MicroStrategy Reviews

Design and development of the product lines in the apparel industry with its unit pricing info,customer demographics details,Customer profile,competitor info and analysis over a time period..Store wise inventory details of each product line across the region,state and country level

• Enterprise wide reporting capability.
• Self-service reporting & analysis.
• Extensive analysis of business units function: It provides various metrics and by using drill through and drill across functionality.
• Ease of understanding of various performance measures using widget features.

Schema updates help us to cope up with enterprise business definition changes.

Reports auto-styling allows us to design stunning report output, differentiating the result set for better understanding of the business users.

VLDB properties allow you to customize the SQL that MicroStrategy generates. These settings affect how MicroStrategy Intelligence Server manages joins, metric calculations, and query optimizations.

The flexibility to work with agile data model updates.

We have used MicroStrategy for 10 + years.

We have encountered stability issues with regards to Metadata db being crashed and need to reload the Project and configure it to various Project repositories

We have encountered no scalability issues.

Technical support is very good.

We worked with IBM Cognos and its business adaption due to its rich data visualization capabilities, widget creation, etc.

Setup was easy. By creating a unified project model with the organizational standards, business rules, and project design, the underlying data model design is streamlined resulting in consistent reporting and analysis across the enterprise.

It’s cloud version pricing is competitive and in sync with market demand.

For an enterprise-wide DWBI implementation, MicroStrategy is a great choice. Evaluate your organizational needs to go in either for on-premises or cloud version of the product to control your project budget.

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.

Primary is the enterprise reporting. That's our baseline. Everything else is "nice-to-haves."

It performs very well.

If you provide the necessary data to make decisions in a timely and visually stimulating way, then you can make better decisions. It profoundly impacts the organization.

It's such a rich platform, it's got so much to offer: it's mobile, In-Memory Analytics, and there are data connectors to just about everything you can imagine. It's a total package.

If they didn't do their enterprise reporting very well then it wouldn't be as successful.

I would say what's unique is that it's a comprehensive package, and wasn't done piecemeal. It was built internally. They didn't buy products and stitch them together. Everything works really well together. It's such a powerful platform and I've worked with it for a long time. It's amazing that I still continue to learn and discover new things even to this day.

We have rolled out self-service to business teams. Data governance is the biggest challenge.

Looking forward, for this year, mobility is something I think we'll utilize most. We're currently on the mobile platform but we're looking to use it more. It's going to continue to be a strong push.

I don't think that they will, but I'd like to see parallel processing, scalable parallel processing. 

Also, there are minor features, that I've already logged with MicroStrategy, nothing major.

It's one of the most stable platforms I've ever worked on. I've never had it fall on me, never.

It scales well. It used to have only a max of four I-servers, but I think recently, somewhere in version 10, they doubled that, so you can have eight I-servers now.

The only problem with that - yes it's a cluster, they raised it from four to eight - but your jobs aren't distributed. Your job goes to a single server - one of the eight. If you have a really huge job, it'd be nice to distribute it across all eight and cut the response time significantly.

They're actually pretty good. It's support, it's a difficult job. They're actually really good.

Windows implementation is pretty straightforward. Linux is pretty easy. High-level, it's very easy.

Take the time to find an experienced consultant. A good consultant can increase your adoption and lower your overall cost by saving you from costly missteps.

I would prefer having analytic capabilities from a single platform, rather than from many-point solutions, but in reality, I don't think that's very possible. 

I can give you an example. MicroStrategy, was very early to do In-Memory Analytics. I think everybody else is catching up to that. It doesn't really set them apart anymore today, but it did at one time. But beyond that, with MicroStrategy you're still limited to a single server, and to really crunch through a lot of data you need to parallel, across servers. MicroStrategy doesn't currently offer that so you have to go to something like Spark.

So I would love that on one platform, but in reality you can't get everything you possibly want in one platform. But MicroStrategy is smart. They have data connectors to open source applications. That may provide the functionality that you need to fill in the gaps.

Most important when selecting a vendor is 

• the support 
• their stability, are they going to be here tomorrow
• release schedule, a fairly stable, consistent, high-value release schedule.

I give MicroStrategy a nine out of 10. It's pretty solid. It's not perfect, but it's pretty solid. I think it is probably the best solution out there right now.

Do your homework. Shop around. Really understand MicroStrategy and the alternatives. Do enough research to realize where the real value is at. It's a mature product, it's a mature suite. It's more than just pretty dashboards. If you look past that, the administration, mobility, the analytics, if you look at all of it and rate each of the categories, I think you'll realize that MicroStrategy is at the top of the list.

