MicroStrategy Reviews

There are two use cases. One is on the transactional side. As we're doing insurance transactions, we're using the transactional side to assess risk on each transaction. On the portfolio side, we're looking at the whole portfolio of insurance risk.

Underwriters love the transactional side. 

The performance: We've thrown a lot of data at it, and now we're trying to improve the performance. But the underwriters love the content that's being delivered. On the portfolio side, we're just starting the launch, but underwriters seem to be responding well to it.

The goal is for all of our underwriters to see the risk of a property the same way. If I have 30 underwriters, they should all see and measure the same risk. With all of our modeling, we create a lot data. But with these dashboards, we're giving the same direction. So, underwriters are coming to the same risk conclusions on all of our risks.

Delivery, meaning the ability to create aesthetically pleasing information by providing dashboards.

In terms of self-service, we have an ad-hoc platform, where you can build portfolio reports on your own, so that's already released.

The capability of MicroStrategy that I believe we are going to be utilizing most in 2018 is mobile. We're trying to get to launch. We're having issues with legal, around the app store, those types of things.

• Tighter mapping integration.
• More Writeback capabilities that would allow our IT department not to be worried about the wild, Wild West of Writeback.

We did have issues with stability, and that was because we were co-located with another business unit, and we outgrew them on the unit. So we had to get to a separate physical instance.

There have been scalability issues which I attribute more to architecture than the tool. Meaning, we weren't leveraging capabilities that allow for the scalability, so we're incorporating them now.

I'm on the business side, the design of the metadata and the like; on the hardware and that type of stuff, I don't get involved.

We favor a single platform for this type of solution, versus a many-points solution like Cognos. Single point is always easier.

What I appreciate most in a vendor is when they bend over backwards. MicroStrategy does that, when I approach them.

I give it a seven out of 10, and the reason is, underwriters love the content. The performance isn't where I need it to be. When I get to the less than five seconds per click, it will be a 10.

In terms of advice, you need to think abstractly enough so that it becomes a metadata layer that's usable for all of the things you want.

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 use it primarily for reporting. Most of the reports are grid reports. We do slice and dice, and use pivot tables on the reports. The data goes up to the level of CEO. Basically, we use it for basic grid level reporting.

It has helped our modern developers. It has helped the business users to design their own reports. They know exactly what the need, so the power is now in their hands. They do self-service and develop their reports. Dependency on development teams, as well as managing the platform, has reduced a lot with Visual Insight.

Visual Insight gives you the capability of doing self-service analytics. This has been the most powerful and valuable feature.

We have rolled out Self-Service, and the rollout has been smooth so far. Customers are happy. When I say customers, the consumers of the report. 

Maintenance and manageability becomes easier with a single platform. You do not have a complex environment for four or five different vendors to serve different purposes.

We are developing a mobile platform. Until now, I have not worked on it. There are plans in development of introducing a mobile BI with MicroStrategy.

In 2018, we plan on significantly using the Dossier feature. It comes with MicroStrategy 10.9. We have set up a platform in that version, and we are exploring the Dossier option.

I would like to see some enhancements in distribution services and the way reports are delivered currently. It is mostly static reports. We want to be able to do dynamic subscriptions and all that stuff in distribution services.

They need to improve on distribution services. There are lack of features which were there earlier with Narrowcast, but they are not there in the distribution services. Then, they need to improve on having more professional, well-equipped premium support.

More than five years.

It is stable. I have worked on three different BI tools. I find MicroStrategy the most suited to the enterprise-wide BI platform, because of its scalability and stability.

It is scalable.

I would give them eight, eight out of 10. Sometimes there is a delay, because I am based out of Asia Pacific region. The support is usually done during the US business hours. There is a delay and it is difficult. 

If I am facing an issue today, then I have to wait for the US folks to come on and look at my problem and provide a solution, which I may see tomorrow. There is a one day delay. This goes on for different cases that I open. We are planning to take the Asia Pacific support license as well. We will see how it goes.

No, I recently joined my company.

I would suggest to explore MicroStrategy. It is a good tool. I have been working on it for seven years now. 

