MicroStrategy Reviews

I work for an airline and we are customers of MicroStrategy. 

The MicroStrategy semantic layer is a great feature that I haven't seen anywhere else. I also like the mobile applications that we're able to build with MicroStrategy's apps. The solution has very good all-round capabilities. I've implemented the HyperCard feature, introduced a couple of years ago, for embedding tags in my emails. It enables users to roll over a detail in the email and they can see airline performance. MicroStrategy is also excellent at providing connectors.

MicroStrategy needs to work on visualization and get closer to what Tableau or ThoughtSpot provides. They need to simplify the process involved when new objects are created. It currently requires updating the schema which takes time. In the next version, I'd like to see the inline processing of Python script that Tableau has and it would be great if they could introduce the Natural Language Processing feature that ThoughtSpot has implemented. 

I've been using this solution for four years. 

The solution is scalable but time consuming. If I want to add an additional node into MicroStrategy it takes some time. We have around 200 MicroStrategy users. 

The customer support is great, I always get a timely response. 

Positive

The initial setup is simple. I use an on-prem implementation for all these tools and it's straightforward, particularly for a single note cluster.

MicroStrategy licensing is costly when you're rolling it out to 200 users. A license with Tableau costs the same as I pay for two MicroStrategy users. In order to keep costs down, I'm proposing that we use the data connector for MicroStrategy in Tableau. The company wants to move to one tool but I think we should keep the bare minimum of MicroStrategy with the semantic layer working with one or two architects and a few power users and expose the data connectors to Tableau so that the end-user has one tool, but we have two tools on the backend. 

We're probably going to move towards the MicroStrategy professional license scheme which provides flexibility and discounts.

We also use Tableau and I've had experience with ThoughtSpot. As a backend guy, I like MicroStrategy. As an end user, Tableau has a crisper visualization with a better color palette. On the other hand, Tableau generates a huge amount of log which is time-consuming to go through. That aspect is simplified in MicroStrategy where I can go to one place and see the error. Tableau doesn't provide any service unless you purchase their premium-level support whereas I have MicroStrategy on speed dial and I can call at any time to get help. On the other hand, everything has to be defined with MicroStrategy which is difficult whereas in a solution like ThoughtSpot, it's just a case of ensuring that all the keys are defined. The same thing that took a month to do using MicroStrategy was completed in three days using ThoughtSpot.

I recommend MicroStrategy for anyone looking at an enterprise-level solution. If an organization only requires localized reporting, they should go with Tableau. 

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

As it stands now, the primary use is just for utilization, the mobile device, and the reports which are built for it. There might be plans in the future for spreading the entire platform to other areas and divisions as well. 

The truth is that this is not about business impact, such as high reliability. This is something that can be perceived, but other features are more compelling, like visualizations, which have a possibility of utilization around mobile devices with great GUI. Those stories, which are built for them, are something that they can really utilize. 

The most important features are its enterprise-based features. The platform can be easily monitored. You have quite a good overview of tasks which are being run. Also, you can see the users who are logged into the platform. Also, the tasks that are not performing well, you can easily kill them. These are core features which are not as common in other BI platforms, like Tableau or Qlik. 

In a few months, we will be distributing personalized alerts to users using mobile push notifications.

We hope the new tools will make a huge difference, especially considering the new workstation. We would like to see features that were introduced for the Operations Manager that have been discontinued. We would like to see those features somehow integrated into the Desktop Workstation tool. 

From time to time, there is for a specific project and the focus is that the support is close to the HAPS. We had three HAPS and the fourth one is currently under construction. We would really like to see MicroStrategy have some support teams based more in Europe, because for now it seems that there is one person for the whole CE region. That is not exactly what we would like to see. We do know that MicroStrategy supports most places, either in the US or India, but those are different time zones, people, and cultures.

In early phases of the 10th release, there were some issues, especially on several OS types like Windows, but then it stopped. It has been resolved, especially the issues with the intelligence errors were kind of serious, but it turned out that after some time we received a patch which worked. It is definitely better than it used to be. 

This is an area that could somehow improve, because the support was not exactly as responsive as we had hoped for. It is the reason why we utilized the MicroStrategy Community for solving these issues. 

I did not do the initial setup for the mobile solution, because that was somehow developed by third-parties. Otherwise, I was hands-on for the initial 10th releases, like 10.2, 10.3, and even 10.4.

In the beginning, it looked straightforward, but each of the releases had its own issue for some reason. I did not see any additional value of providing one button for installation on the whole platform if it was going to be installed for different servers. You would have to make customization every time. There was no additional value in an installer. 

