MicroStrategy Reviews

MicroStrategy's biggest advantage is its metadata. It is the building block of the tool, which holds the foundation of the business. Not many of its competitors have this feature in their tools. Metadata will help in scalability, organizing objects and also help enhance their dashboard and report performance.

The learning curve is comparatively small and, finally, they really improved their visualizations in Visual Insights.

Data Visualization helps the company's C-level people to make decisions regarding their business, both small scale and large scale.

They could improve the Enterprise Manager and Operations Manager components. Enterprise Manager is another component that comes MicroStrategy that acts another project inside it. Though it is a great feature, it needs lot of polishing of the objects such as attributes, metrics and others. They could also improve the pre-built reports that they provide with the component.

I have used it since 2010.

As long as the initial setup is done properly, there is nothing to worry in the long run. Users have to make sure they keep the product updated with patches.

I have not encountered any scalability issues; one of the best things about the product is its scalability.

Technical support is 3/5. Elite group customers get the best technical support vs regular customers, whose tickets get delayed.

I did not previously use a different solution; this was my first business intelligence tool.

Initial setup used to be very time consuming and complex (because of so many components) but over the years, they have trimmed it down to minutes.

It’s a great tool and expensive, as well. That’s why small businesses will find it difficult to afford.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated SAP Business Objects, Tableau, IBM Cognos, and QlikView.

You need a strong and well-experienced team to successfully implement and use the tool at its best.

Centralized server and repository: It reduces the development and maintenance effort for the team, and provides a unified user experience.

MicroStrategy also provides a full set of BI features, including:

• OLAP reports
• Dashboard
• Data discovery
• Visualization
• Scheduling and alert
• Comprehensive security control and more.

All these features are built on the same architecture and repository, and support unix-like OS. Thus, we can easily fulfill a user's needs, and align with all the system and security policies of my organization.

All the business units rely on the information provided by MicroStrategy for their decisions on daily basis. This increases data accuracy and saves time to build reports.

The design process of the mobile dashboard development. Now, MicroStrategy's mobile dashboard is still not a RESTful design, which means we need to design a different layout according to the device's screen size. It costs us more effort if we want to support the mobile and tablet at the same time. It would be better if MicroStrategy supported a RESTful dashboard design pattern.

More than 10 years.

No.

No.

A nine out of 10.

It is somehow complicated for a user/analyst without a DWDM background. But for an experienced DWDM modeler, it would be an easy task.

If your are looking for an enterprise level BI product for the standard BI platform in your organization, MicroStrategy would be the best choice.

• Mobility: Until very recently, I ran the marketing department for my online gaming company. The ability to review reports, have alarms, drill through the data and make actions (referred to as TRX services) was invaluable. I could decide on the go or at home which campaigns to run the next day, which products to advertise or which partners to invest on. My business is quite volatile and fast changing and so need to be the tools that manage it.

• Usher allowed us to let go of slow connections to VPN, speeding up the tasks probably by 10-fold and providing an improved security layer.
• Transactional services allowed us to code triggers to our affiliate system, CRM, and reporting services. This allowed us to clean up the data on the go, start and stop campaigns and partners, and better relay data to other departments. It's a strong offering that most BI systems lack.
• Visual Insights: This one is where most tools focus on, and although MicroStrategy is not the best – I rate Tableau and Qlik better – it is definitely up there; easy slice and dice of information and visually appealing reports for the non-techie businessman. :)

The main transformations came in the form of mobility, security and self-service.
Smaller benefits came, for instance, from the disappearance of point-in-time presentations for board members with Office integration.

Publishing centralized reports allowed a consolidation of metrics and interdepartmental cooperation and efficiency.

There are ways to go in the areas of newer technologies (big data), better integration with other visualization tools. For instance, MicroStrategy does not provide real-time reporting and integration with other services (social media listening, for instance).

Transactional services should have a big overhaul in terms of delivery, tracking, rollback and documentation.

On the major improvements I would recommend – I would say last but not least – is a review of the UX of the whole backend, as it looks a lot like it’s from the early 2000s.

I have used it for three years.