There is a steep learning curve with it, a skill set that goes with it. But they've balanced that with the new Data Discovery module that is fairly easy to use by anyone.

Our primary use case is to use for the self-service analytics and data sense, mostly in terms of the analytical platform.

We cannot measure in terms of values or pounds. However, it definitely impacts people, who are excited to use it.

We are looking forward to distributing personalized alerts to our users using the native mobile push notification systems. We will also eventually configure our mobile apps to work offline.

• Visual Insight; now Dossiers
• Its robust, analytical predictor
• How we can enable program leaders, so they can be enabled to do their own jobs rather than depending on IT.
• We are using MicroStrategy's Writeback capabilities for retail.

Sometimes, it has become too complex to upgrade and adjust to the ecosystem in general.

Needs more visual essence and connectors for the ecosystems, which would be easy to use. Easy to use in corporate and to implement in the ecosystem, and not too complex in terms of implementing and enabling, then that is what we will do.

Stability is good.

Scalability is something which will need to be improved when it goes to a bigger audience. 

Technical support is knowledgeable. The right person gets back to us whenever we email them. I would rate them as an eight out of 10, most of the time.

No.

The initial setup is in-between straightforward and complex. It is not too complex.

We did it on our own, but sometimes we had some challenges, such as you do not know how it will react. This is one of the things which comes with usability. We would try to reach out to technical support for their help when this happened.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We look for their capabilities, what they have developed, and what they are up to in terms of innovation and creativity. Mostly, we consider that if you are creative, you can do anything.

MicroStrategy has a lot of features. If the developers and end-users know how to use it in depth, it is one awesome BI tool.

MicroStrategy Architect is kind of a data modelling tool available in the MicroStrategy Desktop. It is used to maintain the relationships among the attributes. It is a really useful tool, especially when you have to modify the relationships/hierarchies; you do not need to go to the database to do the changes. Instead, you can use this architect to define them.

MSTR generates SQL automatically for every object you pull on to the report. It has many options available in the VLDB properties where you can optimize the SQL.

Web is an amazing tool for end users. You can customize the reports, create new ad-hoc reports, modify the existing static reports and apply sorting, filtering, pivoting, etc. Admins can define the access levels to the users based on their right to view/modify the sensitive data. Access levels can be defined at many levels; at project level, folder level, report level to the developers, standard users, project owners/directors.

The security filters concept was very useful for our requirements. It was like we had to use same database tables (backend) and report structure (frontend) for different countries but each country should not see the others’ data. In this case, we can apply security filters in the web environment to the user groups specific to the country.

Data blending is also a good feature. With this, you can insert objects from more than one dataset in a single grid or graph in the dashboard. This allows users to create their own custom dashboards from multiple datasets.

The visual insight tool can be improved further. When I tried with Tableau, it has a wide variety of graphs to generate quick and easy.

The graphical interpretations developed from the reports are not directly usable for dynamic analysis and formatting takes longer. the graphs do not indicate trends on their own. Whereas in Tableau, developing dashboards from the scratch is easy and super fast and dashboards look great without formatting.

But I heard MSTR version 10 has come up with many features; yet to try.

I have used it for five years.

I have not encountered any stability issues so far.

I have not encountered any scalability issues so far.

I am not really a great fan of tech support, because my project’s issues didn't get solved or the response was not quick.

However, there is a discussion forum on the MicroStrategy Community site. You can post any technical/tool-based questions and you will get a fast response. It also has a knowledge base, which has many posts/tech notes written to provide solutions to the different kinds of problems. This community is really awesome, with many blogs/articles on MSTR.

MicroStrategy was the first tool I worked on in five years. But I would probably switch to Tableau if I needed to work on visual insights and utilize a variety of graphs.

Initial setup was quite straightforward and easier to me.

The price is too high. They could at least increase the software evaluation period.

We didn't evaluate any other tools; the requirements we received from customers instructed us to work with MSTR.

MSTR is a great tool for reporting. Especially for big organisations, it is very stable. Training is a must for the developers who want to play with the options available in and out of the tool.

Caching and report bursting, as it offers the phenomenal ways to access the info at a blazing speed.

With this, we have been able to provide consistent reporting with ease, after the efforts put in the initial schema setup.

Visual Insight, as I see, has improved a lot but it still lacks the analytics capability of other tools such as Tableau.

I have used it for seven years.

I have not largely encountered any stability issues, but upgrades at times have been little shaky.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is decently good.

I previously used SAP BO, but it was moving here and there between companies and becoming a bit too much to handle.

