MicroStrategy Reviews

MicroStrategy's biggest advantage is its metadata. It is the building block of the tool, which holds the foundation of the business. Not many of its competitors have this feature in their tools. Metadata will help in scalability, organizing objects and also help enhance their dashboard and report performance.

The learning curve is comparatively small and, finally, they really improved their visualizations in Visual Insights.

Data Visualization helps the company's C-level people to make decisions regarding their business, both small scale and large scale.

They could improve the Enterprise Manager and Operations Manager components. Enterprise Manager is another component that comes MicroStrategy that acts another project inside it. Though it is a great feature, it needs lot of polishing of the objects such as attributes, metrics and others. They could also improve the pre-built reports that they provide with the component.

I have used it since 2010.

As long as the initial setup is done properly, there is nothing to worry in the long run. Users have to make sure they keep the product updated with patches.

I have not encountered any scalability issues; one of the best things about the product is its scalability.

Technical support is 3/5. Elite group customers get the best technical support vs regular customers, whose tickets get delayed.

I did not previously use a different solution; this was my first business intelligence tool.

Initial setup used to be very time consuming and complex (because of so many components) but over the years, they have trimmed it down to minutes.

It’s a great tool and expensive, as well. That’s why small businesses will find it difficult to afford.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated SAP Business Objects, Tableau, IBM Cognos, and QlikView.

You need a strong and well-experienced team to successfully implement and use the tool at its best.

I just maintain the platform and develop the reports.

MicroStrategy does have just standard reporting on them. Not more than that. A few mobile reports.

Learning curve: 

From the end-user perspective, it depends on how the report is designed. It's very easy to handle, like a regular website. 

For end-users developing self-service, the handling itself is easy as well, but the end-user has to have some knowledge of data, I mean data wrangling and stuff like that. Otherwise, you wouldn't know what to do. It's the same, like in Excel, for example. 

For developers, if someone already has some knowledge of data warehousing, it's not a big problem. It's just another content that you can learn.

I wouldn't recommend it if you have no data warehouses; for example, you would need to find a lot of knowledge to transform the data in MicroStrategy itself. So that could be quite challenging.

We have MicroStrategy in place for a couple of years, actually more than 15.  

It's quite stable, actually. We don't have a lot of issues with the platform. So it's good.

The data volume is not a problem because we have data warehouses. We only point to data warehouses where we have the data stored. 

So it's actually the distinct count of current users that would be necessary to scale up. But we don't have to cope with that right now.

We did have some issues over the years. One or two issues a year. We changed servers to the Unix platform. We had some troubles there. It was actually hard to find someone who has Unix experience with MicroStrategy. Because most of the staff had good knowledge with Windows, but not with Unix. So this was actually quite challenging. Once we had all the issues closed, it was stable then. But it took at least a few weeks.

We have different products like Oracle. We are trying to harmonize and switch to only one technology.

We are not developing something. We are just defining the target architecture. And after that, we will create a project for the transformation.

We already have a lot of experience, so for us it's not a hassle.

I was part of the in-house deployment. 

Not for all the deployments, but for the reports that we develop, we deploy them.

I wouldn't recommend it if you have no data warehouses; for example, you would need to find a lot of knowledge to transform the data in MicroStrategy itself. So that could be quite challenging. 

If you have data, it is not that complex. It's manageable even for end users. But most of the time, some source systems have a lot of tables. And so if you have to make some matrices, you need to know what to do and how to do it. So you need a little bit of experience. It really depends on which source systems you're reporting from and which users you have.

In our case, with our purpose and the skills we have, I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

It is basically used for higher reporting purposes, such as process digitization, retail, bookings, inquiries, etc. We only used it for a PoC.

We were using the latest version available at that time.

The interactive features that appear in the report were good. The external rendering option they give with multi servers was also good.

It was interactive. Building the dashboards was pretty straightforward. It didn't take me much time to learn.

It was also secure. We were using it on-prem and, integration-wise, it had options for various data sources. We could connect with different databases, which was an advantage of this solution.

