MicroStrategy Reviews

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.

Primarily, as a developer, I am administering user privileges and creating reports for analysts and clients. 

The product is performing great.

It has greatly benefited our organization. We have a lot of products based on it. We license products from MicroStrategy to clients, therefore it is pretty important.

We started with Self-Service and now we are actually restricting Self-Service. What we do is give access to prompted reports for clients and we control ACLs on those objects. It feels like Self-Service because they are picking what they are using in the report, but they are not actually getting to the semantic layer.

The option to use various administrative tools, like Command Manager, System Manager, and Integrity Manager.

I prefer having the analytic capabilities all in one place, such as a single platform.

Something I would be interested in is more visualizations, because right now we use SDK to create some. If there were more out-of-the-box options, we would be happy with that.

Stability is great, especially with package deployments. It is very consistent and stable.

We have not had any issues with it. Usually, a client selects only a couple of users, so we are not up to the thousands.

I have not personally used technical support, but people on my team have.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I have implemented upgrades.

Upgrades seem like they are straightforward now. A couple years ago, they were a bit more complicated. There were unknown changes and they would do version releases, then sometimes things would break and they would have hotfixes. However, when we were less mature, it was harder because we did not have the right Integrity Manager tests and automated tests that we really rely on, so it was very manual back then.

We will not be investing in mobile analytics. We work in healthcare, and the data is sensitive. We do not want people on the move with healthcare data.

Do not give clients access to Self-Service or the entirety of everything, such as the semantic layering and creating reportings. It is a headache if you do it. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The ability to have multiple roles within the organization use it and being able to restrict it. For instance, there is consumer level access that business users can use, but then IT can use its tools and keep it separate but all within the same technology.

Highly scalable: It is not a bottleneck for leveraging a high-capacity analytical database.

Users can now consolidate data from across the business without reaching boundaries of cubes.

Even though self-service capabilities have been greatly improved, the basic reporting layout is still behind similar products.

I have used it for 18 years.

We have only encountered minor issues from time to time.

Scalability is excellent.

Technical support has been similar to other vendors.

We have not previously used a different solution.

There is a lot of setup to perform, so initial training is important.

Consider CPU-based licenses, if you have a large user population with highly varying reporting needs.

I do not recall whether we evaluated other options before choosing this solution.

The core of your data source (data warehouse) should be star schema, preferably starflake. Then you can attach other data sources around that.

The OLAP functionality of this product is best in class. The cubes created in MSTR can utilize all cores of the server and thus can be configured to use MPP architecture.

Another feature to highlight here is the latest Big Data Engine; MSTR's BDE is a Yarn based application that embeds right on top of Hadoop FS providing direct access to files in FS without need of any other language - Pig/Impala/Hive. I believe this is the closest a BI tool can embed on top of Hadoop FS.

The last one (not a feature though) which I would like to mention is the SQL that MSTR engine creates to retrieve data from warehouse. The multi-pass SQL is a very effective tool that provides lot of VLDB settings to tweak the SQL in regards to database, load and multiple other factors.

We were able to automate multiple repetitive tasks in the BI environment using administrative tools provided with this product. This helped the team focus their energies on critical work tasks.

Version control is still a major concern in MicroStrategy. I am aware that MSTR is working on it as an enhancement.

License cost is also on the heavier side. Perhaps the desktop version that launched recently, might help ease pressure on budget.

I have been using it for 7 years.

There are no issues with the stability of the product. It works well even with huge datasets and under heavy workloads.

Scalability is not an issue. Administrators can make use of clustering feature to balance out loads on MSTR I-Server. MSTR can scale vertically as well as horizontally.

Technical support has improved a lot in terms of response time as well as technical know-how. The trend was observed with the release of major version 10.x.

I have used some other solutions simultaneously and also at previous work places but I have never switched from one tool to another.

The initial setup is quite vast. Users need to install & configure a lot of components in the MicroStrategy toolkit. Starting from version 10.x, enterprise manager console is embedded in the operations manager console which requires additional configuration.

License cost is quite pricey with loads of add-on functionalities and tools. Organizations possessing an enterprise-wide vision should be the right customers for this tool.

The new addition - MicroStrategy desktop can be used as a standalone application and can help ease pricing pressure.

I did an assessment of Microsoft and MicroStrategy but I realized that both fall into quite different leagues. Microsoft is an ideal fit for low to mid-level companies while MicroStrategy is perfect for huge enterprises. The assessment is a part of market study and will be used for future prospect engagements to position MicroStrategy.

MicroStrategy requires a heavy dose of training and experience to master it. Prepare yourself with an experienced team before jumping into any project.

Mobile dashboards give people the data they need at a glance and on the go.

EVPs are able to run their entire business from an iPad; they can answer questions, see issues, etc. at their fingertips.

- Purchasing process: MicroStrategy is a very litigious organization. When we want to enter certain agreements, it's not uncommon for the request to go back and forth within legal for weeks. Some of this is our organization as well, though.
- Support: The support line used to be top notch, but now it seems as though the people manning that line are not very knowledgeable and can very rarely actually answer the question or solve the problem.

I have used it for 15 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

We previously used a different solution. We switched because MicroStrategy was more robust.

It is a rather complex setup, with many moving pieces and very configurable, so by default you must figure out how you want to configure it.

Be patient; get a good understanding of what you need.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated Oracle OBIEE and SAP BO.

Hire a professional to help implement the program not just the installation.

Centralized

Object oriented

Meta Data

All business data available to analyse in acceptable time and form with no extra efforts.

Visualisation will improved in the next version.

15 Years

No

No

Good

Good enough

MS OLAP and SAP BW.

High

OBIEE, MS OLAP, Cognos, Tableau, QlikView