MicroStrategy Reviews

Predictive analysis with R, reporting and dashbaords.

With the advent of the partitioning concept in Cube partitioning, predictive analysis with visualizations, our organization is able to win back customers and customer appreciation.

• Its Cube performance
• Can be easily integrated to D3
• Can be easily integrated with third-party tools/products

Data writeback, and on-the-fly predictive analysis results from R and Python.

Cube publish time exponentially increases with MicroStrategy Cube size. Also, it has been observed that the Cube data gets unloaded from MicroStrategy's Cube cache resulting in reports and dashboards being impacted, having no data when executed.

With Cube partition (v10.1 and above) scalability has not been an issue, but the Cube publish time, and temporary space consumption while the Cube is being published, has almost doubled during implementation of Cube partition.

I would rate tech support seven out of 10, in terms of response and issue resolution.

We used SSRS reports, but the performance and visualization were always an issue.

Initial setup is bit of complex, this being an enterprise tool. It has three main components: Desktop, Web development, and Intelligence Server, and each has to be installed separately.

Before going ahead with MicroStrategy, we evaluated Tableau and QlikView, but in terms performance, data handling, and stability, we found this product scored highest. In fact, Tableau and QlilView are less stable and in no way match the Cube (cached data) functionality offered by MicroStrategy. A single report/dashboard can be created by pulling information from multiple cached data (called Cubes).

Our primary use case is to deliver all data insights to our company. We do not serve our platform engineering computing teams, but we are working on that. We're actually trying to do that. We serve the entire business: the finance, merchandising, and marketing team. All those teams are meant to use our tool, so we produce a lot of reports for them. We connect it directly to our data warehouse, that is their direct connection to all the data they need to run their business. 

It is performing great. We have built some really cool tools. We would like our users to use it more. For some non-technical people who do not have experience with a tool like this, they were a little intimidated. Therefore, they use Excel a lot. Thus, our big mission over the last year, and we have been successful with it, was to get them off of Excel and to make them use MicroStrategy. The more we get them to overcome their initial intimidation, or whatever it is, the more they take to it more quickly.

We use it as a front-end application. We connect directly to MicroStrategy web.

There have been actual direct bottomline impacts in terms of extra revenue created from the reporting solutions that I showed them how to do. Without getting into any details, I showed our marketing team how to go after more high value products that they could then push out, which resulted in more revenue. I showed another team how to identify other products that would otherwise be swept under the rug, and because they found these, they made an extra push and we got an extra X amount in revenue from a specific sale because of it. Therefore, it has had a direct impact on bottomline improvements. 

The other win is a lot of productivity. 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. 

These have been the two big impacts from MicroStrategy. 

From the perspective of serving the users, the most valuable feature that we have been able to give them is the Self-Service reporting tool. For example, the cubes in the report builder and showing them how to do that has gone a long way over the past year to getting them to develop their own insights for specific problems that they have. 

We already got some demos of the next release, so we are really excited about the Dossier. It is going to be really big. 

The other one that we are excited about is the collaboration aspect, where you can ping somebody on a dashboard and it sends them an email. Those are two things that we want, and those are two things that we are expecting. 

Our users tend to say the interface is a pain, which I can go either way. I find that once you use it for about a month, you are fine. But for some reason, some users are maybe not tech savvy or they are not familiar with applications like this. They have a steep learning curve, for whatever reason. Everything else is great. It has integrated very well into our data warehouse. I find it easy to build dashboards and create stuff. So, I am happy with it. It is just the end user has that pretty common steady complaint, but we are overcoming it. 

Stability is good. It is really stable. We rarely have issues with MicroStrategy going down. 

Scaling is something that we also are going to have to do a lot of in 2018, because our user base is going to increase. We are connecting to other people that are producing more. Up until now we have had a stable base of users, so scaling has not even been a thing. 

We have grown along with it pretty well, so I have not had any issues. 

We will occasionally reach out to tech support. One of our Dev guys actually used to work for MicroStrategy, so he is our guru. He will occasionally reach out to MicroStrategy for error bug fixing, etc. However, it is very few and far in-between.

I was not involved in the initial setup. 

We are going to be looking for the next platform release. That is what we are hoping for, and so I will be involved in that. 

