is well suited to enterprise-level companies. 

We are currently using Tableau. It's less expensive.

The initial setup was done a very long time ago. We had a third-party help us when we first implemented it back in the 90's. 

Since then, we have managed it ourselves. 

We did hire a third-party to assist us in the implementation process when we first set the solution up.

We are just a customer and end-user.

We are using the 2019 version of the solution.

I used to run a consulting company and we would consult on this solution. I would always recommend to our customers that they get a third-party to help them implement it initially due to the fact that the learning curve to implement MicroStrategy is much steeper than something like a Tableau.

Since we moved away from MicroStrategy, they've really gained traction on their visualizations and it's much more similar to a Tableau design now, as far as building visualizations. That was the only thing really lacking for us. It's good that they've moved in this direction.

Technically, we are still using the solution, just at a reduced scale.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

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.

We have insurance customers, health customers, in our organization. The performance is good.

The reporting, the dashboards, and the new visualization functions. It is very easy for users to understand their data and dashboards. The dashboards which we are using in our enterprise, they're very helpful in realizing business opportunities for us.

The Dossier functionality. We are on 10.4, but we have a sandbox for 10.10 and we are planning to upgrade to 10.10 next week.

We are planning to roll out self-service to business teams, but we are still working on that. We want to deploy a self-service solution to them but we have not done so yet.

For 2018, we want to use Dossier and visualizations. We have a new Vitara visualization chart. We are now planning to buy Vitara visualizations and we'll be using that.

I can't think of anything at the moment.

Enterprise is very stable. I've been with MicroStrategy from more than 12 years. The performance and the stability has been increasing. It is the best solution for enterprise BI platform.

We haven't faced the issue of scalability.

I like them. They have very good technical support.

We were using SSRS and we converted that, and SAS as well.

We switched because it is a stable platform and we know the good features in MicroStrategy. We have moved more and more of the reporting solutions to MicroStrategy. We still have some SSRS reports, but by the end of this year we are planning to move everything to MicroStrategy.

It is straightforward because I have been working with it for 12 years. So it's easy for me.

Maybe for newcomers it might be a little bit difficult, but they can easily see release notes or get some technical support. They can easily implement the solution. It's not that tough.

In terms of having the analytic capabilities in a single platform, like MicroStrategy, versus a many-points solution, we are planning to use it like that. We had different reporting solutions, but we are moving everything to a single MicroStrategy BI platform.

We haven't invested in the mobile platform. We want to invest, but the problem is the security. We are in the health domain, so we have PHI data. We have some challenges, so most probably this later year or at the start of 2019 we may be able to get the mobile solution.

When choosing a vendor, the major thing I look for is the technical support; how reachable they are. And stability as well.

I definitely recommend MicroStrategy. Install MicroStrategy and use it for reporting, the dashboards, and self-service. You can use it as a centralized BI platform.

It is one of the best BI reporting tools as per Gartner. It is a complete reporting bundle, which includes reports/dashboards/document creation along with Cube.

It also comes with self-service analysis that helps the user carry out short analysis within the corporate level. It has a good administrator tool to handle the administrative part. It has server distribution to publish the dashboards and reports from the end user in different formats as well.

It includes lots of other features that help to take the reporting to the next level; for example, R Integration that supports more than 70 databases.

It has strong metadata in the architecture, which makes a huge difference with the other tools in the market.

It's a DSS tool. Thus, for analysis in an analytics-oriented company, it has made a huge difference in their decisions.

This product needs to be ready to use at the enterprise level . As the market is growing and changing very fast, sometimes the development team does not have sufficient time to incorporate requirements within the given time frame. Thus, some solutions should be ready to use, i.e., the plug and play functionality for solutions at the enterprise level.

I have used this solution for more than 10 years.

Not many issues were encountered in terms of stability; there were only a few defects which were resolved in later releases.

There were no scalability issues.

I would give the technical support a 8 out of 10 rating.

Previously, I have used different solutions. However, I have found MicroStrategy better than any other tool.

A few configurations are needed as per requirement.

The pricing policy is good compared to other products in the market. It's a license-based software.

We did not evaluate other options. As we know, it's the best solution.

We value the ability to build dashboards and reports in a relatively simple way. We can teach end users how to do their own reports and dashboards making the process cheaper and faster.

Also, the ability to import data from a grand variety of sources and combine them into a single report/dashboard, skipping the expensive ETL process or validating it before a robust construction.

MicroStrategy makes it easier to control internal and external demands and also to monitor public programs financed by the institution.

Data discovery and self-service BI still needs to be simpler to end-users.

I have used MicroStrategy since 2012; four years.

We have not had stability issues.

We have not yet had scalability issues.

I rate technical support a 4.5/5.

We did not have a previous solution.

Initial setup was complex. MicroStrategy is a hard tool to configure in many ways, starting from its licensing schema.

Make a good study of your needs because its very expensive to change from nominal licensing to a server core licensing.

The buying decision was made by a previous team. But other solutions are always evaluated, like Tableau and ClickView.

Make sure there isn’t a cheaper solution that satisfies your demands. Prepare a good team to develop and use it or you’ll have a big mess and difficulties making data discovery and self-service BI.

It can be applied to a wide range of uses. It's a complete solution for all the BI needs of a company.

Mobility features have helped people who work supervising shops.

Visual Insight isn't as easy to use as the competitors.

I’ve used MicroStrategy for 15 years.

We occasionally had stability issues.

We did not have any scalability issues.

I rate technical support 1.5/5 because they hardly ever help you with problems and when they do it's very late.

We have always MicoStrategy.

Recently, the licensing method and pricing have been simplified. Now it is much easier to understand.

At that moment many of the current tools didn't yet exist.

No special advice.