The collaboration feature, which was separately licensed, was also good. The hyperIntelligence feature was also good. They give you custom cards where if you hover over any web content, those terms would appear in your report, and then it'll give you a quick summary of the KPIs around that word. I really liked this feature.

Data preparation-wise, it was not so straightforward with respect to getting different sources. Preparing or transforming the data inside and then bringing it onto the dashboard was a bit difficult, and the experience could have been better.

I used it for around three to four months. I was involved in a PoC, and then I had to step aside. I'm currently not involved with MicroStrategy.

It is most probably stable because I did not face any problems with it. I had very limited experience with it, and I did not face any issues.

It is scalable. It is on-prem, but they have cloud features as well. 

We had about 300 to 400 users.

Their tech support was pretty good. They responded pretty quickly to all issues. 

I was not involved in any of the admin processes. We have a team of 10 to 15 people for deployment and maintenance.

It is a licensed product, so we need to pay for it, but I'm not aware of the exact pricing and comparisons.

You need to explore and see if it fits your use case. You need to explore its data modeling features and then decide whether to go ahead or not. You should also compare it with other solutions, such as Power BI, and take a call based on your requirement. It integrates with different data sources, but I could not explore the data modeling features.

I could learn it quickly. I had read the comments that the learning curve is steep, but it was not so bad.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

We actually have two industries we service. We service the transportation industry, as well as the healthcare industry. We typically do patient transports for emergency and non-emergencies. We do them by helicopter, that is our airmen division. We have a number of other businesses that we serve, like alarm system companies and the like, but primarily we use our analytics to look at patient transport counts and volumes, by the day, by the week, and by the month.

We also look at specific parishes (we call them battalions) to see how we can expand businesses out in Texas and Louisiana. We have a large market in Louisiana, Mississippi, and the surrounding areas. Therefore, we do a lot of proof of concept reporting as well, and we use the Enterprise Manager for other things as well.

We literally have some issues with the high-end users using the data and trusting the data. A lot of it gets dumped into certain areas, therefore we made a central repository for it. Then MicroStrategy reports off of that central repository, so we can validate the data relatively easily. Thus we can say, "Look, this is what we are seeing for Louisiana. This is what you guys have from the communication center. It matches one for one."

It builds a lot of rapport between the top end users and us. When I say that, I am referring to the "C" levels, the executive committee people, and other high end users.

MicroStrategy self-service is on the horizon. We have a couple of groups of people that we are trying to test out self-service with right now, specifically, our quality improvement group and our business development group. The problem for us is we do not want self-service to become this thing where there are reports everywhere and we can't manage it, so we are trying to develop some auditing processes to make sure that we are not throwing ourselves to the wolves. However, the plan is definitely to move towards self-service. We want the users to be able to be intelligent enough to make what they need and see what they want.

Dossiers are going to change the name of the game for us. We want to be able to have the executive committee go into a meeting and tell a story. We want them to tell us a story, not us. I do not want to go in as an IT guy and say, "Hey, this is the story." We really want the executive committee to be able to understand that this is a way of telling a story with data, because data without information is useless. If we can get them to that point, which I am confident that we can, then MicroStrategy will have done a great service to us, and rendered time back to us to go spend on other places. 

That is really what we are shooting for. Dossier is a big thing for us. Geospatial analytics is huge for us. Anything that we can do with self-service is big for us. Those are the top three goals for 2018, in general.

The one thing that we have wanted to get more into, and we have touched a little bit of, is the Esri out-of-the-box: Esri mapping geospatial analytics. In fact, our presentation includes a piece of how we were able to leverage placing that airmen station in Texas for the first time, based upon transports from a geospatial map. 

There also are a few others that we have taken advantage of recently. I think the chat feature inside of 10.10 is huge, especially if you are doing collaborative dashboarding.

We mostly do MicroStrategy, so we prefer the single platform for analytics capabilities. There are some use cases to do multi-platform. We just have not been at a point where we can overutilize it yet, or even utilize it at all. The cases for us that come up, they are so far and few between that we really have to take advantage of it and spend a lot of time on it, so that we can sell it. I imagine in the future that we probably will have multi-platform stuff.