This should be an area MicroStrategy focuses on as well as the upgrade pads, especially Enterprise Manager and its statistics. This has always been an issue. Many of the reports were basically unusable. 

The mobile for MicroStrategy is the best of all the BI platforms. It has some drawbacks, but its functionality, if done by skilled developers, I am really not sure if there is anything better. Some people can consider, I would say dedicated mobile applications, for example, maybe SAP. Then, it is very nice for the end users as well. 

However, as a separate product for the mobile device, MicroStrategy is the entire BI platform. It is an enterprise solution, a separate unit, etc.

We are not using MicroStrategy's WriteBack capabilities, but it is something to be considered in the future, especially considering the fact that it is a unique feature that could be utilized. 

It is performing very well. We meet once a week in the organization and talk about the performance of the prior week. There are a lot of things going on. We sell a lot of product to a lot of customers for a lot of different reasons. Therefore, MicroStrategy gives us the opportunity to dig into the data and find out what the story was.

It has certainly given people the ability to ask more questions and get more answers. It has made them even hungrier for the data.

In 2018, we are eager to start the mobile platform, because we are going to create a sense of urgency in developing more tools, then just creating more reporting solutions.

I like the user interface and the experience has been great.

The subscription model is excellent. About half of our reporting comes out of the subscription, and from there, the ease of use in dragging and dropping reporting objects.

Business systems are always going to have reporting solutions. A single platform is a good way to centralize it. I do not want to take data out of the database system unless I need to. When I do need to, that is when I am going to use MicroStrategy.

We have rolled out Self-Service to our business teams. It has been pretty good. It can be a challenge and change, but when people see why we are offering them a solution that is governed by the analytics team, they get a better sense of saying, "Okay, all the work is done for me. I can just get this, and access it."

There are a lot of offerings, and we are not fully using everything to its advantage.

There are some challenges in our organization on how we store the data. However, if you are throwing something at it and expecting it to give you the one true answer, you got to do some homework before that.

Their business practices and the solution itself are in sync with our business strategies, so I am very confident.

The scalability is great. It was one of the selling points for us on MicroStrategy.

We have not scaled yet, but we should be soon.

Tech support has been great, very responsive. We usually hear back within a day. We usually email them and that works out perfect. The right person always gets back to us.

We usually hear about updates every couple of months. 

We were actually giving people SQL access to the database and certain people had it, but not everybody. While we had bottlenecks before, the bottleneck just got wider and the need to consume data got bigger. We really needed a more holistic solution that was governed and defined by a team to get the one single truth.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We had some help installing it, but it made sense for what we were doing.

The price was good. We have had great support along the way. 

We actually had Birst and Qlik on the shortlist. What made us choose MicroStrategy was its longer term benefits. While the other solutions seemed flashier, we would actually grow out of those solutions within a year or two.

The biggest thing is to think about the people involved with the software process, not just the people installing the software or administrating the software, but the people who are going to use it. Then, you need understand how you maintain adoption throughout implementation and post-implementation. 

How do you keep people hungry for the data? You have to make yourself available. It is critical for whatever solution you choose, because if you do not offer adoption, ways to help train, or think about the end use cases, then you are dead in the water.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Scalability
• The administrative tools
• Managing the reporting solutions
• The user interface. 

Pretty much everybody needs to be pleased.

From an end-user perspective, the VI (Visual Insight) component is valuable, as it provides self-exploration to users, along with data wrangling and simple integration with D3 data visualization and numerous data source exploration. Also, mobile BI deployment is easy and valuable.

In earlier versions, MSTR always required some technical person to set up the schema and the report/documents/dashboards for the end user. There were very few capabilities/features the end user could start doing on their own. With newer MSTR versions, there are easy ways for even end users to start importing data, wrangle data, if needed, and visualize using VI. And VI has additional features I have mentioned, which are like icing on the cake.

This product certainly has helped in various ways in all my past client implementations, be it simple on-schedule, automatic report delivery or self-service data exploration using Visual Insight.

MSTR is already well structured when it comes to overall product architecture. Starting with version 10.x, MSTR has improved significantly in the self-service space in comparison to BI tools in the market. However, the Visual Insight tool can be further improved, especially in the areas of presentation and export features:

• They need to add more default visualizations, which are already available in RSD; for instance, histogram is a basic one that must exist in VI.
• Currently, export from VI is not working as expected. (Most visuals get converted to bar chart when exporting.)
• Though presentation mode is available, it would be nice to have an option for a more storytelling-like feature for better presentation of MSTR dashboards (similar to what is available in other BI tools).
• Pure design mode for VI: This would help troubleshoot abrupt errors VI sometimes throws as a result of underlying data/dataset changes.

