MicroStrategy Reviews

We use MicroStrategy for our supply chain and merchandising, because we are retail.

Performance has been pretty good so far.

Because we are in retail, we do a lot of analytics. The way that we designed the graph is pretty cool for our analysis on a daily basis, so that we can define our forecast.

Definitely the dashboards and the VI, because they're pretty cool for our customers.

Our business users have access to self-service.

And looking at 2018, the feature we plan on using the most is Dossiers.

Right now, MicroStrategy is on AWS by itself. Since we are retail - and AWS is Amazon, which is our competitor - if they would move onto different cloud environments, that would be awesome.

Stability is pretty good. We have been using it for four years. We might have had some downtime, but it's pretty easy to bring it up.

It really scales. The stability and scalability are really cool. That's the beauty of MicroStrategy. It competes really well with Tableau, but data-wise, MicroStrategy beats all odds.

We have used tech support many times. Sometimes they're knowledgeable. I would say that there is a lot room for them to improve. The time that I spend with the technical support, if I'd spent the same amount of time doing my own research on the knowledge base side, I could get pretty much the same thing. 

Some of the technical support guys are really awesome, but others...

It was pretty straightforward.

We prefer having the analytics capability in a single platform, versus in a many-points solution, because our user base is pretty small. I don't know if we even offer multiple platforms. I'm not sure if we have tried that or not.

We have already invested in MicroStrategy's mobile platform and it's pretty good.

When looking at vendors to work with, we look not so much at name brand but at technical support and application features.

I would give it an eight out of 10. There's a lot of room for improvement, with all the other BI tools in the market.

Go for it. If you are a retail company, I would say go for it, do a PoC, it should be fine. Because I've been working with MicroStrategy for the last 12 years, I know what it is capable of.

Data analytics, as a reporting tool.

It's integral enough to make financial decisions in our organization.

The most valuable feature is predictive analytics. We also have some users that love using self-service.

In 2018, I think the most utilized MicroStrategy capability, for us, will be dashboarding.

I can't think of anything.

I think it's rather stable now, compared to where I come from. Earlier versions of MicroStrategy weren't so stable. Around v7's, they weren't as stable as they are now.

I think with all the APIs it's very scalable, although ours is a relatively new company so we haven't scaled yet.

In the last three years, I have probably opened three tickets. However, they do not get back to you quickly at all. The longest I waited for them to get back to me was a week.

Historically, MicroStrategy has been a technical solution. You could just call and get somebody on the phone. Now, you never know if you should call or you should open a ticket online. And then, if you get the ticket open, is someone going to call you back? The last couple of weeks been better. Last year, I complained to MicroStrategy quite a bit about the technical support.

I do love the tech notes, I do love the online community. I think that's very helpful.

I've been using MicroStrategy for 20 years but I've used Cognos, I've used Crystal, and there used to be another reporting tool called Eureka Suite. I've worked with Tableau too. It was a company decision to switch.

It's straightforward.

We have not invested in the mobile platform, but we do plan on it, towards the end of the year.

When selecting a vendor, I appreciate customer service. That's the best thing. No matter how difficult the tool is, as long as you have good customer service, it'll take care of itself.

I would rate it an eight out of 10, because I think they're still lacking on customer service. I think historically, MicroStrategy's customer service was a lot better than it is today.

I would definitely recommend MicroStrategy over anything I've worked with before. And I worked with Tableau too. If you want some pretty designs, Tableau is a good tool, but other than that, as far as analytics, it's definitely MicroStrategy.

We have installed MicroStrategy and implemented a couple sample reports just to prove we can. However, we do not have all our current reports from Tableau replicated in a MicroStrategy environment, and we are headed that direction. 

We are planning on rolling out Self-Service and investing in mobile analytics.

In the immediate future as in the next month, because our other license expires in March, we want to hurry up and just get all of our reporting replaced and have them all in MicroStrategy, then we will move forward from there. 