We have some mobilize licenses right now. We have a small amount: 25. We built a couple of mobile apps. We have not jumped on the mobile bandwagon just yet. We have some use cases for it. We have not really identified where we can get the most bang for our buck. I imagine 2018 might have some of that as well, as a minor goal, possibly 2019. This being a huge issue for us, our getting into it, because a lot of our trucks, our medics, our people who drive on our trucks, and do the transfers, they all have iPads. If there is something that we can give them which says, "Hey, avoid traffic here," or do something to make a decision, that could be huge. Use cases are always a challenge.

If I had no issues with the tool ever or if I did not have any problems when I upgraded, then I would probably give it a higher rating (a perfect 10). If the Enterprise Manager was a little bit less quirky when you build out-of-the-box customization reports for it, I probably would give it a 10, but just those small things bring it down a little bit for me. However, it is a good tool.

Let us say that you have someone who comes in who does not have a strong programming background and they want to use Enterprise Manager to do some things. It is sort of the way the warehouse is set up, they might need the statistics warehouse when they first get in and they could be very turned off by the UI. Just the way some of the reports tailor themselves out-of-the-box, it does not really lend itself to be helpful. 

Then you have to customize, and when you start customizing, you bring in these attributes that sometimes do not even fit together. You may want to see something and how it gets done, then you are kind of stuck. That can make you leave the tool alone completely. Luckily for us, we have found ways to work with our consultant, and just really try to tackle it as much as possible. We have found ways to get around it.

I actually enjoy MicroStrategy a lot. When it came to Arcadia Data, it was sort of dead in the water, a Lazarus project. It kind of came up from the dead. Mostly because people did not understand the tool. My grandfather always had a saying that you got to know the tool before you can use the tool. That is what we did. My colleague and I took MicroStrategy, and said, "What does it do, what is it?" 

We just started building simple reports from scratch and went from there. Now, that we understand it, people are like, "Oh, okay. I get it. It's not that bad, it's actually great."

I am a fan of MicroStrategy and other tools, but I think MicroStrategy is a great tool. It does really well for what it serves.

We like the tech support. They have done a number of things to help us out. They have sent us to rapid response before, when we really needed them. They have gotten back to us as early as a day, maybe half day, and even within an hour. 

We have had positive experiences with them. There are areas that I can specify that they can improve in, but I think that is with any help desk or technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup. 

I came in three years after its inception, and it was in the Lazarus stage. They were not going to spend any more money, get rid of the tool, phase out of it, and since then we have brought the tool back:

• We have bought 100 new licenses.
• We have ramped up user adoption.
• We have run on trips to do symposiums.
• We have found that it is starting to fit together.

Do not walk away without taking the time to get to know the product or the people intimately. If you are trying to do analytics, it is a fantastic product, a top-tier product. We have dealt with a number of other products. I worked with folks who have dealt with Tableau and others. Especially with what they are doing with Dossier and all the things that are coming out, MicroStrategy has really started to lead the way with analytics in the future. I would court MicroStrategy and spend some time with them. Get to see what the tool does and what can it do for you. Do some proofs of concept.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We try to court them as much as possible. We want them to come and see how we do things in Louisiana. We are very much a down to earth folk. I will say that. People mention the Cajuns. We are kind of rambunctious, too. We got to get to know the person that is selling the product before we even get to know the product, then we look at the product, and say, "What does it do? What can it do for us?"

We do a lot of proofs of concept. We are doing telemetry in our trucks, ambulances, and vans, possibly. What we found is the MicroStrategy reps travel a great distance to see us, and we appreciate that. We need to see them face-to-face. If there is a quote, it is amazing what you find face-to-face. That is huge for us. We have to have that.

MicroStrategy is just readily available for us.

In addition to its dashboard, reporting, and scorecard development tools, MicroStrategy has more than 10 tools in its product suite which help to integrate with other technologies and products.

