MicroStrategy Reviews

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.

We use it for reporting. The performance is okay.

We are eventually looking to automate everything in our process.

What we are trying to do is eliminate the need for them to actually do anything Self-Service. We are trying to establish interface agreements so we no longer have to deliver Excel files, and things will just be there when they need it. 

For example: They tell us what we need. We put it in the batch. It gets put to them right when they need it, right where they need it, then they can just process it. Therefore, we can automate everything. 

In 2018, we are going to be using the pretty charts and graphs. What I want to do is move us more towards using machine learning artificial intelligent type capabilities in order to process all our data. It is a 100 terabyte database. You can't just aggregate everything up to a day or a month and say you understand everything. We are going to have to have some automated features. Therefore, we can actually parse the data and do some doppelganger analysis, then we can get some of our things solved. 

It is always nice to have one solution in a single platform. I think that was part of the reason for selecting MicroStrategy. You can do pretty much everything, instead of having to get a little bit here or a little bit there.

I don't think we have actually taken advantage of anything that differentiates it from any other product. All the reports are very simple and straightforward. We probably could have worked with any application, but we chose MicroStrategy. 

I hate the user interface. I hate having to sit down and put in every little thing. It is almost like we are always having a start from scratch in order to build something new or to build something similar to what was there before. It seems klutzy. 

We would like access to more storage and access to more metadata to build the right programs that can construct all the stuff for us instead of us having to type it in all the time. 

We have the mobile server. We have not used it. That is because the people on our team have not been trained on it yet, but that is something that we want to do. We would like to have everybody with a phone, but again, this gets into what KPIs are you going to put on this phone that are going to be immediately accessible and actually usable because we have got thousands of them. If we put two or three on there, we do not have one RF engineer that is just going to use two or three. 

We are unable to boil everything down to a number, like Nike did with their shoes, your exercise, your workout routines, etc. We don't have that capability. We are really going to have to lead the realm of pretty charts and graphs and build an AI. 

It has performed fine. There have been instances where we wish it could have perform better. My suspicion is a lack of expertise on our end. We probably need some consulting help. We have not had time to go out and try to acquire it, but performance is fine for right now.

We have seen that it scaled in other places, and it works, so it is possible. 

I have not used support, but I know a couple of my team members have. They did come through for us. I am not sure if it was tech support or if it was sales support. I can't remember when they did that, because there was a person that was helping us almost full-time to get the product implemented and get some of our first reports to them. 

No. We were producing Excel spreadsheets and putting them out in order for people to consume, then we produced those. Now, they are just in reports that we can access over a website instead of pulling it down from our file server. 

I think that trying to get into all the analytics and all of the visualizations is what turned everybody on: the colors, the pretty charts, etc. I do not think they really know how to use it yet, but we will get there eventually. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

At corporate, up in the C-Suite office, they had chosen MicroStrategy. We wanted to fall in line with them. That ended up being the primary reason why we chose MicroStrategy rather than just going to jQuery and making a web page with some jQuery objects in it. 

MicroStrategy is probably overkill for what you are going to use it for. Just like when we were in school at tech studying electrical engineering. We studied all calculus, then finally, you get up into the upper echelons of electrical engineering at a bachelor's level and it is all algebra. 

You did not use your calculus. That is what this product is. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Functional capabilities
• Tech support.

Mobile, Visual Insights, reporting and subscriptions with alerts.

From my experience, I see that it is definitely more useful for businesses to make effective decisions from the data used. One example I can recall is in healthcare, where it helps businesses to see hospital/facility level inflow/outflow information on a mobile device in real time fashion, and make decisions accordingly to improve the business.

Some of the basic features such as Axis Label formatting on Graphs, Quick Switch on mobile (iOS), properly updated documentation on their websites, and faster enhancement fixes when needed for customers/businesses that are simple in nature rather than holding it for longer durations to fix.

I've been using it for five years.

There are times where the installation cause problems – but those could be avoiding if we know the process or certified/supported items before doing it.

I would rate it as average as enhancements and defect fixes takes years or months to implement. Other than that, their turn around on issues will be quicker depending on the priority of ticket.

I’ve used Qlikview and Tableau – which is good in self service than enterprise delivery. I love MicroStrategy as it has full depth BI functionality inside right from Admin to End Users scalability. Hence, MicroStrategy is the best solution I have used to date.

It was straightforward to me and now they have made it much easier in v10.x with express install and a static licence key rather than updating it on every sub release within the versions.