These are some of key areas I feel need to be improved; however, there are many more suggestion on the community’s idea exchange.

I have been using MSTR and related solutions for over eight years now.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

MSTR is one of most scalable BI tools around at the moment.

Depending on the type of customer you are (by that, I mean on-premise or cloud), tech support is usually knowledgeable and does escalate issues to a more-experienced expert when required. Response time on issues is average and sometimes, you need to be on top of it to get things moving or escalate to your MSTR account rep.

I have used different solutions at different client assignments and, as part of the BI practice group in my past experience, also provided a recommendation for MSTR in comparison to other BI tools, depending on the client infrastructure or use cases.

Initial setup complexity depends:

• If you are going on-premise with MSTR, then - depending on your knowledge on setting up the tool - some might call the setup complex. However, in my view, it’s straightforward, with tons of support and knowledge available.

• If you choose to go cloud with MSTR, its even simpler, as MSTR technical support takes care of all the setup for you.

MSTR can be costly and difficult to digest to begin with, but is certainly one of most structured and scalable solutions out there available in market. I think companies should look at the tool from the scalability and stability perspectives, along with weighing it against the most important use cases and to not just go by how easy it is to create or visualize data. Most tools only present a pretty picture of the tool by showing how easy it is for users to visualize data on their own and hiding the data preparation realities.

I have evaluated multiple tools in the past such as Tableau, SAP BusinesObjects, SSRS, Crystal Reports, QlikView, SAS VA, Looker, etc. Each evaluation you perform depends on the use case you are focusing upon, and most of these leading tools have evolved recently. Therefore, analysis performed by me at that point could be obsolete by now. However, as far as overall architecture level, MSTR still holds the leading spot in the market.

Most companies just starting to look around should try the MSTR cloud AWS offering, as that would take away most implementation hurdles or need for technical experts for setting up the environment, along with low cost of ownership compared to the on-premise offering. Also, focus on your use cases and the vision you have about taking reporting and decisions on data to that next level, which is scalable and strong as your business grows.

Our company does business intelligence recording.

The hyperintelligence is the most valuable feature.

Preparation, data loading, and data management application are challenging with MicroStrategy. It lacks cube-based analytics as it is outdated, meaning there is no memory or fast processing analytics, or MMA deployment.

We have been using MicroStrategy for three years.

MicroStrategy is very stable.

This is a scalable solution. We have 55 business users.

MicroStrategy's technical support is fair.

We used SAS prior to MicroStrategy and I preferred SAS.

The initial setup of MicroStrategy is complex. Our organization's structure requires the handling of three environments of the platform, development and production with the corporate technology, production support and the other IT support making it very complicated to get the developed final product live. Deployment took two weeks. 

There is a ROI from MicroStrategy. The data management and visualization to start the business strategies creates new services. However, you do require an adjustment to policies in order to make a profit.

I am unsure what the licensing costs are for this solution however, development costs are around $100,000 per year.

I recommend other organizations focus on the data processing and data preparation for the platform because it is very challenging. 

I would rate MicroStrategy a 7 out of 10. 

The primary use case of the solution is for management reporting and analytics across many different subject areas.

It's an information delivery mechanism to pull all of our data into one central tool, allowing us to look at key metrics across the organization.

The most valuable features are the scalability and management reporting.

They need to do a better job in its ability to allow end-users to produce their own reports, metrics, and self-service business intelligence.

MicroStrategy is a complex tool and you need to have a MicroStrategy architect. 

In the next release, I would like to see better visualization and more service audience or functionality.

I have been using MicroStategy for ten years.

They have recently changed the version numbering and they go by years now. We are using version 2019 in the cloud.

It's very stable and we have not experienced any issues.

This solution is the most scalable BI platform in the world. There is no other BI platform that is in its class. We have used all of them.

It's used by our analysts, our franchises, and by our executives.

We have 40 users inside the company and 4,000 users outside the company.

We plan to increase the usage of MicroStrategy. We are probably going to go as high as 8,000 users.

We don't leverage technical support a lot because we have our technical resources on-site, but if we do call them, they are good at responding.

Previously, the main solutions that we used were Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, and Amazon Quick Site.

