MicroStrategy Reviews

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. 

One to three years.

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.

Our primary use case is to improve our profitability across our field organization. It's performing fantastically. We have over 140 branch locations, over 1000 users, and it's scaling great. Performance is great. The feedback from our field users is fantastic in terms of form and function, so it's meeting all of our expectations.

Our goal is to roll out self-service, because with the advent of our tool, being able to drive actionable intelligence is just the next natural thing for us; to give the users ability to perform analytics on their own. 

The most valuable feature is the ability to actually embed actions, comments, being able to leverage Transaction Services to embed the tool into a business process. 

We get so much more value out of this tool because it's part of a business process. It's not a normal BI or analytics tool that has nice gauges and "dancing bears." It's actually a tool that's being used on a monthly basis, even a daily basis by our operational users, because it's embedded within an existing business process.

Looking ahead at 2018, I think the MicroStrategy capability that we'll use most is Transaction Services. I think we'll continue to build upon Transaction Services, driving actionable intelligence to the business, aligning Transaction Services to those business processes that are most critical, to help drive profitability, to help drive quality improvements across the organization.

Maybe a feature where migrations are easier. When you migrate from certain environments, it could probably be a little cleaner. Sometimes it seems to be somewhat clunky when you migrate from one environment, say a development to a test or production environment. 

Also, having some use cases from MicroStrategy that talk more about self-service, what self-service is and the applicability of self-service to different types of use cases and different types of personas in the businesses.

Three to five years.

We've submitted technical support tickets but it's never been anything where it was like "the boat was sinking" and we had to call technical support. Regarding the tickets, I would give the response to them a lukewarm rating.

We were using Excel. We use Hyperion for financial reporting but we got the point where we had to put on our "big boy pants" and get a real solution.

I don't think it was complex at all. I think the time to actually stand the solution up was relatively short. I think the complexity didn't come into the actual set up, it came into the actual configuration and development of solutions. The set up was easy. You just install the thing. It's the development that's the tricky part.

There were other vendors on the shortlist. I think initially, for us, it was some of the capabilities, the enterprise capabilities. And believe it or not, it was actually Transaction Services, that was really the part of the tool that made it very compelling for us, because it gave the opportunity to drive action.

I prefer having analytics capabilities in many points, rather just in a single platform like MicroStrategy. I would hate to say that we have just this one "basket." I think there are many different use cases, and I think you have to address the many different use cases that the business brings to you. I think MicroStrategy is very complementary to what we need from an enterprise standpoint, but I believe that you also want to be armed with other tools that may fit other use cases.

We don't plan on investing in the MicroStrategy Mobile at this time. I think when a tangible use case becomes relevant for our business, we probably would consider it, but not at this point.

When selecting a vendor I would say our most important criteria are 

• experience
• having a tangible real use case that can articulate into my industry
• credibility in the market place
• having a bench of talented resources.

I rate it a seven out of 10 because I don't think there's any silver bullet BI solution out there. The reason I would not rate it a 10 is, I think it's great for certain things but maybe not great for other things. I wouldn't put my eggs in one basket and say MicroStrategy is the savior for world hunger, because it's not.

In terms of advice to a colleague looking into a similar solution, I would say clearly understand your use case and make sure you understand the culture of the organization before you dive into this tool, or any other tool. You have to understand, what is the use case? What is the business problem, what are you going to solve?

What are the underlying support teams and resources that you need to actually manage, maintain, and support this particular solution? Because Excel, in some instances may be okay. In other situations it may not be okay. I would beg to say that there are probably a lot of organizations out there that are still running 80% of what they do on Excel, and basic reporting is fine. Some of these things that we talk about like predictive models, that's great stuff. But I'd say 70% of organizations need basic reporting. So focus on the basics. If you focus on the basics, then that should drive your decision.

We obtain all the data from different data sources and put them together. I report to different subject areas like finance, operations, product, etc.

The product is performing well.

Reports are very easy to create. It takes a very short amount of time to build a report, which is very useful. It is very easy to access them from my desktop and web (everywhere). When someone logs in, they can simply see all the reports. It is easy to schedule them.

