MicroStrategy Pros and Cons

It offers us a lot of out-of-the-box tools, which give us the ability to automate a lot of our administrative tasks. Some things become menial: user creation, restarting a server at 10 o'clock on a Friday - simple things that they really give you the tools to be able to do. That's one thing I really like about the MicroStrategy platform from an administrative perspective.

We've made a few enhancements to our Enterprise Manager system to allow self-reporting to grow. We see that as a very useful system. It's been incredibly beneficial in diagnosing production performance issues, diagnosing what reports are running slowly, where the SQL could be optimized, opportunities or metrics where we see long-time running performance. Enterprise Manager has been absolutely vital in giving us some of the insights about our system.

I think we have a huge enterprise-wide push to Visual Insight. Our environment has transformed over the last year. We were a strong "grid to PDF," "document to PDF," that's all we did. And then they came in with these Visual Insights and everyone was like, "Wow, that's kind of cool." We created a static reporting portal behind it and now, it's just taken our reports to another level. The level of insight that you get in a 30-second glimpse, it just revolutionized it for us. It gives the user a larger subset of the data so that they can actually maneuver around, rather than being specifically pointed at whatever your document is designed for.

I like that they're trying to incorporate Developer into Workstation and Desktop into Workstation, so you get the all-in-one encompassing, highly technical Developer Workstation where you can do the VI, you can do the Dossier.

We have ramped up user adoption.

Technical support has sent us to rapid response before, when we really needed them.

Dossiers are going to change the name of the game for us. We want to be able to have the executive committee go into a meeting and tell a story. We want them to tell us a story, not us.

It's a stand-alone mobile development app that you don't even have to do business intelligence on. You can just use it to build apps.

Building apps is easy. You just drag in your data, and then you drag in all the elements that you want on your app. It's drag and drop design, and then you can customize your visuals. They make it all easy with plug and play widgets.

We are embedding multimedia content in our apps... You can embed streaming video from websites, or you can host the video files on your internal media servers. The video is clear, absolutely.

On our mobile solution you can deploy up to 100,000 users. In our case, we're up to about 10,000 active users, and MicroStrategy's server technology behind the scenes, the Intelligence Server and the Mobile Servers, are very robust and they can handle the workload.

Our primary use case is to deliver all data insights to our company.

I have shown our users how to stop using Excel. They would create these vast Excel files, and I showed them how to do the same thing with MicroStrategy, which saves a significant amount of time for them everyday.

It has had a direct impact on bottomline improvements.

With the new version that's coming out, I think they have simplified a lot of things. Also, when it comes to the administration part, and sharing, and the collaboration features, they are really great. You can send out comments with a filter to someone in your organization, and if the person clicks on it, he actually ​sees what you are seeing. So that's really great.

You can build once and deploy to multiple operating systems. Also, it resizes in the way you want it to​.

It's an open platform. That's also important. You can create your own data connectors. There's everything you can do with APIs. It's not closed like, perhaps, an SAP system might be.

There's extensive logging capabilities, if something is wrong then we are able to find out why.

We leverage it, not only for reporting but for analytics and also for geospatial reporting.

In the past, when we had so many legacy systems, with Cognos and others, it was took multiple steps to get what we wanted. Now, it's a seamless integration. We can connect directly, in the form of In-Memory Cubes or live-publish cubes, to the data warehouse, and blend in the data with big data. Not only relational databases, but we can also integrate other third-party files, and create a single-source software.

It keeps BI in the hands of everyone, rather than a developer or an analyst.

Now we can collaborate, in real time. In the past we had to wait for our business partners say if a visualization looked good or sufficed for their requirements. There was no real-time decision making. Now, with Dossier, it will accelerate the velocity of decision making.

Workstation and Desktop on the client side will speed up some development activities.

The single stack solution will always be more profitable, scalable, and elastic for organizational needs.

There are people who are using MicroStrategy as transaction services.