We were using Oracle OBIEE, which is a Business Intelligence Enterprise. We moved from OBIEE to MicroStrategy.

The set up takes a while, but once it's set up it's an automatic mode.

We hired someone that had the consulting experience and became our permanent team member.

We have the best pricing available, but we can't disclose that information.

We have two ways of using this solution. We have an SSBI, which is self-service intelligence. We also have an enterprise-class, where we publish everything on the web, from tablets to phones, for our end-user base who are franchises.

It is the best for large scale deployments, but you cannot become a MicroStrategy shop without having the right technical resources on the team.

Don't even think about it, if you don't want to spend the money for the right person.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We help customers utilize MicroStrategy in multiple ways:

• We have enterprise analytics being used.
• We use MicroStrategy as an integrated solution with some of their other CRM type applications.
• There are people who are using MicroStrategy as transaction services. I have never been successful with it. 

There are a broad range of applications that we see.

MicroStrategy is one of our key tool sets which we are focusing on for 2018 and beyond. It has the potential to become a great evangelist for AI and other embedded analytics. For more futuristic design solutions, our organization as such, is focusing on this area in terms of artificial intelligence and analytics. MicroStrategy, so far, has based on their product roadmap to fit squarely to match the design that we have.

The single stack solution will always be more profitable, scalable, and elastic for organizational needs. 

In 2018, we will be focusing a lot on artificial intelligence and analytics. Embedded analytics will be another key area that we will be focusing on, therefore we will be looking to see how the SDK shapes up and the road map for cloud implementation. This is the next major push that we see. The ease of upgrades and mobile analytics are also other key areas that we will be focusing on.

MicroStrategy's multilarity and the range of features which it comes with makes it a key building block of our entire data value chain, starting from the production of data, where you could essentially use the transactions services to become your app that generates the data through to data blending and data wrangling, which handles most of your cleansing and cleaning up of the data. Then, you have data storage and analytics, all the way through to presentation. The key value proposition for MicroStrategy is its ability to support each of these use cases. 

Distribution services are definitely something that sets it apart from the rest of the tool sets. Embedded analytics are a side of this field where not many key players are doing really well, and MicroStrategy strategy has the open APIs and SDKs that can be leveraged here.

We have seen mixed success with Self-Service. There are customers who are very happy with what they are seeing in MicroStrategy. However, there are some customers who are not as happy, but most of it has to do with the process of data governance and BI governance. They need to put it in place together with the tool set. The tool set will only give you features, then ultimately how you use it is what generates value for the business users. It is more about educating the customers, etc., but Self-Service in MicroStrategy has been a very successful deployment.

There are learning curve issues due to organizational processes. Most of the time, there are processes in which the user is not sure how to implement the solution and what the other surrounding processes and frameworks that he needs to put in place.

MicroStrategy is not cloud native today and some of their APIs are a little limiting.

One of the things that I want to see MicroStrategy do is become more cloud native. Right now, the deployment on cloud is very easy to ruin, it is very much like spinning up separate VMs. We would like to see it be more modular on the cloud, where people can look and scale different portions of the applications as they want. That will be a very interesting feature if MicroStrategy could do this.

Their on-premise solution is very robust. 

However, we have seen some stability issues with MicroStrategy on cloud. We have a few unhappy customers.

The solution is scalable. A little expensive perhaps, but it is scalable.

We have our technical support team, but we have interfaced with the MicroStrategy technical support on several aspects. Most of the time, they are knowledgeable. 

We hear this from our customers mostly (about waiting long times for responses). Those customers that approach us, we have the right sort of contacts to give them the answers quickly. It is the customers that have direct interactions with MicroStrategy where we hear mixed reviews.

If you are a technical person, someone who has all the tools and processes to get you trained on the platform and be able to manage the platform and installation by yourself, it would be straightforward. But for a non-technical person, it could be a little heavier (complex).

We had MicroStrategy train us on the platform.

As a consultant, we have multiple tools which we are focusing on.

Definitely research the key business use cases. Make sure you have your key technical person trained on MicroStrategy and on how to implement the solution. One of the important things for people to keep in mind is the Henry Ford slogan, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." However, the horse might not be the right solution in this case. Just keep that in mind. I think MicroStrategy has everything else I need.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Customer support is a very key area for us. When we help someone through the journey, we want to make sure of the following:

• The vendor's equally committed.
• Has the resources.
• Ready to support us.
• The tool's key features and capabilities are aligned with the digital transformation team, which we see around us.

• 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.