I would definitely recommend my friend or a colleague to use it, and implement it in their company.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

1. Security.
2. Stability.
3. Scalability.

It is very easy for non-IT personnel to create (grid) reports. And once the report is created, the user can switch rows, columns, and add filters. This avoids the creation of a lot of reports that have just a different look.

The drill-down functionality is also very good.

It did not really change the way the organization works. But it has improved our budgeting process. It also gives us a better overview of our warehouse management.

It has two versions: web and desktop. Some changes can be done with the web tools and some can be done with the desktop tool. Reconciling the two tools to make all functionality available in all tools would be a great improvement.

The graphs available for the new dashboard of version 10 are weak. You can include all the 3D graphs that you find, but you have to find them and include them or develop them yourself. By default, you should have at least the same possibilities for the graph so that you can add in a document. For the moment, I still use the document because I did not find a line graph that can use multiple metrics and multiple categories.

I have personally used it for three years now. The company I am working for has used it for four years.

We have not had stability issues, but we are a small group and we do not use the mobile functionalities.

We have not had scalability issues, but we are a small group.

I find technical support very responsive. If they do not know the answer, they search for it until they find a solution that solves your problem. The community site has also a lot of information.

I am an external consultant and I know the Microsoft BI suite. I also worked a bit with QlikView. The company that uses MicroStrategy had no other tools before it.

I was not there at the initial setup. I found it easy to add some new attributes, facts, and metrics.

I am not in charge of licensing. They made a change in the licensing module some time ago and we can now use all the enterprise tools for free. This was a big improvement. We are using a name license. The advantage is that these licenses can be used on all environments.

I was not there for the initial choice. But I know they had a PoC on SAP BusinessObjects and Microsoft BI.

If you use MicroStrategy on top of a data warehouse, put all the code translation in a snowflake schema. The reason is that often the last pass of the process translates the code into labels and it is easier if these labels are in separate tables.

Install the enterprise manager tools and projects at the beginning. You can create a lot of objects and you need to know which one is used. This tool is not perfect, but it will give you an overview of the utilization of MicroStrategy.

As an IT person, you have to create the model: define the attributes and the metrics. Once you have done that, if a user wants to create a grid report he must drag attributes and metrics and drop them in the grid area.

This user has to know the business a bit because he must combine attributes and metrics that make sense.

Another way of working is to create a big grid report with multiple attributes and metrics. A user can easily remove the attributes and metrics that he does not need and remove them from the grid. He then can save the report is his "my report" folder if he use it often.

For example, as retail company, we created a "big" grid report with sales and stock by articles, shop, sales persons, year and month. The sales period is part of the filter. If a user want the sales per shop and years, he just has to remove from the grid the attributes and metrics that he does not need. Same thing if he wants sales per users. For us, it simplifies our life because one report replaced eight existing reports in our system.

Now, the the reports are made by someone from the business that asks sometimes (but not often) for IT support.

If you only want simple grid reports, almost anyone can make them. If you want advanced reports (dashboard, pixel perfect documents) the user must follow a training.

• Visual insights:
  
  • For ad-hoc and self-service visualization
  • Faster user adoption
  • Connection to different sources
  • Data blending / mashing: Blending and mashing is valuable since users right now are currently tied up with the traditional way of getting data from databases prepared by IT. This feature will enable business users to immediately have access to different data sources, whether from IT or from their personal files, and allows them to combine these sources, and create reports and/or visualizations quickly and easily.
    Saves time and empowers business users.
  • Visual data discovery / data visualization
• Developer: object-oriented BI modelling
• Web services: building highly customized BI applications
• Mobile: pixel-perfect mobile dashboards, building mobile apps
• Object manager: migrations
• Security: complete and secure for enterprise scale

• As a consulting firm: delivering BI solutions to customers effectively and efficiently at an enterprise level

• Developer: Simplify BI modelling features to increase learning curve and user adoption.
• Data visualization: Improve and add visualizations and features to prepare BI apps. Reduce clicks and steps.

I have been using it for 3-4 years, including earlier versions (9.2).

We have encountered minimal stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer support is great but can still improve TAT.