We are still on the beginning stages, however having the intelligence server sit in the middle is huge for us. It is going to save us a lot of time, make our work a lot simpler, make it easier for deployment, and getting the reports in the hands of our users sooner. 

It was easy to install and implement a report with it.

It is too early to tell. We have some ideas regarding what we can do, because we have been using a different product all along. We will see as time passes as to what we could do before that we have trouble with MicroStrategy, but I do not think it will be a problem. 

No issues.

No issues.

During installation I had some trouble, I created actually a couple tickets with the support department and Micro Strategy helped us straighten those out. They were very knowledgeable.

We are currently using Tableau. We recently signed a contract with MicroStrategy. We are going to move all our reports from Tableau to MicroStrategy. We are not going to connect Tableau to MicroStrategy, which we could. We are just going to let our Tableau license expire in March, then we are just going to go MicroStrategy all the way. 

We do not want to pay Tableau and pay MicroStrategy. It is a business decision. We are going to do one, not both. 

Initial setup was straightforward.

They gave us a good deal. They convinced one of our executives that we are getting a deal, so they signed. 

We want to do what makes sense for our business. We are not married to one way of doing it. We will listen to our business people and we will do whatever makes sense depending on the situation. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We want a solution that we can implement in a short amount of time. We don't want to go back and forth in a month; we want it to work right now. Also, we want to be able to have a vendor who we can reach, and they respond when we submit a ticket. They need to respond in a short amount of time. Even though, they are busy answering requests from other people our requests are important to us.

The use case for this is for our sales people who work in the field.

In terms of performance it's really good, they're giving good feedback.

I look at the front-end, the website. They have landing pages and that makes life easy for exhibiting things.

The architecture, it's very solid.

We are also using the Writeback capabilities. We are writing back to our CRM, Salesforce.

If they can make it more stable, in terms of the connectivity, that would help.

It is very stable. The only problem, I feel, is the connectivity - that has hiccups. Other than that, it's good.

Scalability is pretty straightforward.

We use tech support. They're knowledgeable and easy to contact.

It is easy because we didn't customize anything. If you know what are you doing then it's not difficult.

We are not yet using multi-media content in our ads, but we will. And we do have a capability for our mobile apps to work in offline mode.

When looking for a vendor the most important thing to us is the use case, the capabilities of the product.

I give it a six out of 10 because of the connectivity and a few other things. The main thing is the connectivity, and then there is the caching, so if they can work on that it would help.

Still, I would tell a colleague to definitely go for MicroStrategy.

• Mobile
• Data marts
• Cubes
• Visual Insights (VI)
• SQL engine
• MicroStrategy Office

Perfect balance between self-service and governed BI.

While VI gives self-serve agility, report wizard brings governance specifying limits on MicroStrategy and database end.

Development tools (developer and architect) need improvement.

Native VI on mobile apps and better android support are lacking.

More than 10 years.

While deployment is easier, the upgrade is painful process.

Developer, iServer, Webserver all are very stable.

Some versions have memory leakage or cube index issues, but overall very stable software.

No, scalability is strength of MicroStrategy.

Very average customer service.

Sales is very responsive, but technical support is below average.

Below average.

Used Tableau, Cognos, SSIS, BO, and Pentaho.

Moved to MicroStrategy for a scalable and mobile solution.

Straightforward.

In-house.

Hard to calculate but offering a single BI platform brings down maintenance and time to market time.

While initial cost of MicroStrategy is still on the higher side, the long-term benefits brings down overall cost of ownership significantly as compared to other tools like Tableau/Cognos.

Yes, Looker BI.

The real difficulty is finding a correct development resource for MicroStrategy as it has a steep learning curve and is unlike other tools on the market.

• Dashboards
• Documents
• Reports
• Filters

Working as a BI Consultant, I have to develop different analyses, reports and dashboard documents to analyze the status of different business measures. We are using OBIEE and MicroStrategy for the purpose of enterprise performance management by defining and describing different business perspectives and objectives, initiatives and results are analyzed on the basis of these defined attributes.

There are limited features available for the overall enterprise performance management and analysis. There isn't a proper mechanism to define proper KPIs, collaboration or analysis of numeric data separately.