We are running Self-Service to our business teams now. It is good.

We prefer a many point solution right now due to different areas of the business, because they are asking for different things. Some functionality is easier to be built in different products. Therefore, I have found MicroStrategy to be probably doing 80% of everything, but there is 20% left that is easier with other tools with different types of visualizations slicing and dicing the data.

In 2018, we plan on using Dossier.

The most valuable features are the Visual Insights and the visualizations.

We are using the mobile analytics of MicroStrategy. It is in production.

It's just very small technical things. Sometimes you can do something on attributes in documents RSDs, but then you can't do the same thing in Visual Insights or Dossier. Just being able to do everything across everything. Sometimes you can do something in reports, but you cannot do the same thing in documents. So, it is expected that you should be able to do everything everywhere. 

Less than one year.

It is stable.

It is fine. Halfway there.

If you make it much bigger, some performance issues come up. On a smaller scale, it's performing well. For us, it is not that big, so it is good. However, we are not going to add more on it.

For technical support, it depends. Sometimes, they are very quick and very supportive. Sometimes, nothing comes back. Sometimes, I give them a 10 out of 10, and sometimes, I give them a two out of 10. The problems are mostly in L2 or L3.

I was not involved.

The initial setup was straightforward.

If you want an enterprise solution, definitely go with MicroStrategy. If you want something for a small business area, like your HR needs some reporting or your finance needs some reporting, go with a different tool.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Just price. First thing is price. For larger companies, maybe price is not a big issue, but for a company of our size, price is important. Being able to address all the issues or all the capabilities that we require, it is very important. The support, the training, and all these things that come with the product, that is also important. 

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.

Recovering session finally works for all report types. Also, fundamental issues with ODBC causing involuntary restarts has been resolved. It has a couple of very useful end-user and developer features, such as copying panel stacks inside RS documents and the ability to attach images directly to a dashboard. They are pretty useful.

End users are able to work more on their own, so it lowers the cost of BI department.

The developer is a long-ago obsolete tool. Its interface and functions should be completely redesigned. The fact is not only is the user interface far obsolete (for more than 10 years), it is also quite often repeating tasks like dragging because it handles the actions incorrectly (like moving objects from report objects are to a grid). Also, it does not work properly when the resolution is too high, and the integration architect tool is far from being bug free.

They are working on a new tool with codename Workstation so we will see.

I have used it for three months.

We encounter fewer stability issues now (version 10.3 hf2); before that, there were pretty serious issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is getting better; there has certainly been progress over the past year, but it still could be so much better.

We switched because MicroStrategy is the most-advanced and feature-rich tool.

Each release (even a minor one) is unique, so initial setup is definitely complex; each installation has its own specifics.

Negotiate at least a 30-40% discount.

We also evaluated SAP BusinessObjects and Tableau.

Get a person who has some skill and has already done several installations.

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.

Customer Service:

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

Technical Support:

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.

It’s very scalable, the most scalable BI platform that I know of. By that I mean data scalability as well as being able to support a large number of users. The product is mature and stable. It supports a broad range of analysis styles and presentation formats.

We have deployed multiple BI solutions using Microstrategy, ranging from standard reports to dashboards to ad hoc analytics.

Microstrategy works best against a star or snowflake schema. While in principle it can work with a more normalized data model, it struggles with schemas other than star or snowflake.

Over 3 years. It had been installed before I started with the company.

Nothing major

Nothing major

The tool itself scales well, however in our experience the scalability of the entire solution is 90%+ a function of the underlying database.

Customer Service: GoodTechnical Support: Good

We used Cognos before. The main reason for switching is that at the time when we made a decision to switch, Cognos was unable to handle the data volumes that we required. Latest versions of Cognos have improved in this respect.

I can’t comment on this because initial setup had been conducted before I joined the company.

We used a mix of MicroStrategy Professional Services and in-house staff. Their consultants were superb.

We don’t measure ROI.

It depends on how you count costs and what you include.

The other option was to stay with Cognos.

Make sure your database design follows dimensional modeling principles. Avoid API-level customizations, they may break when upgrading product versions.

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. 

On-premises