MicroStrategy Reviews

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.

Valuable features include advanced SQL Engine, Reusable Metadata, Data Exploration/Viz, Production Grade Report/Dashboard Automation, Mobile, Integration with rich SDK/API, and In Memory BI high performance.

Made self-service BI/Data Exploration possible for the end-user.

Simplified development tools.

Removing Flash from web interfaces

I have been using this solution for 18 years.

No, very easy to install and manage environment.

No issues with stability.

No, highly scalable on all sizes of data and platforms.

4 out of 5 – they have great tech support but are sometimes challenging to work with on contracts and pricing.

5 out of 5 – they go above and beyond to resolve or enhance their product.

I have worked with many other solutions but keep choosing MicroStrategy whenever the requirements are complex. There are many niche players that may excel in certain specific areas but if you need to push the boundaries and have a complete BI solution that is not focused in a niche such as data visualization then MicroStrategy is a leader that should be considered.

You need to understand the platform but once you have this understanding the installation is very straightforward.

Internal/Off-shore vendor (Infocepts – 5 out of 5 off-shore vendor founded by ex-MicroStrategy employees).

It is providing both internal and external reporting for the business that was not previously possible. The first external reporting solution was delivered in less than 1 month of development.

$150k for a single CPU of web/iserver capacity. Currently all development/administration is supported by a single off-shore developer at a rate of $35/hr. The new pricing model has allowed for simplified web user pricing allowing all web functionality to be available to all users.

We evaluated Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, BO, SSRS?MS Power BI, OBIEE, TIBCO.

If your BI requirements are complex and require significant integration into internal applications this can be achieved using MicroStrategy and the SDK but the appropriate skilled resources will be required throughout the implementation. Do not expect to be successful just throwing a java developer at the SDK work who has no previous experience with the MicroStrategy SDK.

The feature I found most valuable is the drop and drag functionality available for the relevant stuff you can use to link the relevant data.

The areas that have room for improvement in MicroStrategy are mainly related to building additional tools. Specifically, the embedding process has been a bit of a struggle. It's crucial to correctly populate the embedded components, especially considering my work in the banking environment. For instance, in the banking environment, there are branches in different regions. If you don't necessarily do it in the necessary SQL operations to populate the data, it becomes difficult to build an embedded React app or any other application. So, that's definitely an area for improvement.

So, we can list additional customization options as one of the improvement areas.

Additionally, I feel that the pricing is a little bit too expensive. That is the main reason why people are not using MicroStrategy in South Africa.

In the next release, I believe the additional customization options can help the product. Also, the pricing is too costly currently. Even that can be worked upon.

I have used MicroStrategy for about a year. We currently use version 11. 

We did not have any stability issues. So, I would rate MicroStrategy a ten out of ten.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. Within our banking organization, around 300 plus users are using MicroStrategy.

When it comes to technical support, we did have some issues. We waited a long time for someone from the support team to get back to us. 

Neutral

The deployment process took less than a month. However, being in the banking environment, there are numerous processes involved that can impact the actual deployment timeline, etcetera.

We are waiting to switch to Microsoft Power BI because MicroStrategy is too costly. So, as for the pricing, I would rate it three out of ten, where one is high price, and ten is low price.

MicroStrategy is a nice tool to have. The support, the visualization, and everything else are very nice. In fact, it is more enhanced than Microsoft Power BI.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

Our primary use case for this product are analytics and visualization. 

It has allowed us to standardize the reporting so that everybody is looking at the same view of the data.

The most valuable features are ad hoc reporting and the ability to create dashboards.

The product could be improved by adding additional visualization.  Also, another feature to consider in the future would be adding some additional offline capabilities without using desktops. In addition, continued development of mobile reporting. 

I have not encountered issues with stability. 

 I have not encountered any issues with scalability. 

We have used CognitiveScale in the past. 

The implementation was fairly straightforward. 

Make sure to do your due diligence and understand that the tools meet your needs. 

The licensing is a bit high per user. 

Yes, we considered Tableau, SAP Business Objects and Cognitive Scale.

We use MicroStrategy to generate enterprise-wide reports. It is used by all the store managers to track sales, stock, inventory, etc.

It helps all the store managers and supply chain people to obtain a view of the data and plan the next week, the next month, quarters, and so on.

We are still learning on our journey of how to roll out Visual Insights to all the business users and how much data input capability should be given to them.

In 2018, we plan on using Visual Insights heavily.

The most valuable features are drill down, dashboards, documents, bringing everything under one roof, and visualizations.

We are using mobile analytics, and it is amazing.

While we prefer having the analytic capabilities in single platform, it does depends on the use case.

More visualizations out-of-the-box. That would be my top priority. For example, the cool things that you see in 3D visualizations, if those could be made. If some of those things could be made available in MicroStrategy, that would be great. 

It is pretty good. We have not had any issues so far.

Scalability is the best thing. You can really scale. It has already scaled to approximately 2000 stores and more than 15,000 users.  

Whenever we have had some issues, we have contacted the technical support, and they are knowledgeable. However, it never really gets to the point where we are contacting them, because a lot of resources are available on MicroStrategy's support site, which is helpful. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

MicroStrategy was a little late with Visual Insights, but it is one tool which you can find everything.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. Technology
2. Flexibility
3. More partnerships.