I have done both as a vendor team and also in-house for my own organization. My advice is to read the complete install and upgrade guide that the product provides. This will help you to have a better implementation than doing it without this knowledge.

They should make it cheaper and add more value to the product by resolving small issues that are very key to businesses. Other than that, the current pricing and licensing model is good.

Understand your business needs and budget. In order decide whether or not to get this tool you need to know your the vision that will eventually help in growing your business.

We use it for statistics for our customers.

The solution makes it easier for self-service.

The pricing could be lower because it is costly. They could also provide some features that Tableau offers. Microsoft has development features regarding schema objects and some integrations.

Tableau is more user-friendly, and MicroStrategy could improve specific visualizations, short card metrics, graphs and functionalities. In addition, it would be good to have year-to-year comparisons using transformations.

We have been using this solution since 2007. We are using the latest version, and we always update the versions. We use on-premises and are currently shifting to Google Cloud Platform.

It is a very stable solution. However, the tool could have easier optimization. We are used to creating cubes, but if the query is too large, our administrators in the databases abort the query. That is why we need to be able to optimize and have a good response time.

It is a scalable solution.

The technical support is helpful. They are testing some issues regarding the metadata when one of the columns gets duplicated. They take the schema for us and divide it. It takes a while, but they help us because it is hard for us to do it ourselves.

Our clients use Tableau, QuickView and PowerBI, but we use MicroStrategy at our company.

Our infrastructure department takes care of the implementation. There are some drawbacks to the shift. MicroStrategy is also scaling.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. It is a great tool and has the best offerings for doing data analysis. In addition, it offers some features that are better than Tableau and Data Studio.

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 are a partner with MicroStrategy. We have over 300 casino installs of our casino operating system. Right now, we have them in about 10% of the properties which are with us. We pretty much do a lot of custom reporting for them and/or train them how to do customer reporting and visualizations.

It is performing well.

In my particular area, it has actually enhanced it greatly. It has enabled us to get data to the customers, then have them turn around and create these reports in minutes rather than hours. 

We have, to varying degrees, rolled out Self-Service and some of it is more IT driven on the properties. Other times it is more custom reporting done by us. They have it as a feature there. They can use it to the best of their abilities, but a lot of times they will bring us in to do all the custom stuff.

In 2018, we will be using the capabilities of Dossiers more. We are not yet looking at investing in mobile analytics, because we are trying to do something in-house.

The drag and drop and point and click features of everything that will instantaneously render data and/or visualizations right off the bat.

We like having the single platform of it. However, we also like the ability to go out there and hit disparate data sources because a lot of the properties that we deal with have a lot of different type of disparate data sources coming in rather than just our one casino management software.

They have so much stuff in there that I don't know what else they can put in there, unless they can get somebody to be able to talk in there and tell it to build a report. 

From the standpoint of a partner and what I do as a job, there is nothing that I can see. Maybe from the customer's standpoint, because they are getting into something new.

Stability is great. We have not had any issues.

Scalability is fantastic. It can go from a small operation up to a gigantic operation. 

We have used technical support a couple of times. It was more or less at a level that had to do with web Java errors and stuff like that. Other than that, we pretty much use the knowledge base. We feel that Microstrategy's community is a good forum to use.

I have been involved in some parts of the setup, and it is pretty much straightforward. It is not horribly hard to set up in comparison to other things that I have seen.

Do it now.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They have a knowledge base and offer training and/or have events where you can network with people from the company who do stuff. With MicroStrategy, actually meeting the people that you're dealing with face-to-face.

The primary thing that we are planning on using it for in the near future is analyzing healthcare trends and providing more visibility into what is going on within our healthcare spend. 

Getting more data to people more quickly. Providing more flexibility for how they use the data, so speed up the time and flexibility in how they are getting to use the data.

We primarily use it to support more internal departments. Those are our customers. We have different areas which we support from a healthcare data standpoint. The plan is to enable them to use the data, so we would use some configuration and setup, but then the customers would go in and look at the reports that we have set up or be able to do ad hoc stuff based on those data sets which we have built. 

I really like the visualizations. I like how you can put large data sets in there, then the user can quickly go through the data and drill down at various levels to understand things. 

It is definitely customizable. We have been able to put in key metrics and performance indicators, thus it is customizable. 

There are features which we are not using as far as some mapping and geography things which we could be using more broadly. That is in the current capabilities. 

I also went to a class on some statistic stuff, R, and all that integration that I think we would like to use. As far as additional things that are not currently a part of the capabilities, I am not sure, because I do not know all the capabilities yet. 