We encountered stability issues in the beginning; the learning curve for troubleshooting is not small. However, after training on the MicroStrategy server was done, we found the platform very reliable.

Not for our use case, yet. We use MicroStrategy just as the content delivery layer; all our backend is done using a Hortonworks "BigData" (dislike the term btw) stack.

Technical support is good.

We previously used several different solutions. :) I’ve been in business for a while. I actually for this business never switched, as Lottoland was a new business. The reason I didn’t use the technologies that I used in the past such as Oracle, SQL Server with Crystal Reports, Jaspersoft, Cognos, QlikView, SAP BO and so on..., is that I had looked at MSTR’s potential, but their pricing structure was far too complicated and convoluted. When that changed, it tipped the scales to choose them as our provider.

From a technical perspective, the default installation is quite straightforward.

However, initial setup complexity depends on the eye of the beholder I guess. I started with around 70 end users, 120 reports/dashboards across the company, one production server of MSTR with passive fallback, and transactional services for writeback on our data warehouse.

MSTR has no contact with nor at any point was used to manage the data warehouse or our data sources.

Pricing, as I understand it, is now based on:

• Users
• Cores
• A separate price for mobile

I have no advice, I'm afraid; it’s quite straightforward. As a rule of my company, we keep costs low so strictly report readers have no access; "inquirers", power users, and technical staff have full access. If at any point the cores become cheaper, we would switch. :) Then they have to reassess access strategies, as it becomes more important the time users access the platform rather than the amount. We'll never be in that situation because we run on commodity servers (we prefer more servers with more cores rather than a big mainframe). If I have any advice, it is to go cloud if possible; due to our regulations, we cannot.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated several other options, the usual subjects: BO, SQL Server, Tableau, Qlick,...

If you implement a specific refresh window, be very wary of refresh times and memory consumption; system refreshes block any other action on the system. Other than that, the platform is quite intuitive for anyone who has BI solution implementation experience.

MicroStrategy is the best of all enterprise solutions on a price/value axis.

It is performing very well. We meet once a week in the organization and talk about the performance of the prior week. There are a lot of things going on. We sell a lot of product to a lot of customers for a lot of different reasons. Therefore, MicroStrategy gives us the opportunity to dig into the data and find out what the story was.

It has certainly given people the ability to ask more questions and get more answers. It has made them even hungrier for the data.

In 2018, we are eager to start the mobile platform, because we are going to create a sense of urgency in developing more tools, then just creating more reporting solutions.

I like the user interface and the experience has been great.

The subscription model is excellent. About half of our reporting comes out of the subscription, and from there, the ease of use in dragging and dropping reporting objects.

Business systems are always going to have reporting solutions. A single platform is a good way to centralize it. I do not want to take data out of the database system unless I need to. When I do need to, that is when I am going to use MicroStrategy.

We have rolled out Self-Service to our business teams. It has been pretty good. It can be a challenge and change, but when people see why we are offering them a solution that is governed by the analytics team, they get a better sense of saying, "Okay, all the work is done for me. I can just get this, and access it."

There are a lot of offerings, and we are not fully using everything to its advantage.

There are some challenges in our organization on how we store the data. However, if you are throwing something at it and expecting it to give you the one true answer, you got to do some homework before that.

Their business practices and the solution itself are in sync with our business strategies, so I am very confident.

The scalability is great. It was one of the selling points for us on MicroStrategy.

We have not scaled yet, but we should be soon.

Tech support has been great, very responsive. We usually hear back within a day. We usually email them and that works out perfect. The right person always gets back to us.

We usually hear about updates every couple of months. 

We were actually giving people SQL access to the database and certain people had it, but not everybody. While we had bottlenecks before, the bottleneck just got wider and the need to consume data got bigger. We really needed a more holistic solution that was governed and defined by a team to get the one single truth.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We had some help installing it, but it made sense for what we were doing.

The price was good. We have had great support along the way. 

We actually had Birst and Qlik on the shortlist. What made us choose MicroStrategy was its longer term benefits. While the other solutions seemed flashier, we would actually grow out of those solutions within a year or two.