The most important feature is the way it handles ad hoc queries and provides formatted reports.

The In-Memory Capability (cubes) needs a lot of improvement. They have tried a couple of new things in version 10.x, but it has stability issues.

I have been using MicroStrategy for the past 10 years.

The current version that I am using is stable but it lacks some features. Also, version 10.x has some stability issues.

We haven't faced much of an issue in terms of the scalability. However, due to its design (as it is very tightly coupled with the database), it depends on databases a lot, which might be a big concern for scalability.

Technical support depends on which tech support center is answering your queries. The US-based tech centers are very good as compared to the centers in Asia.

The pricing for MicroStrategy is always on the higher side. They should seriously start thinking about their pricing and licensing strategy.

We evaluated SAP BusinessObjects as it was one of the enterprise-level tools at that point of time.

MicroStrategy is an enterprise-wide Business Intelligence solution. There are various components of the software which are independent modules, but which work in conjunction to give a holistic enterprise-wide solution.

The most significant product feature is its robust data warehousing capabilities and metadata management. MicroStrategy lets the user create a different data model on top of the actual physical data model, according to the project requirements. This is a very helpful feature for modelling data and managing the metadata from different data sources in a single place. Any changes in the project data model or inclusion of new data fields is fairly easily accomplished.

Another key feature is that MicroStrategy is mobile-ready. This is one of the few software applications in the BI field which is mobile-ready. It is easy to build visualizations for mobile phones and iPads, and deploy them to end users.

The server architecture is very robust and enables the user to blast company-wide emails with BI reports.

The product has enabled the organization to blend data from different business units of the organization and product reports on it.

It has also replaced the manual process of sending out reports in an Excel sheet every Monday to specified users.

The product needs some improvement in its visualization capabilities. A fair amount of training is required to use this product.

The product is not business-user friendly. It has a lot of IT components which require special expertise. Ad-hoc reporting capabilities can be improved.

I have been using MicroStrategy for three years.

The product is stable. However, performance issues could be encountered if the server architecture is not set up appropriately based on usage and requirements.

Product scalability is easy and MicroStrategy provides additional support if required.

This software requires some training and technical expertise. MicroStrategy provides training sessions for users. They also provide technical support while installing the software and setting up the architecture, which is helpful. Technical support is very responsive and helpful. For larger organizations, they usually have a technical support specialist assigned who would answer any question via email or phone.

I have used many BI solutions other than MicroStrategy.

The initial setup is complex. However, MicroStrategy sends technical support to assist with the initial setup. These consultants work in conjunction with the company's employees to get it set up.

The pricing and licensing is a bit different than most products due to the suite of standalone tools that exist within the entire product. A sales representative would be able to assist with the pricing.

I reviewed IBM Cognos along with MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy was a better fit for our company needs due to its robust architecture, mobile-ready dashboards and a good pipeline of features coming in the future.

I keep learning new technologies and products to stay relevant in the ever evolving BI market. MicroStrategy has a good place in the market right now and is used by many enterprises as their primary BI tool. It also has better in some capabilities (handling large databases, server architecture, mobile-ready) than other tools in the market and has a good pipeline of upcoming advancements.

This is an enterprise-wide solution for which the return on investment is long term rather than short term. Evaluate the product appropriately with others based on your needs.

Easy to develop new reports, easy to change metadata layer

We automatize daily management reporting, ad hoc reporting, and schedule reporting with fix structure

Web interface has to be more quick-response and user friendly. There is a desktop application that is still used. Creation of a report with complicated structure (documents) is not easy.

5 years

No

No

Yes, sometimes web-application works unstable with big amount of data (it's not actually the big problem for the most cases but if you need few hundreds of thousands records - there could be an issue)

We have good support from consultant company and we don't works directly with a vendor.

Same answer as above question.

Microsoft Excel (power pivots). Microsoft is the easiest and the more user friendly especially for beginners in the simple edition (pivot table). We don't use Microsoft BI products like report and analysis services - I can't estimate how they are easy to use and powerful.

Independently from the tool, initial setup is always complex. Usually complexity depends on the scope of the project. Few reports and 1-2 datamarts this one thing, plug-in data warehouse to the reporting - another.

Initial implementation was with consultancy, further - in-house. Consultant was good, at least they was more skilled as we were in the particular area.

The most expensive position is license cost. It is very expensive so this one of the reason why we can't expand the solution more widely in the company.

Microstrategy was the first our mature BI solution in the company. IBM Cognos BI was the next but it didn't get a lot of fans. IBM Cognos BI from our opinion is weaker in many places and not so handy.

Nice easy to use product, I can advise to use it for others.
General advice (not depends on the particular product), implementation of BI tools MUST be a general company strategy. Implementation has to cover significant part of the reporting and everyone who need a reporting has to use it. - in this case you will get benefit from reporting unification and control over new reports growing.
There is in the company has to be developed reporting creation rules (who are allowed doing what and there it's can be located - public or private)
BI team has to be fully responsible for reporting environment including testing and describing reports in the public area. BI team in the company has to be created with dedicated analysts who are responsible for making analysis of the reporting requirement from other people and make internal in-house support for the users
BI team MUST have rights not to make reports (at any level of complexity) but make changes and develop metadata layer as well in the BI, - that is very important, otherwise you will have "armless BI".