I've been using it for six months to a year.

Sometimes there is an issue of font size, spacing and other related formatting document issues.

We've experienced no issues with performance. However, the larger amount of number of selectors, filters etc. you have, the longer it will take to display an analysis.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

7/10

8/10

I started with OBIEE, and I am still using it for References.

It was straightforward.

We implemented it in-house.

We're also using MicroStrategy.

If you are looking for purely Performance Management of whole enterprise, then you should choose OBIEEE, otherwise choose MicroStrategy.

The ability to create VI’s which are easy for front end users to manipulate in order to see the data they wish to see.

Visual Insight allows the developer to create reports and/or cubes as the foundation and the end user can easily pull any of the metrics and attributes into the report, graph or other visualization without requiring technical reporting knowledge. This really gives the end user the ability to manipulate the data as they see fit. They can see as little or as much detail as the report/cube allows.

The ability for end users to self-service on ad-hoc reports.

Instead of using a lot of table joins within MSTR, we have had to rely on ETL for those same reports and then expose that view/report in MSTR. A couple of reasons for this are slowness when running the report inside MSTR and difficulty in setting up left joins when using multiple tables.

We have been using the solution for about three years.

We have not encountered any stability issues. Only a few outages that have always been resolved quickly.

Scalability issues have been the most significant which we have faced.

This is not an area I have to deal with much but from what I have heard it seems to be good.

We previously used SSRS. We still use this sometimes but have been working to transition to MSTR. MSTR gives the end users more flexibility when looking at reports.

The setup was complex. Our warehouse was completely rewritten in order to fit the MSTR model.

We have no specific comments regarding this issue.

We evaluated others but I was not part of that decision making so am unaware of other options being looked at.

Find other companies who are willing to share their experience and the lessons learned when setting up their environments.

The best thing I saw was the excellent mobile integration. The interface is very clean and beautiful. The configuration of devices is extremely fast, you just need to click the link that is sent to you with all the configuration.

Another great feature of MicroStrategy is the SDK, with which you can introduce new charts and customize the whole web environment. You can customize almost everything in MicroStrategy. Finally, the MicroStrategy Community is very active, you can have answers faster than the support sometimes.

We provided dynamic reports, using data from a large database. The ability to use in-memory calculations in association with the calculations performed in the queries, made possible to run heavy queries faster, because the the heaviest calculations were performed by the analytical engine. So the query passed less time at the RDBMS.

In another situation, we were supposed to configure MicroStrategy Mobile on many devices. To do this, we made a list of the users, told them to download and install the app, and then we sent them the link to configure the application. In a few minutes, almost every device was configured and running.

The main thing that the company must improve is the support for their clients.

In Brazil I have seen many issues not being resolved for a long time, which makes the clients become impacient and disappointed.

I´ve been working with different versions of MicroStrategy since 2011, for different customers such as government agencies, banks and insurance companies.

A common issue during deployment in Windows was that, the registries were not being well configured, then the developer (Desktop) tool stopped running. To fix this issue you need to reinstall the tool.

There are also problems after installing MicroStrategy Web at IIS, and you need to go to the registries and change a specific path to the JNI Bridge.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered, and when we needed to upgrade a machine, we just had to change the memory configuration to use the new memory that was available.

In some cases MicroStrategy took too long to respond the opened cases, what made the clients very upset and disappointed.

I believe the customer service needs to improve. It can be better.

The manuals of the tool are very complete, if you follow that, you are not going to have many problems.

MicroStrategy need to create cheaper solutions, as nowadays it's too expensive, and sometimes you pay for something that you are not going to really use.

v10 of MicroStrategy is helping a lot of users by giving them the possibility to add new charts using JavaScript libraries like D3, in a very simple way using Visual Insight.

HTML5 is supported everywhere, so using it will be a game changer.

You must practice! The amount of configurations and possibilities are huge, so, go through the manuals, go through the online courses, participate in the community. There are a lot of things to learn.