The biggest thing is to think about the people involved with the software process, not just the people installing the software or administrating the software, but the people who are going to use it. Then, you need understand how you maintain adoption throughout implementation and post-implementation. 

How do you keep people hungry for the data? You have to make yourself available. It is critical for whatever solution you choose, because if you do not offer adoption, ways to help train, or think about the end use cases, then you are dead in the water.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Scalability
• The administrative tools
• Managing the reporting solutions
• The user interface. 

Pretty much everybody needs to be pleased.

We use it for reporting, it's enterprise-wide reporting. There are tons of different things, some scheduled by MicroStrategy. Those old-fashioned reports, PDFs, Excel, and even portfolio and task stuff. Works for many industries now, different business lines, finance, supply chain, etc.

MicroStrategy has become an obsolete product. It might still be around for another 10, 15, maybe even 20 years, but I wouldn't recommend using it for any specific use cases. Unless you already have a MicroStrategy license, in which case it might be worth sticking with MicroStrategy for cost reasons. However, I wouldn't buy new MicroStrategy licenses.

There are definitely some drawbacks. The biggest one is the complete lack of a community around MicroStrategy compared to other BI tools. This can be a huge problem from an IT department head's perspective. If a developer gets stuck on some task, they might spend hours or even days trying to solve a problem because there's no helpful information online. 

With tools like Tableau, Power BI, or Looker, you can easily find solutions and ask questions in forums or ChatGPT (OpenAI). It's almost impossible with MicroStrategy.

Another drawback is the lack of a talent pool. It's very difficult to find developers with MicroStrategy expertise. There are barely any online courses or tutorials available, and even searching for information can be frustrating. You won't find educational videos at the top of the search results; instead, you'll see stuff about Bitcoin investments. This lack of focus on development is a major downside. 

I've been quite disappointed with MicroStrategy's investments in recent years, with them prioritizing discounts over research and development.

So, in terms of functionality, MicroStrategy is alright. It's a solid BI tool and can handle most tasks you'd expect. The problem lies outside the tool itself. You need a strong community to learn from and keep up with the rapid development of BI tools. 

Unfortunately, MicroStrategy lacks that community support. You're either stuck figuring things out yourself or paying expensive fees to MicroStrategy consultants for help. This isn't the case with tools like Power BI or Tableau, where you can find experts readily available. In addition to other drawbacks, it's not cost-effective either. 

The on-premise version used to be the only option, which meant buying licenses for CPU units. While cloud migration with SkyLink in MicroStrategy Cloud makes scaling easier, it still requires initial setup and configuration. This button with Azure or AWS can take a couple of weeks, depending on your data sources and desired outcomes. Compared to other solutions where you can start quickly and iterate, MicroStrategy's approach might be seen as slower and less agile.

I have been working with this solution for ten years. I worked with the cloud version of MicroStrategy.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten because MicroStrategy is generally stable, but every new version seems to have bugs.  

For scalability, I would rate the standard on-premises version, I'd rate a two out of ten. But the cloud version is a seven out of ten.

In Europe, I know of around 700 organizations. The US will have much more.

You can pay for customer service and get help with specific issues. They have different tiers of support, like first-line and so on. You submit a ticket and wait for a resolution. If it's simple, you might find some help. But for complex issues, they might just push it to the next product release.

So, overall, the support is pretty good. 

Positive

I currently use other tools like Business Objects, Power BI, SQL Server Reporting Services, and others.

I didn't choose MicroStrategy. It was already in place at my previous company, and I inherited it. 

It does require deployment, and with Azure's architecture, you need a central computing unit like MicroStrategy Intelligent Server. So, that must be installed and configured. 

Once it is set up, you can start integrating data into it and building dashboards. Setting this up takes time, but it has the advantage.

The advantage of this approach is the enterprise scale of the solution. You have time to carefully consider your implementation and follow a more waterfall-style approach, eliminating and minimizing errors. 

This is unlike some other solutions where you can start quickly with Excel files and move data into BI tools rapidly. While that's convenient for speed, it can lead to neglecting a solid, scalable approach for the future.

The deployment took around a couple of weeks. It takes around two weeks to configure everything. Moreover, setting up the project and defining the data sources and desired outcomes can also impact the timeline.