We did not switch from a previous solution. We use Tableau, Microsoft and MicroStrategy depending on the needs or requirements of the customer.

The setups I have done are all single-server deployments, both in Linux and Windows:

• I-Server
• Mobile server
• Web server

Further simplify the licensing scheme:

• Architect is expensive
• Match or beat the pricing of Tableau
• Tableau is still cheaper

All products have been used depending on the customer.

At the enterprise level, MicroStrategy is good but requires a longer learning curve to fully maximize the platform as compared to other traditional BI tools and niche products such as Tableau.

• Rapid development: Once you have data, it is pretty fast to develop dashboards that are available in both web and mobile environments. It is quite easy to develop in days.
• Enterprise readiness

• Management's ability to slice and dice data quickly with ease

Any product/feature request takes years to get, if at all. This really pulls the rating down overall.

For example, the MSTR prompt interface sucks, where users can enter details to get data. However, they do not seem to be too worried about modifying it. Selector preferences cannot be stored per user. Prompts can be saved per user but that interface sucks.

Also, multiple currencies are handled poorly even after introducing two or more datasets in a document.

I have used it for more than two years.

I have not encountered any stability issues. We have four servers with DR capability.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

We got MSTR Services to set it up.

With V10, they made life easier for licensing; bargain and do not take the quote as serious.

Before choosing this product, I evaluated MicroStrategy, Cognos 8/9, Tableau’s very early versions and QlikView.

It is good enterprise-level software. Consider Tableau and Qlik before making your decision. Evaluate your user readiness. For example, to use Tableau, the users should be more on the power users side. MicroStrategy is better if management is not tech savvy.

• Business users can create their reports once architected
• Available on all devices
• Customization options available at coding and visual levels

Enterprise-wise solutioning helps us to troubleshoot more effectively.

Creating a dashboard is a very tedious and manual process.

I have used it for six years.

I have not encountered any stability issues; it is very stable.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 6/10.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was straightforward.

It is somewhat expensive.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated SAP BusinessObjects and IBM Cognos.

Depending on the data volume, choosing the most suitable database will be key. Setting up the MicroStrategysystem for optimum performance will drive how helpful the output will be.

The ability of the end user to be able to design and modify their own solutions, as well as the ROLAP architecture that provides almost unlimited scalability.

With MicroStrategy's focus on end user empowerment, a business analyst can make any modifications needed to follow wherever their analytical thought process leads them. With a multi-dimensional cube solution (Cognos, for example), if the analyst falls into the "white space" between cubes he/she needs to stop and request a new cube from the IT shop, interrupting the analytical thought process, possibly for a significant amount of time.

Data access could be improved. MicroStrategy has a data import capability but it only works for data in a Excel spreadsheet or a CSV file. It would be helpful if one could point the data importer at a web site, or provide it a URL of a data source and have it import the data.

I have followed MSTR's development for nearly 20 years and find the totality of the product to be the best in the business because of scalability, single metadata, SQL generator, and end user usability. I organized a review of 6 then-current BI applications in 1996, including MicroStrategy, Holos, Information Advantage, Essbase, Oracle Express, and Cognos. Only MicroStrategy, OBII (formerly Oracle Express) and Cognos are still standing.

Not on my personal WIndows 7 Pro 64-bit machine. I've never deployed the Server product.

Not on my personal WIndows 7 Pro 64-bit machine.

Not on my personal WIndows 7 Pro 64-bit machine.

Customer Service: Unknown.Technical Support: Unknown.

One customer was using Cognos and I advised them that they may want to consider switching to MicroStrategy for the reasons I stated above.

On my personal Windows 7 Pro 64-bit machine. I don't know how different it might be on an enterprise server, although an acquaintance who has deployed it says that there are no issues.

I've also looked at Tibco Spotfire and Pentaho, and read reviews and evaluations of Tableau. All of these are seductive, but their solutions ignore the challenges of dealing with masses of data. MicroStrategy's single metadata also makes it possible to track every object and action in the system, and to autogenerate documentation.

Look at the complete package, considering TCO, administrative ease and end user usability/empowerment.