Explore the Self-Service tool functions to rely on cubes. I will also recommend to teach your users to become comfortable with the tool. Since we started doing this in 2017, rather than having our data team build everything, such as all the reports, we have started pushing it more towards the users. The response has been phenomenal. Create Self-Service tools and "force" your users to use them. 

We do not use it to embed analytics into the applications. Most of the people use the web access. We are working on actually building out more enhancements to our whole data warehouse. Right now, 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. 

We have not used any of the APIs, but that is what we have just started to explore. A lot of the stuff that we have done, unfortunately, has been a lot of manual stuff. At least on our end, we have ETL intensive processes. We have data sense, which we write ourselves then have to send them. We have to create some job framework and all this really time consuming stuff. So, one thing we actually did start talking about recently is how to get more API-focused work done. That is going to be our goal for this year. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: responsiveness. That is probably one of the big ones. We are a relatively small company. Our parent company is huge, but we operate autonomously from them, so we are small compared to them. Being able to reach out and still have access to people that will help us, even though we are small, is really a big thing for us.

• Sharing objects, which helps the end user with self-service reporting.
• Security filter controls the data-level security in the report for sharing with more than one partner.
• Access Control List controls the object-level security for accessing by user.
• OLAP functionality:
  
  • Multidimensional analysis: OLAP helps the user gain an insight on the data coming from different sources.
  • OLAP helps faster execution of complex analytical and ad-hoc queries.
  • Allows trend analysis periodically.
  • Drill down abilities.
• MicroStrategy Desktop is one of the popular analytic tools that can be migrated to a server for publishing for other users.

• * Reduced IT dependency. *
• Using template
• Users (Business Analyst) are using this canned report template for their reporting based on their info and save that report in their own folder. And they are using subscription to deliver that report to their stakeholder.
• Allowing user to create report from scratch. Train them what to use and what to not use. Once they familiar these then they don’t dependent on IT.
• Introducing the Dashboard; provide enough information in the dashboard. Once user started using those dashboard then they don’t dependent on IT.
• Now most of the request from users like below;
• - New metric (custom metric)
• - New filters (custom filter)
• - Complex reports where they can’t create by themselves.

• MicroStrategy Desktop: Personal analytical tool that helps users to do their analytical work using multiple sources of data. However, this tool needs to improve to add more analytical functions, and an easy solution to use third-party graphs and maps.
• Multi-level security: Currently, MicroStrategy provides multiple ways of access (Standard, Windows, Database, LDAP, etc.) the MicroStrategy tool (use either one of them), but not combined solutions.
• Big data solution: Currently, MicroStrategy is providing a very good big data solution for MicroStrategy Desktop but not an easy server-level solution.

* Reduced IT dependency. *

n Using template

o Users (Business Analyst) are using this canned report template for their reporting based on their info and save that report in their own folder. And they are using subscription to deliver that report to their stakeholder.

n Allowing user to create report from scratch. Train them what to use and what to not use. Once they familiar these then they don’t dependent on IT.

n Introducing the Dashboard; provide enough information in the dashboard. Once user started using those dashboard then they don’t dependent on IT.

Now most of the request from users like below;

- New metric (custom metric)

- New filters (custom filter)

- Complex reports where they can’t create by themselves.z

We have been using the solution for about eight years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

I would rate the technical support as about 7/10.

We were previously using Crystal Reports. We switched because of the analytical solution offered with this product.

Initial setup is straightforward. Step-by-step configuration information has been provided by the vendor.

I would advise others to go for the Named User license instead of the Server Level license initially. License pricing is moderate.

I am not aware of any other evaluated solutions.

Go for it.

In version 10, Visual Insight had a major improvement. Now, it is a very powerful self-service BI. In version 9, you still needed Flash on your machine, but version 10 is based on HTML5. It is very easy to build your dashboard and once you save it, it is available on all devices, including your iPad.

MicroStrategy is using what they call a meta-database, where you store all your business logic and you can re-use it in any report or dashboard. This helped us a lot. You now have one version of the truth and it is re-usable. You don't need to build complex calculations in your Excel sheet, as we were doing in the past, with the risk that someone made a slight variation to the business rules.

The dashboard and reports are what they call pixel-perfect, which means you configure a fixed size for your report and align everything based on the fixed size. But now you have various devices with different screen sizes, and it would be smarter to have a flexible layout which will scale according your device.