We use MicroStrategy as an integrated solution with some of their other CRM type applications.

It has the potential to become a great evangelist for AI and other embedded analytics.

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.

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.

It is always nice to have one solution in a single platform. You can do pretty much everything, instead of having to get a little bit here or a little bit there.

Provides us charts and graphs for reporting.

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

Getting more data to people more quickly. Providing more flexibility for how they use the data.

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.

We're starting to open it up to more and more people to give them the ability and start looking at these things themselves, but it's not the most intuitive system, Enterprise Manager that is, so it's tough. We're trying to bridge the gap between usability and who we let in the system, because you're not going to come in and just pick it up.

The problem is the way that their metrics are designed. It can be difficult to understand what you're actually looking at. Then when you're comparing a document against the VI, you can't actually do that properly. So there are components, and there is a huge learning curve in the Enterprise Manager space. I think it would benefit them greatly if they were to exercise a significant amount of research and development in that space.

They need to supply the support system that's just not there right now. They don't have Enterprise Manager classes. You need in-depth classes to understand what those metrics are doing, to understand the table associations from one to the other. You can't just go and pick it up and understand that DT_DAY connects to all of these tables, without going into Architect, looking at the source tables. I, as a analyst, a slightly technical user, I don't have the expertise to do that. Business users definitely don't have the expertise to do that.

It needs row-level security, column-level security, on attributes. I want to be able to handle full-scale security model from the semantic layer, flat out.

I want to be able to have one report that's delivered to 30 different people and all 30 different people see something different. Now, you can do that today with metrics. You cannot do that with attributes. There's a component of that which, if an attribute is on granularity-one and another is on granularity-two, and you remove granularity-one, you're now going to be summing to a level that you did not expect before.

From a stability standpoint, from MicroStrategy, I would say it's fairly consistent. I would give it a "B" because there are times where we have issues that are just inexplicable. They go away and then we have no resolution. To me, that's not acceptable. There are just times where our users can't access things and we're not sure why, and that's a problem to me.

Enterprise Manager should be a little bit less quirky when you build out-of-the-box customization reports for it.

The interface you can design in MicroStrategy is great, but I feel it needs to be refreshed, add a bit more functionality. I would like to see more capabilities on the mobile side, to bring it on par with apps that you see in the App Store.

MicroStrategy is dragging behind other tools on the self-service visualizations, like Tableau. I would rate Tableau as a 10. For the same visualizations, I would say MicroStrategy is an eight, maybe nine. They're still behind on the self-service visualizations,

Our users tend to say the interface is a pain.

Our data warehouse is sort of static; negative load and that is it. It is not as real-time as we would like. We are working on building that out first to create more real-time, at which point we will work on some potential integrations with other applications, but I don't think we are there yet.

It is performing well, but sometimes we have complex requirements and the performance decreases, and then we have to find another way to make it perform again. That is what you encounter when use the project, but that's inevitable because if we would have used another product, we would've had the same thing.

You can now do data blending at the document level and data blending allows you to show results from different data sets in one grid, so to speak. I want to be able to create a data set that can receive data from multiple cubes, have it in one data set, and then bring it to the document, because then I can reuse it for other documents. Now, I have to do it in a document and then it's less reusable, because if I want to share that functionality, I have to copy the document, strip a lot of things, and then work on that basic element that I've built in that document.

We have seen some stability issues with MicroStrategy on cloud. We have a few unhappy customers.

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.

MicroStrategy is not cloud native today and some of their APIs are a little limiting.​

I would like to see 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.

The UI seems klutzy with its manual entry.

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.

When we come to them with a problem, they might know more of a generalized solution, but not one targeted to our industry.

If there are some advanced visualization features - maybe I'm not aware of them - but if there were a Vitara which could work on top of MicroStrategy, it would make sense for MicroStrategy to have that within their own library. So they should add more visualizations to the library.