The Azure part has a publicly available flat pricing structure. But for the on-premises version, you negotiate directly with MicroStrategy. They're often willing to offer significant discounts, up to 80% off the original price. The pricing list itself is not publicly accessible, so it's a bit opaque.

Overall, I would rate the solution a five out of ten. 

The feature I found most valuable is the drop and drag functionality available for the relevant stuff you can use to link the relevant data.

The areas that have room for improvement in MicroStrategy are mainly related to building additional tools. Specifically, the embedding process has been a bit of a struggle. It's crucial to correctly populate the embedded components, especially considering my work in the banking environment. For instance, in the banking environment, there are branches in different regions. If you don't necessarily do it in the necessary SQL operations to populate the data, it becomes difficult to build an embedded React app or any other application. So, that's definitely an area for improvement.

So, we can list additional customization options as one of the improvement areas.

Additionally, I feel that the pricing is a little bit too expensive. That is the main reason why people are not using MicroStrategy in South Africa.

In the next release, I believe the additional customization options can help the product. Also, the pricing is too costly currently. Even that can be worked upon.

I have used MicroStrategy for about a year. We currently use version 11. 

We did not have any stability issues. So, I would rate MicroStrategy a ten out of ten.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. Within our banking organization, around 300 plus users are using MicroStrategy.

When it comes to technical support, we did have some issues. We waited a long time for someone from the support team to get back to us. 

Neutral

The deployment process took less than a month. However, being in the banking environment, there are numerous processes involved that can impact the actual deployment timeline, etcetera.

We are waiting to switch to Microsoft Power BI because MicroStrategy is too costly. So, as for the pricing, I would rate it three out of ten, where one is high price, and ten is low price.

MicroStrategy is a nice tool to have. The support, the visualization, and everything else are very nice. In fact, it is more enhanced than Microsoft Power BI.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

The primary use case of the solution is for management reporting and analytics across many different subject areas.

It's an information delivery mechanism to pull all of our data into one central tool, allowing us to look at key metrics across the organization.

The most valuable features are the scalability and management reporting.

They need to do a better job in its ability to allow end-users to produce their own reports, metrics, and self-service business intelligence.

MicroStrategy is a complex tool and you need to have a MicroStrategy architect. 

In the next release, I would like to see better visualization and more service audience or functionality.

I have been using MicroStategy for ten years.

They have recently changed the version numbering and they go by years now. We are using version 2019 in the cloud.

It's very stable and we have not experienced any issues.

This solution is the most scalable BI platform in the world. There is no other BI platform that is in its class. We have used all of them.

It's used by our analysts, our franchises, and by our executives.

We have 40 users inside the company and 4,000 users outside the company.

We plan to increase the usage of MicroStrategy. We are probably going to go as high as 8,000 users.

We don't leverage technical support a lot because we have our technical resources on-site, but if we do call them, they are good at responding.

Previously, the main solutions that we used were Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, and Amazon Quick Site.

We were using Oracle OBIEE, which is a Business Intelligence Enterprise. We moved from OBIEE to MicroStrategy.

The set up takes a while, but once it's set up it's an automatic mode.

We hired someone that had the consulting experience and became our permanent team member.

We have the best pricing available, but we can't disclose that information.

We have two ways of using this solution. We have an SSBI, which is self-service intelligence. We also have an enterprise-class, where we publish everything on the web, from tablets to phones, for our end-user base who are franchises.

It is the best for large scale deployments, but you cannot become a MicroStrategy shop without having the right technical resources on the team.

Don't even think about it, if you don't want to spend the money for the right person.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are Reynolds American. We work in product supplies scenarios. In our environment, we work with any kind of volume data. We use MicroStrategy to deliver reporting to our trade reps who go into outlets, so account-level reporting. That's going to be more of our embedded reporting. That is an application that we created in Salesforce that links into MicroStrategy and links back and forth between the in-house application we've created.

But then, a large majority of our reporting is going to be that enterprise application where we have a fixed reporting environment on a monthly basis. We deliver reports to a large majority of our cooperate departments, anywhere from 300 to 1000 users.