We have been using MicroStrategy for five years, starting with version 9.

MicroStrategy is running very stable but demands solid hardware.

So far, we did not have issues with scalability, but we never had more than 50 users using it at the same time.

Support is for technical issues, e.g., my installation does not work or I have a bug. It doesn't help you if you want to define new business rules and you would like to know what is the best way of doing this. Support will forward you to their consultants for these kind of questions.

We had Excel and a tool called Excelcius, which was just a tool to create a better looking dashboard. But your intelligence was still in Excel. We wanted to remove the intelligence out of the Excel sheets and into a central database.

MicroStrategy has a steep learning curve and you need to spend time in training before you can use the full potential.

The license is based on a fee per user, but recently they did decrease prices.

We were looking at SAP BO and Cognos.

MicroStrategy is what they call an enterprise solution, which means you can use it for reports, dashboards, self-service BI and mobile devices. The meta-database is a real advantage because of the reusability of your business rules, but you need to put time and effort into training; otherwise, you will get very frustrated.

The most valuable features are:

• A single integrated architecture: develop once, deploy anywhere.
• MicroStrategy Mobile: best in class mobile integration
• MicroStrategy Office: no need to connect to MicroStrategy web/mobile; open Microsoft Office documents, worksheets and refresh data as and when required
• MicroStrategy BigData Gateway: seamless connectivity to major Hadoop distributions
• Pixel perfect dynamic dashboards: high quality dashboards for board-level and management reporting
• Intelligent Cubes: load data once a day, no need to connect to the database.

We tried one of the leading reporting/BI tools in the market, but was it was not scaleable for enterprise levels. MicroStrategy does scale for enterprise levels.

There are a couple of areas that could be improved. Formatting the dashboard takes lot of time, which increases IT costs.

1. Dashboard development is time consuming, if you are doing corporate themes with a similar look and feel across all your visualizations. Starting Version 10.2, MicroStrategy provided features to re-use themes and templates across multiple dashboards. This does helps a little when you have grid/graph types of dashboards. However, when every visualization is different, it takes time to achieve pixel perfect visualizations. Having a Visualization Expert in the initial design stage helps with annotations and scales used within different panels, borders, etc., but it does take time to develop.
2. Tableau visualizations provide targeting from different data points to very different visualizations. There are some visualizations in Tableau which are much better than MicroStrategy.

We would also like to see more visualizations within Visual Insight. The existing visualizations are not at par with Tableau. I believe they were supposed to match Tableau capabilities, but they fall short on that. However, Visual Insight is better for end users who want to develop their own analysis and visualizations.

I’ve been using this product for 13 years; from version 7.5.2.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would rate technical support a six out of 10 (one-worst 10-best). Based on the level of support (Gold) we had, I have found tech support a bit sluggish. We had already resolved issues with workarounds before technical support came up with solutions.

We were using Tableau, but it had scalability issues and per-user licensing costs.

We did have some issues, but good documentation from MicroStrategy and the Technotes helped resolve most of them.

Pricing/licensing is little bit on the high side. Businesses buying this product should plan in advance what licenses to purchase. I would advise you to hire a contractor or free lancer with previous MicroStrategy experience to plan your project correctly.

If you have a user base that is going to increase over time, this product is best suited. Web-user licenses are unlimited for users who do not wish to create their own reports or dashboards and just want to view, download, and use.

Intelligent Cubes: not all database environments are optimized for reporting, nor do all BI lanes have access to a proper data warehouse. Often the BI tools are directly used against operational tables from the source. Intelligent Cubes provide the ability to pre-cache the results for non-real-time reporting to give the illusion of real-time response from reports (especially dashboards).

It provides a single point of reporting from many data sources.

List of improvements that this product lacks:

• The ability to export and make the Intelligent Cubes shareable with other reporting tools.
• Expand on the capabilities of the Visual Insight dashboard creation wizard to include more complex document templates to make it more appealing for business users who need greater sophistication but less development time nor reliance to BI developers.

I have used it for 1.5 years at my current company, and for 15.5 years in my entire career.

In the long history of this product, version 7.2.3 is the most stable. Next to that, it is 9.4.1.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Unfortunately, over the past five years, fewer capable first-level technical support technicians have been able to answer my questions. The quality of technical support expertise has degraded and there is more reliance on the MicroStrategy community users to help each other than from the vendor.