• Enterprise Manager tracks the usage of the MicroStrategy environment. This helps management to know how well the stakeholders, such as sales and business users, are using the tool for decision making or for daily sales tracking. They can know if there is an ROI for this tool.
• Visual Insight helps top executives with little or no technical background to find the insights and visualize the data in no time. Multiple formats are supported: Excel, CSV, text, and more.
• More than 50 data connectors include connectors to relational databases, NoSQL databases, social media, and other BI tools. This enables MicroStrategy to connect to any other data source to extract insights from it.
• MicroStrategy's Distribution service is so robust that it can send notifications, emails, and send to FTP to different sets of users and locations with a different personalization for each subscription.

Our Finance team has to send alert emails to stakeholders for the open due balance during the first week of every month. The details include the bank account details for transfers, invoice details, and the repo rate.

This used to be done manually. MicroStrategy’s Distribution services became a game changer for us. We send around 1000 emails in 10 minutes. It also provides a mechanism to track the delivery of emails and notify the administrator in case of failure.

Compared to other BI tools in the market, the development time for dashboards, reports, and scorecards for this tool is high.

It has developer and web components that are that the other has. It becomes difficult for a developer to switch between them for development.

Many BI tools enable you to develop a dashboard once, and then view it on various devices, such as web, mobile, and iPad. MicroStrategy dashboards are not auto-sized based on the device. A separate dashboard has to be developed for each device.

For every release, there are new features with new bugs equal to them. The vendor has to come up with quarterly releases, which is good; but the applications in a production environment are unstable because of the frequent upgrades being done.

I have been using MicroStrategy for more than five years.

Until version 10.2, the environment was quite stable. After that, MicroStrategy started releasing new versions on a quarterly basis. This means that more upgrades need to be done on the production environment. This makes the system a little unstable.

With recent releases, MicroStrategy introduced the “Work Fencing” concept for hardware scalability.

MicroStrategy uses PRIME (Parallel Relational In-Memory Engine), which it claims as the “interactive exploration of terabytes of data with millions of users.”

MicroStrategy has been very good in upgrading itself to handle Big Data, both in terms of hardware scalability and the volume of data it can handle. We did not come across any problems in terms of scalability.

Technically, the support team is very strong in terms of troubleshooting the MicroStrategy logs and other system logs. They also suggest a few best practices for better performance and maintaining a stable environment.

However, they ask for too many logs and files if a help request is raised. It would be helpful to have a centralized log.

The time zone of the support team and the development team is usually different. This delays the resolution time.

Prior to switching to MicroStrategy’s Business Intelligence tool, we were using Excel and SQL queries to track business metrics. These solutions required more technical knowledge. There is no centralized ecosystem which can integrate and troubleshoot if there are issues.

We purchased MicroStrategy licenses, expecting our business users to like the seamless experience. MicroStrategy has a mobile component which helps our sales team track and showcase insights to stakeholders without any problems.

MicroStrategy setup requires a few hardware prerequisites, and a few other installations in the system. This include the .NET framework, IIS, etc. Once the prerequisites are met, it is straightforward.

Also, we can install different MicroStrategy components in different servers, assuming that those servers are able to communicate with each other. This avoids the overhead of having traffic on only one server.

I don't have much information on this. MicroStrategy offers two types of license: per user and per device. The licensing is a litter higher compared to other BI players in market.

Apart from MicroStrategy, there are a few other players in the market which are actually doing good. There are the in-memory BI tools like QlikView and Tableau, and traditional BI tools like Cognos.

We have found some aspects of MicroStrategy which actually suit our business model, so we went with it.

There are around 10+ good BI players in the market. All of them have their own strengths in terms of visualizations, predictive analysis, self-service, mobility, scalability, etc.

I would definitely recommend this product, but I would suggest that companies identify what exactly the business users are looking for in a Business Intelligence tool, and try to evaluate the tools abilities and licensing cost before actually purchasing the tool.