We also have second, ad hoc environment, which is more of a weekly environment, where we typically do the same delivery of those static reports. But there is that component of the ad hoc where we facilitate the back-end development of all of the objects going through the STLC to Git, to production, so our business users can actually utilize what's available to them in the production environment. They can then take the next steps, pulling back those insights off of the data that we provide them.

I think one of the greatest things about MicroStrategy is their holistic approach to business intelligence. They don't put priority on one component of report development over document development, over administrative functionality, and security. I think they have a very holistic application. 

They offer 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. 

Regarding our users, the insights that they can gain, how quickly they can gather information, has been a huge benefit for us from MicroStrategy.

I think ease of use is definitely a benefit to our users, from an administrative perspective, as well as a business end-user perspective. I found that it's very easy to get users into the system, get them familiar. 

The biggest part is the caveat of our data. We have more trouble getting people to learn our data than we do the structures, the navigation, manipulation, and all of these things that you do as a report developer and end-user. Most of them are familiar with Excel and it's just so similar that they can pick it up very intuitively. When you start talking about the really specialized data sets that we have, that's when it starts to become a little bit more hairy, so that's not really a MicroStrategy component.

In terms of self-service, we make use of Enterprise Manager. We've been trying to involve it a little bit more with some of our actual rep data, so we can start to look at that enterprise report utilization on a geographical scale, departmental scale. We've made a few enhancements to our Enterprise Manager system to allow that 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. 

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.

Personally, looking ahead at 2018, we're getting into the administrative side of our cloud implementations. We're really trying to move to the cloud in 2018, so I see myself getting more familiar with MicroStrategy on AWS Console. And even if we intend to go to the on-prem on AWS, I see us getting more familiar, and it's not necessarily a MicroStrategy component, but structuring the infrastructure of the server in such a way that we're cost-effective, we're maximizing our utilization when we can. I think that is going to be a large component for us in 2018, though it's not necessarily specifically MicroStrategy.

Then 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. 

So VI, Dossier. 

If we can get on 10.9 this year, I would like to but we're not big on feature releases and we had difficulty with 10.9 on sandbox, so were hesitant right now.

Then our cloud implementation, coming in 2018, is going to be a big play on the 10.9, I think. There's no point in us upgrading and then going up the cloud two weeks later. It's a lot of stuff, but that's our focus.

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. 

What can they do embolden that system, to make it more intuitive? But also, to supply that support system so that they can get a higher level of reporting.

I know they're working on the telemetry initiative right now, and they have given us some reports in that system, the Enterprise Manager space, that really do help us look at those insights. But the biggest piece is that we can't get to them by ourselves, that's the problem. We don't see it by ourselves. We can't get to them by ourselves because there are association-joins and things that we don't understand, that are causing either cross-joins or any other crazy thing that you could think of. 

It's kind of like a trial and error deal, to see what's coming back. You look at the SQL, make sure it's a synched. It can be a little difficult to get in there and really figure things out.

In terms of features for a future release, I have a whole list somewhere. 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. 

They have a long road ahead of them to be able to accomplish it. But, being that we're in a very regulated industry, it is incredibly useful for manufacturing, for research and development, for those in Earth sciences, environmental sciences, those folks who have a lot of SPI, a lot of that data that they want to restrict users having access to, I think that's a selling point that they don't have right now. I think is going to take them out of the Earth sciences space as a true competitor. There are so many out there, and it's a space that they have an opportunity in, and that row-level of security was a big component of what we would do.

Then there's significant digits, which my client team will probably laugh about if I told you that, which gave us a lot of difficulty trying to get to a scientific way to look at decimals, but it's not straightforward and it's a pain. 

Then a few of those consolidations that I mentioned. 

Then, if they could beef up Enterprise Manager - if I could go to my client team and tell them this report has been run three times in the last three months by these three people and they say, "Well, those three people, what are they doing? Why are they running it? Get it out of our system. That's a waste of our time. It's a waste of our resources. It's taking up space." So if we can get to that next level in Enterprise Manager, I think that would be huge for us as well.