Setup is overall fairly easy. However, changes in the metadata/statistics tables from one version to the next can benefit from better documentation to give clients a heads up.

Like any enterprise implementation, clients should first take time to analyze the needs of their organization, the level of expertise of their user base and how reports are to be delivered to the end users. Before doing any future upgrades, they should do a sizing exercise by gauging how much server resource is used historically and the projected use over the next 12 months. In particular, many companies underestimate the size and total number of Intelligent Cubes that need to be preprocessed each day.

What I’ve mentioned elsewhere: Planning and sizing is a must, as well as thoroughly understanding the user base and their reporting delivery needs.

MicroStrategy can read data from a wide variety of different DBMS and web services, producing optimized SQL code for each of them. It's a one stop solution for BI: after 10 years using it I still haven't found a report or graph that can't be done with the suite.

We use it for any kind of reporting and analysis. It helped manage the institution, reduce costs and provide better service to the patients (which are our customers...)

The web is full of very interesting data, and the number of web services providing datasets is increasing. I would like to see Support for OAuth 1.0 and 2.0 to be able to attach external data sources. I'd like to have Support for JSON data. I hope HTML5 and JavaScript will be used extensively in next versions, to substitute the Flash based components.

Since 2003

The software is feature rich and clearly not easy to start with. I believe the installation and the setup of the data model is the most difficult part; once this is done, the rest of the deployment is very easy. Clients run on Windows, on Android and on iOS seamlessly, there is a web based interface that can be used from most browsers.

No. I have been using the software both on Windows and on headless Linux, and had no stability issues fo far. Memory availability is very important, as in any other data intensive software.

We don't have Petabytes scale databases. Our information systems are in the Gigabytes order of magnitude. We were able to handle our data volume with ease. Number of concurrent users is in the hundreds, no problems so far.

We solve most of the issues with the knowledge base or the discussion forums. To date we had no interaction with the customer service apart from some help we needed for upgrading from version 7 to version 9.

The knowledge base is extensive and covers 90% of the problems we may face. For the rest, we manage to find alternatives thanks to networking, blogs, forums, etc.

We are still using multi vendors solutions. There are historical datawarehouses that need to be maintained (Oracle BI, Actuate, Microsoft BI), but all new development is done with MicroStrategy. Reason for that is mainly practical and economical. We prefer paying licenses to one signle vendor whenever posible. We are also testing the new free Desktop version for a reduced number of users.

The setup is complex. After the installation you need to configure several aspect of the suite: metadata, connections, Project settings and start developing objects. I suggest buying a book or reading the manual thoroughly. There is a very good book on Amazon "Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy" that covers every aspect of the setup and initial phases of the Project (http://amzn.to/1by3HAO).

We implement everything in house due to the sensitivity of data.

I'd rather not disclose it.

We evaluated Oracle, QlickView, Tableau, Microsoft BI

Training training training. Especially in the beginning phase, a wrong choice can be very costly.

Our primary use case is to use the business intelligence tool for court data, to make the court and judges work more efficiently, faster, and less expensive.

It's performing well, we are expecting a major breakthrough this year regarding the analytics bot.

The flexibility.

And looking ahead in 2018, we expect to be using dashboards and, hopefully, Dossier.

I would try to make it a little more basic, user-friendly. In terms of the UX, it's a bit sluggish there.

You should ask me this question when we get to version 10.10.

We have had downtime with the current version but I wouldn't put that on MicroStrategy. Maybe it's MicroStrategy's fault, but I wouldn't it put it that way.

I think the scalability is excellent.

We haven't used tech support directlly, we have our partners to help us.

Regarding rolling out self-service to business teams with MicroStrategy, we have been thinking about it, but I doubt that we will.

As for having the analytic capability in a single platform like MicroStrategy, versus many-point solutions, we naturally prefer one platform. This is because of a single, standard mode. We don't have to scatter and search through eleven different platforms when there's only one there.

We are thinking about investing in the mobile platform of MicroStrategy but I can't say positive, we will, or negative, we won't. I don't know at this point.

For me, the most important criteria when selecting vendor, in general, are 

• flexibility
• and their Interest in work with us - I like devotion to our interests.

You should have a clear goal, and focus on a single thing for the tool, to yield the best results as fast as possible.