Throughout the set up of some large data sets that we use, we have had to learn more about how to use MicroStrategy in the right way. At the beginning, there were things that we set up a certain way, and it might not have been the best way from a speed perspective. We have had to go back and adjust things accordingly, but so far the changes that we have made have gotten us to a place where we are comfortable with the speed and usability. 

My team has a little bit, I have not personally. I know they have used support for some administrative stuff, but I do know our team is very hands-on. They will go research stuff on their own, too. They use a combination of the two, but I have not heard of any specific issues per se. I would say one thing that I probably get from a lot of customers is that based on our industry, they do not necessarily understand our industry as much as we do. Therefore, when we come to them with a problem, they might know more of a generalized solution, but not one targeted to our industry. 

We are currently using a combination of Excel, SQL, and ad hoc queries.

I am new to this position. I have been there a year. I got a glimpse of some of the things we were using it for initially and realized that the tool is a lot more powerful than what we were using it for. I do not believe we were leveraging it to its full capabilities. Being able to get the right data to the right people in a timely manner is really important, and I saw a lot of opportunity to use that tool to solve some problems that I currently had. I do not know where it is going to end, but we are trying to leverage it as much as possible and build out the capabilities. 

Some stuff is easier than others. Throughout this big project that we are working on now, there have been challenges and hurdles. We have worked through those one at a time. It is user-friendly in some aspects, but in others, you definitely have to do some research to figure out the right way to fine-tune things. 

When I took the position we were already using MicroStrategy. We actually looked at Tableau 2 as an alternative, but we decided to stick with Micro Strategy because we thought it was a better solution for our business. 

Make sure you have the right people and the right training going into the development aspect of it. Really understand the tool, its capabilities, and features before you start doing large scale development. 

I like the capabilities MicroStrategy offers. I do not know if it would be the only solution, but it has a lot of capabilities that we are still learning to understand better. We are probably looking at investing in mobile analytics at some point in the future.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Attention to the customer's needs and having support here when we need it. 

• Ad-hoc capability is critical to our customers
• They depend on the ability to take a standard set of data and organize it in a manner that is meaningful to their particular field of interest.
• Our product delivers POS transaction analysis in grids, dashboards, and documents.
• We group analytics under multiple areas, including Operations, Loss Prevention, Merchandising and Inventory, Loyalty and Fuel. 
• Our customers’ users can modify a ‘canned report’ to deliver the information their organization finds key. 
• Distribution is key as well. Typically there is one person within the organization or department ‘writing’ the reports. The reports are distributed to a larger group of consumers. Automated, scheduled distribution of information has become key to running their day-to-day operations.

Our customers and their users have used our product to:

• Find theft
• Reduce product waste
• Increase profits
• Make better staffing plans
• Improve store and staff performance measures.

The examples are numerous, so I’ve attached a couple of articles and included a link to our website. http://www.pinncorp.com/soluti...

There are a number of different applications bundled together and delivered under an umbrella product. It needs to be easier to determine which application controls which features and functionality.

I need to point out is that our company is a MicroStrategy OEM partner. We use the MicroStrategy products to build a BI solution for our own retail clients. 

With our EPM solution, we offer different user tiers to our customers, allowing them to acquire minimal functionality for Store Managers.

Each tier includes a particular set of MSTR applications. The Store Manager tier was created so that a single report could be run, but the output for each Store Manager would be limited to that store’s data.

This worked great on grid reports, but when our customer wanted to run dashboards and post them on a server instead of emailing them, it didn’t work. 

After casting about, we learned that we had to add a Report Services license for each Store Manager in order to support the posting of docs and dashboards to a server folder and distribute emails with links. That was a financial hit and it was not what we understood our clients would be able to do with the licensing they were getting.

This particular example actually got resolved when MSTR repackaged their solutions. This included many services in the server umbrella.

We have used this product for eleven years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

I am not aware of any previous solutions.

There is an added complexity in an OEM setup because we ultimately have to be able to deliver a ‘reusable’ solution to our customers. The user setup seems flexible, but it can be complex. 

My experience may be OEM-centric. It was, for the most part, addressed when MicroStrategy repackaged their applications under fewer solution umbrellas.

I don’t typically advise others regarding the pricing. We tend to serve lower user count customers so they are not getting any volume discount consideration.

That was a long time ago. I believe they were using Cognos and Crystal Reports.

• Take advantage of their training which they often offer to prospects. It will allow you to use the solution to your advantage much more quickly and efficiently.
• Get a clear picture of the type of development skill that is required to get a quick start.