I like the ease of deployment. It is very easy to deploy and provision a machine.
I like the analytics and that I can run them. Until now, this was always something that was done on the business side. For me, this solution makes it easier to do analytics.
With Oracle, they have to use an IBM business intelligence tool called Cognizer. But with Microsoft, the BI tool is better. So we are using Microsoft BI as it is quite good.
Most of the Microsoft partners, especially digitally, are separate. Personnel are business people, and they do not have technical expertise, so you end up as a company spending a lot of money training your staff and your engineers. This is something that Mircosoft needs to improve on. They must have personnel who have each shared capacity for their staff, so when it comes to implementation, it doesn't take a lot of time.
The implementation takes months, and it could even take as long as a year. The implementation is a small issue because Microsoft does not come to the ground, it is the personnel.
The only issue is pricing because technical support is there. Our engineers are well trained in Microsoft, and we have the Microsoft BI Office which is very helpful but pricing is a bit of a challenge.
There is not much to be corrected other than just improve continuously on the business intelligence section. That is important for businesses.
This solution was already in place when I arrived, and I have been working with it for more than ten years.
Technical support is okay, we have not had any problems. In the future, we plan to move to Office 365. In the next financial year, we will be purchasing the license for Office 365.
With Microsoft, we buy everything though an agreement, so we purchase volume licensing every year. That is how our licenses are managed.
I am an information security analyst and I research to stay up on the trends and to see what is happing on the market now because we run our Firewalls.
I would recommend getting the correct licenses. From the article, they should get to know which licenses, because there are different agents of licensing.
Ensure they get the right size servers.
Ensure that they have the best technical expertise, to help with the implementation.
Microsoft products are quite good. We run innovation Microsoft 2017 and it's pretty impressive.
I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.
What version are you on, please provide more details. Don't plan on millions of records unless on 2016 version - read my review. It starts to choke once you get anywhere near 100K records in an entity let alone millions. Its fine for small reference data - I used it extensively but just realize it does not scale well. The 2016 version is supposed to be much faster.