We are running into performance issues on the database side right now. We have MicroStrategy issues. We upped to the named user licenses, no issues. Then we introduced some new things to the environment, which is causing, again, database issues.

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. 

We had some failures on data load, whether this is a component of MicroStrategy or how our service is configured, I'm not sure. We just had some issues keeping our data loads running from an Enterprise Manager perspective, but from the production Intelligent Server, stability is fantastic. We've really not had many issues.

Scalability seems great. It wasn't great when we were on the core licensing, to be completely honest, because we were restricted to a single core across 2,500 users, so we moved to named user licensing, giving us eight cores - no problems, whatsoever. You start to think about how you move to the cloud, those eight cores become 16, then become 64 very quickly - not an issue. Scalability on that end, of the Intelligent Server, I think that's huge. We need to figure out the database component of that, but I don't think what you're asking about.

We have 24/7 technical support. They're incredible. We have the extended support plan, so we have actually an account rep assigned to us. If you go for the extended support plan, it's unbelievable. You email him and you've got someone talking to you within an hour; they're working to solve your problem. They'll go through iterations. Sometimes, they'll be taking shots in the dark, but it's IT, it happens; shut it off, turn it back on, things like, you've got to do the basics first. But they have some incredible resources on their team.

The majority of people that I talk to, that I get onboard with, absolutely understand our business model, how we incorporate MicroStrategy into it. But it's the occasional person who you get and you say, "Hey, I already did this troubleshooting stuff, etc." and they say, "Well, why don't you try this?" and you tell them, "Well, if you read my paragraph, I've done that three times." It's just like one in 10 that you get someone like that, but I think you're going to have that everywhere. Then you've got some people who know us by name, they know who we are. When we request support, they are the people who come to us. Creating that relationship with the support team has been absolutely incredible for us.

We have had production problems, Enterprise Manager problems, and they're right there every step of the way, going through our installations, making sure things are coming through properly. In the event that we do have problems, they are always there to support. I think that's been huge for us.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but I have been involved in upgrades. The upgrade from 10.4 to 10.8, simple click of the button, but it just didn't go through as we had anticipated. There's really no explanation as to why. We ran it again and it went through without a hit. Again, that was one of those problems where we don't really know what caused it, we don't know why our installation wasn't working very well.

Then when we attempted to upgrade from 10.8 to 10.9 on our sandbox server, we spent roughly a month and a half trying to do that, completely and totally unsuccessfully. I don't know why. Again, I think that might be a component of how our servers are structured, the way our registries are structured, the way our security interacts with MicroStrategy, but it's a problem. We're working on that.

Being in the position that I'm in, I see the benefit of having the disparate locations. I love web. Web is great for the business user. I love Developer. Developer is great for me. I do not want my business users touching Developer. I don't even want them to know it exists. 

Honestly, MicroStrategy came and did a demo for our clients, and part of the reason they didn't get the contract is because they showed Developer. The business users got so confused that it just was not good. But for someone like me, highly technical, there's just so much more functionality. 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. But then you have your business users' side. 

Then I think there's another component: You've got all of your administrative apps in the back-end like Enterprise Manager, System Manager, Command Manager, Object Manager, and they're disparate.

I was talking to them a little bit yesterday about trying to bring all of this together under one platform. They've done a touch of that with System Manager, but not to the point that it's easily replicable to just run Command Manager out of System Manager. The only reason to use System Manager is if you have a large workflow. Otherwise, it will be quicker to go to Command Manager. Now, if they could kind of bundle that all under one umbrella, I think it would be possible. I think it would be huge from an administrative standpoint, giving your developers, giving the DBAs that level of access in one location that would really bring it to the next level. 

Then if you want to take it even a step further, you can start to think of incorporating Workstation, but that might be a little bit too much in one application, so we'll let them bite off what they can chew for now.

In terms of mobile, I plan on pitching and pushing mobile pretty hard. We have an initiative coming in 2018. We're going to replace all of our trade laptops. We don't use mobile devices today, but we will then replace those laptops in two years. That means that we need to get into the mobile space within a year, we need to validate that everything works, and then, quite frankly, we're probably going to have to redesign many of the applications that we have around that mobile platform. We use Salesforce for some of our trade applications which then import to MicroStrategy to pull in some information. With the new Transaction Services, where documents are now, and where VIs and Dossiers are heading, we could get to a point where we're no longer using that Salesforce application, and we're running a full-fledged customized application out of MicroStrategy. So, I would like to get to that.