MicroStrategy can read data from a wide variety of different DBMS and web services, producing optimized SQL code for each of them. It's a one stop solution for BI: after 10 years using it I still haven't found a report or graph that can't be done with the suite.

We use it for any kind of reporting and analysis. It helped manage the institution, reduce costs and provide better service to the patients (which are our customers...)

The web is full of very interesting data, and the number of web services providing datasets is increasing. I would like to see Support for OAuth 1.0 and 2.0 to be able to attach external data sources. I'd like to have Support for JSON data. I hope HTML5 and JavaScript will be used extensively in next versions, to substitute the Flash based components.

Since 2003

The software is feature rich and clearly not easy to start with. I believe the installation and the setup of the data model is the most difficult part; once this is done, the rest of the deployment is very easy. Clients run on Windows, on Android and on iOS seamlessly, there is a web based interface that can be used from most browsers.

No. I have been using the software both on Windows and on headless Linux, and had no stability issues fo far. Memory availability is very important, as in any other data intensive software.

We don't have Petabytes scale databases. Our information systems are in the Gigabytes order of magnitude. We were able to handle our data volume with ease. Number of concurrent users is in the hundreds, no problems so far.

We solve most of the issues with the knowledge base or the discussion forums. To date we had no interaction with the customer service apart from some help we needed for upgrading from version 7 to version 9.

The knowledge base is extensive and covers 90% of the problems we may face. For the rest, we manage to find alternatives thanks to networking, blogs, forums, etc.

We are still using multi vendors solutions. There are historical datawarehouses that need to be maintained (Oracle BI, Actuate, Microsoft BI), but all new development is done with MicroStrategy. Reason for that is mainly practical and economical. We prefer paying licenses to one signle vendor whenever posible. We are also testing the new free Desktop version for a reduced number of users.

The setup is complex. After the installation you need to configure several aspect of the suite: metadata, connections, Project settings and start developing objects. I suggest buying a book or reading the manual thoroughly. There is a very good book on Amazon "Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy" that covers every aspect of the setup and initial phases of the Project (http://amzn.to/1by3HAO).

We implement everything in house due to the sensitivity of data.

I'd rather not disclose it.

We evaluated Oracle, QlickView, Tableau, Microsoft BI

Training training training. Especially in the beginning phase, a wrong choice can be very costly.

We used the solution for reporting and data visualization. We used Google BigQuery to collect data and build dashboards and reports about production, manufacturing data, HR, people, positions, and headcounts. MicroStrategy was the platform where we built visualizations on dashboards, created standard reports in table format, and allowed some users to analyze the data.

The solution is a very good enterprise tool with excellent enterprise functionality for security and user access. It also works perfectly in distribution, with everyone getting their own reports. It is very complex, so you can do whatever you want. If you want to make some data limitations, you can do it. I also like the internal in-memory engine with the Symantec layer. This makes the solution pretty powerful.

The solution has a very non-logical user usage part. It has a library mode where users can access all the data, reports, and dashboards, but they also can be accessed from a platform. They have to log into the platform. The user experience is confusing for the users. MicroStrategy needs to define which one they will use. Some functionality isn’t available in library mode but is available in the portal. 

There should be Office integration. For example, if I do a presentation, then I should be able to add a chart to my presentation.

I have been using MicroStrategy for two years actively. Our company is using the latest version of this solution.

The solution is stable. We haven’t got into any trouble.
 

The solution is scalable. We have used the solution with 100s of users, and it has been good. We never saw any logging or problems.

We connected and wrote a question to them, which was answered in a few days. We checked the problem together and finally figured out it was something misunderstood.

I previously used SAP BusinessObjects BI, and it was not as fast as MicroStrategy with the same data set size. The solution moved smoothly and quickly based on the in-built engine and some queries. SAP BusinessObjects BI can be used if you have an SAP environment because they have the connectors. However, SAP BusinessObjects BI is not up to date today. SAP is using Elastic Cloud. Both tools are very similar, but SAP BusinessObjects BI has some limitations and graphical queries. It's not as beautiful as Tableau or Power BI, but it is good. In some cases, SAP BusinessObjects BI is slower than MicroStrategy, but it has more features and tools. MicroStrategy is better for SAP environments.