We use the Cloud edition, so N/A.

Pricing is bit less transparent and high.

It takes a while to set up properly to reap the benefits fully, so don’t rush up.

Scalability and the ability to process large amount of data are the product’s most valuable features. The ability for a user to create a report without knowing anything about joins, SQLs, tables, etc. is to me the best feature of MicroStrategy.

The product enables our business to create thousands of reports without knowing anything about the backend. MicroStrategy has been an enterprise reporting tool at our organization for a very long time. From the very beginning, the ability of the tool to provide a drag and drop interface to end users to create reports using the enterprise data warehouse effortlessly helps them in taking strategic decisions in their day-to-day operation.

The initial schema development takes some time. Without a robust schema, the tool will not function properly. The schema is the main engine which creates SQL effortlessly, but designing and maintaining the schema will take some time. The relationship between different attributes has to be maintained properly, as one incorrect relationship has the potential of affecting 100s of reports using that attribute. The schema can’t be maintained by end users and IT intervention is required.

There are two main development tools – Developer and Web. The two platforms are not in sync. Some options are not present in developer and some are present in web. The ones that are present in both are not located under same menus.

Dashboard development takes a long time.

The self-service BI part of the tool, Visual Insights, which is designed to provide the business the ability to create interactive dashboard using visualization, is not very great. Though Visual Insights has improved a lot in version 10.x, it still has a long way to go and is no way near competitors such as Tableau.

I have used it for eight years.

With every version, they will introduce some new tools/feature and it’ll take them a few versions or hotfixes to stabilize that new feature. There are different modes of running dashboards – presentation, Flash, interactive – and not all features work in all of the different modes.

The tool is scalable. Adding users or reports doesn’t have to be a headache, as long the hardware is robust enough to handle the additional reporting load.

There is a community site where developers can ask questions and get answers from other developers and experts, as well as MicroStrategy tech support. The community also has a pretty decent knowledge base in the form of tech notes, which provide information about known defects, issues and workarounds.

We have a support contract and regularly work with tech support on issue resolution, etc. I would give them 5/10, simply because, at times, the reps aren’t experienced enough and need a little hand-holding, which you wouldn’t expect considering they are the vendor and should know more or should be on par with the person asking the questions. Issue resolution also take a lot of time.

We’ve always worked with MicroStrategy.

Initial set up is a bit complex, as I’ve mentioned. Everything is based on the relationship defined in the schema. If someone messes that up, the reports will start giving incorrect output.

Also, to ensure scalability, the hardware needs to be robust, but I guess that is true for any tool.

It is an expensive tool. Licenses are user based or CPU based. Depending on the size of the organization, you might want to go with CPU based rather than user based, as that might be cheaper.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

It’s a good product for organizations planning to deploy an enterprise-wide reporting solution that will be built on top of a RDBMS. It is very robust and can handle large amounts of data fairly well. If the goal is to have a tool that can provide self-service BI and let end users create attractive dashboards without having to worry about object sharing, reusability, schema design, and IT involvement, then there are better & cheaper tools in the market.

I think the tool respects the Dimensional Data Modelling basics and provides features and options that make sense accordingly, while also continuously trying to add exciting and user-friendly features, and being successful.

In all of the projects for various clients I have worked for, MicroStrategy has improved their functions, as it automates publishing for reports, addresses security, replaces multiple legacy systems with one central system, reduces the maintenance, provides better analytical power to users by letting them slice, dice and drill into the data. The tool provides one of the best pixel-perfect dashboards in the industry, appealing and pleasing to eyes.

Data blending needs more improvement; it should let us use all of the general options seamlessly.

I have used it for nine years.

Stability depends on the particular environment we are in; such issues can be resolved by getting help from MicroStrategy Support.

As with stability, scalability depends on the particular environment we are in; such issues can be resolved by getting help from MicroStrategy Support.

For MicroStrategy support, I give 8 out of 10.

I used SAP BusinessObjects before, but MicroStrategy is more robust and has very professional support.

Initial setup is very straightforward. They also provide cloud services for smaller clients who don't have their own infrastructure or don’t want to spend a lot on building infrastructure.

Honestly, I don't know much about pricing of other products, so I cannot compare, but I heard that MicroStrategy is expensive compared to its competitors. But, a company has to go over what they need and what they get through MicroStrategy and decide if it’s worth paying a little more for quality.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options that much; just based on my previous experience.

It's a great product and you can get the most out of it by following the data modelling principles and BI standards. So, plan from the beginning to have an ideal model, even though it takes more time or needs new work.