That will be a large-scale push on my company, but the mobile platform: absolutely. I will be pushing very hard for that.

One of the beautiful things about getting into the cloud space is, it's already there. It's just a matter of us getting it tested, messing around with it, getting the credentials squared away. We've been through conversations of how to get security for people who don't have Active Directory on an iOS device. That's where we are in our talks right now, but mobile is definitely a big, big thing in our sights.

What I appreciate in a vendor is integrity. It's a fault and it's a benefit. Our team at MicroStrategy is honest. When they can't do something, they will very easily, flat out, come out and say, "I don't think I can do that. I will put this amount of effort into trying to figure out how we could do it. I'll put out a tech note, see what kind of pickup I get back." That's one of the incredible things, because you're not having someone who's saying, "Well, I can do this. I can do that. I can do this," and then you're thinking, "Well, he said he could do it," so now I could do it. Let me go out and spend X amount of hours to go and do something where he's going to pull in a third-party, spend $60,000, and complete something. 

I think that it has been great for us to be able to level-set our expectations as to what we can and cannot accomplish, what's realistic, what is pushing us to the next level. When they spot something, they'll say, "That's wrong." They'll laugh at us and literally say, "What are you doing?" and I love that. I think our client team is fantastic. They're unbelievably knowledgeable. Integrity, intelligence, and honestly. Those are my criteria right there.

Overall I rate MicroStrategy a nine out of 10 because of a lot those things I mentioned before. We have issues where we don't really know what's going on. I think it goes back to that "B" rating I gave earlier. There are a few pieces that we're trying to get a handle on that we just can't. I think there are a few enhancements that they could do to make their system better. A "B" rating - I am very judgmental, I do not take things lightly. 

Then also, they need to work on their license structure. They are not competitive against somebody like SAP BusinessObjects.

We had a quote that was almost a third the price, coming from SAP BusinessObjects, and it's not a better platform. It's not cheaper. They do concurrent user licensing, while MicroStrategy does named user licensing, and that was literally the only difference. But it made a $500,000 difference. They've got to do something to make themselves more competitive. Maybe it's assessing your business users and what you really expect them to use, and maybe giving a reduced price on that. But they are already giving us a 60% discount and they were still a million or so above, over a three-year time period. That doesn't account for synergies as we get from on-site resources that are already available, and things of that nature, but I thought that that was a big, big deficit for them.

Regarding advice to a colleague who is looking to implement this type of solution, first, if you can get support online or at least aware that you're doing an installation so that they can be ready for some questions, that is absolutely huge. I know most people only get support for "nine to five," but that, for us, has been absolutely vital.

Also, planning and testing. It's really all you can do. It's just a typical installation. I don't think there's anything out of the ordinary. There are no caveats about MicroStrategy that are different than anybody else. It's relatively straightforward. You've installed a disk before. You plug it in, you pick what you want out of the drop-down box and then you go, boom. But then, when you start to get to the security setup and things like that, you need to be thorough. You need to plan properly, and you think of your use case down to the end user.

I think that one of the most important things that we may have overlooked is getting to: What are you going to do in your two, what are you going to do in your three, where are we going with this? Not, "What do we have now." You've really got to think about, are we structuring this in such a way that in two years, we're going to be so disoriented that we don't know where anything is in the system. I think that ensuring that you have a vision for what your three-year or five-year plan is, I think that's huge.

Again, coming from a project management background I would say plan, plan, plan, plan, and then plan again. That's the best thing that you can do, because implementation is not that long. It's not that hard. As long as you've gone through the settings, you know what you want, it's not going to be a 20 or 30-hour process where you're setting up. You'll install, it'll take 15 minutes, you come in, you set your settings, 30 minutes, and then, boom, you restart the server and you're done. It's just planning. Making sure you know exactly what you're going to do when you do it.