It is important to have a good user security strategy. When building a model, take some time to consider how you want to secure it; limited or accessible. The goal is to build a Symantec career, but it may be in the early stages. It's a good effort. However, step by step, over time, it will pay off. It is a good investment.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is that we want to get away from printed reports. So, not having to print PDFs and send them out; and the whole administration that goes with that. Rather, to make it all digital and interactive.

It is performing well, but sometimes we have complex requirements and the performance decreases, and then we have to find another way to make it perform again. That is what you encounter when use the project, but that's inevitable because if we would have used another product, we would've had the same thing.

With the new version that's coming out, I think they have simplified a lot of things. Also, when it comes to the administration part, and sharing, and the collaboration features, they are really great. You can send out comments with a filter to someone in your organization, and if the person clicks on it, he actually sees what you are seeing. So that's really great.

I think it streamlines business.

We also use Microstrategy's Writeback capabilities with financial systems.

We have the Multimedia widget but it's used for reports that we haven't yet converted to the mobile solution. So it's just to have them available aesthetically for reports but, again, on the iPad, so we don't have to print them.

You can now do data blending at the document level and data blending allows you to show results from different data sets in one grid, so to speak. I actually want to bring it a level lower. I want to be able to create that union of data sets under the document level.

I want to be able to create a data set that can receive data from multiple cubes, have it in one data set, and then bring it to the document, because then I can reuse it for other documents. Now, I have to do it in a document and then it's less reusable, because if I want to share that functionality, I have to copy the document, strip a lot of things, and then work on that basic element that I've built in that document. That's for complex documents, but I really would want that to be added to the solution.

It's pretty stable, and if something is wrong then we are also able to find out why, so that's also good. There's extensive logging capabilities, so we quite often able to manage on this front.

No issues with scalability.

It was necessary that they would assist when there were problems. They are knowledgeable.

Yes, we had Cognos TM1, we have Excel. These programs are still in use but they will be less in use in the future. We couldn't get rid of them yet but at some point in time we think we'll manage to.

When we started it was still version 9, and we deployed our mobile solution through MobileIron, and then we still had to do repping of the app. So there was more complexity, but that's due to the mobile device management solution and it would be the same with any other kind of solution. That's just complexity because of security.

We did evaluate other solutions. That's the whole RFP. There are so many things involved before I can answer that question. There will be political answers as well.

We are not yet distributing personalized alerts using native mobile push for iOS or Android. We want to do that for sure, but it's currently a "nice to have" and it takes some additional implementations on the server. You have to set up some certificates and then make the communication secure. That's some work that we still have to do.

As for choosing a vendor, we had our requirements. They were: 

• the app would be able to perform in offline mode as well because our audience, they're traveling a lot and then what if there's no Wifi? They can't get to their data; that was a strong requirement
• the speed
• the iOS look and feel.

From what I've seen today, here at MicroStrategy World 2018, from the presentation team, I found it very impressive. I also think that it's good that MicroStrategy keeps up with the pace and they also look at what the competitors are doing, and I think that they should really be continuing to do that because we need the "wow."

To someone who is looking at this type of solution my advice would be to start using it now. I think it will save a lot of time if you compare it with other solutions because I want to be able to create a data set that can receive data from multiple cubes, have it in one data set, and then bring it to the document, because then I can reuse it for other documents. Now, I have to do it in a document and then it's less reusable, because if I want to share that functionality, I have to copy the document, strip a lot of things, and then work on that basic element that I've built in that document., and they've improved so many things on the front end. If you compare it with other tools, which may or may not have an analytical engine, which MicroStrategy does have, with all of the other functions, there's so much. They've built in so many functions. It's such a vast solution. For me, it's the obvious choice. Maybe not for everyone.

If you have a big company and you want to do all kinds of analytics, it's an open platform. That's also important. You can create your own data connectors. There's everything you can do with APIs. It's not closed like, perhaps, an SAP system might be.