MicroStrategy Reviews

I have always admired how MicroStrategy has continued to strive on one particular aspect, simplification, yet not compromise on its robustness. The mobile features have proven to be the most valuable to me. Their Mobile solution is one of the best in the BI industry when it comes to quality, presentation, out-of-the-box features and ease of development. My client has fully adapted to this solution and we are extremely pleased with the end results.

In the past, our sales VP and directors will bring their laptop loaded with Excel sheets whenever they meet with their clients, but that has now been replaced with an iPad using the MicroStrategy Mobile solution. The BI application now is able to provide the analytics and visualizations required to empower our VPs and directors to make informed decisions in real time with their clients. The application has also helped identify the weak links within the sales structure.

If I were to pick a few areas with room for improvement, I would suggest the following:

• It would be nice to have more visualizations available for the user community right out the box instead of using the D3 plugin.
• It would be nice to have more features packed with the ESRI Map engine that is supported right out the box.
• MicroStrategy Operations Manager needs improvement from a visualization and stability perspective. (This is a new feature that was introduced in MicroStrategy 10.)

I've used it for 12 years, implementing MicroStrategy solutions for both government and corporate clients.

I have been involved with implementing MicroStrategy Solution for over 12 years and I have worked with other BI solution providers (IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, SAS BI) while contracting for the government. In my experience, MicroStrategy have had the greatest uptime percentile when it comes to stability compared to the rest of the tools. I've seen great improvement in stability, especially in versions 9 and 10. It is a stable tool when it’s deployed and configured as recommended.

The MicroStrategy solution is very scalable. An organization can start out with limited licensing and grow more robust without compromising on the performance.

I would say their technical support quality has been a little questionable lately and I have brought up our concerns to their regional director. MicroStrategy has acknowledged my concerns and assured me that they are working towards providing a better quality of support.

I started my career with MicroStrategy and have not worked with a different solution before. On the other hand, I was involved in a project where we switched from another BI solution, Cognos, to MicroStrategy, while contracting for a government entity.

MicroStrategy’s implementation has always been very straightforward and the organization has continued to strive to simplify the whole deployment process. It requires minimal support from other IT personnel.

MicroStrategy licensing structure has been recently revamped and in my opinion, they have done a great job. From a cost perspective, it’s pretty competitive, but one thing to keep in mind is the fact that you don’t need to hire a ton of consultants to manage this application.

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

MicroStrategy has always been one of the top leaders in the business intelligence industry and they have worked hard to provide new breakthroughs in the industry. There are other BI tools that can potentially provide a better solution for various reasons but in my opinion, they are very much focused on a specific area. If you are looking into a tool that offers the full suite of business intelligence needs, you will never go wrong with MicroStrategy.

Hands-down: Object-oriented metadata architecture.

Why? Allows the re-use of objects throughout the platform, resulting in fast development, need for smaller staff, and faster ROI.

Example: Create a filter for Latest Month.

You can add that filter to any metric, use that filter in any report, add that metric into any other metric (such as Latest Month Highest Performers). Any metric can be added to any report. Reports can even be used as filters within other reports.

It can be used in any platform MicroStrategy offers: Developer, Web, Office, Mobile, Dashboards, Data Discovery… This is the same for metrics, reports, dashboards, etc. Build it once, use it anywhere (no need to create duplicate objects for Web and for Mobile, for instance).

If a change is needed in an object, the change is permutated throughout the system. For instance, if the definition of the Sales metric changes, you change the Sales metric and wherever the metric is used, the change is expressed.

This feature saves a lot of time in development and support because you don’t need to keep re-creating objects (and in re-creating them, introduce possible errors). A very small team can support many more users than any other platform, saving the organization money in the long run. In my opinion and experience, this gives MicroStrategy the edge over any other BI system.

Truly provides a single version of the truth. Once you create a metric or report that is correct, it is always correct, no matter where it is deployed. When a company I used to work for first rolled out MicroStrategy, there was a lot of suspicion by the existing DBAs and the traditional SQL report developers about the system’s results. If a report would show incorrect results one month, there was a lot of finger-pointing at MicroStrategy and ‘AHA!’s. In every case, the MicroStrategy team was able to prove that the error was due to incorrect data in the database.

Over time, the MicroStrategy system grew to be the ‘system of record’ and used to validate data loads for other systems.

Documentation and training: Though the basics of the platform are well documented and the in-house training offerings are the best software training classes I have ever attended, MicroStrategy falls a little short when it comes to some of the lesser-known/used features. For most, this will not cause a problem. But if your situation calls for the need to work with System Manager (a workflow application), for example, you'll be stuck searching thru Google and YouTube looking for information.

I have used it since version 5 (1998); 18 years off and on.

I occasionally encountered stability issues. If the metadata becomes extremely large, I have seen instances in which there are internal inconsistency errors. By this, I mean that it’s not that the system suddenly returns incorrect data but rather the internal definition of an object (could be any object: metric, filter, fact, report, hierarchy, etc.) becomes ‘corrupt’. MicroStrategy provides an easy-to-use tool, ScanMD, that finds and fixes these issues should they occur.

The inconsistency is due to the way the MicroStrategy metadata is structured. It is a relational database with many tables. These tables have foreign keys to the other metadata tables. For example, an Object table and a Where Used table. Sometimes the deletion of an object or an update in an object might not be cleanly expressed throughout the metadata database and the relational integrity is broken for that object, throwing an error message when the object is used.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Like any technical support group, it depends on which individual you are working with. Some have been stellar. Others make you wonder if they’ve ever really worked with the software beyond basic training. Overall, they are better than most I’ve dealt with.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Set up can be complex, though not as complex as SAP, for example. The most important thing, the very most critical thing, is that the data model is correct. Attributes need to be clearly understood and their relationships to each other and the various facts needs to be carefully defined BEFORE you begin. An ER diagram, be it in Visio or a tool like ERwin, is invaluable and in my personal opinion a must have. Going back to redefine attribute relationships and table structures can be very difficult. Do not think you can ‘figure it out as we build’. You’ll need a person who is an experienced data modeler on the team.

Software installation and hardware configuration is fairly straight forward.

MicroStrategy can be very expensive compared to other platforms – at first blush. The cost of purchasing the software and licenses has frequently been identified in numerous surveys as the factor most often cited for not going the MicroStrategy. The initial buy-in can be expensive; however, the platform is so much cheaper to run over the long haul than most other enterprise systems. A very small dedicated team of developers and quick development times (after initial setup) result in a much-lower yearly platform cost than other systems.

From a licensing viewpoint, there are basically two ways to go: per CPU or per user.
Per CPU: If you will have more than a few hundred users on your system or foresee a very dynamic user base where the number of system users can grow rapidly then shrink then grow again – use per CPU. You can have virtually unlimited users.

Per user: If you have a well-defined user base that you anticipate to stay roughly the same or grow slowly over time this may be your best option. Also, if you anticipate a very high workload (many thousands of reports run per day), this option allows you to add hardware without incurring licensing costs.

FYI It is easier to renegotiate your licensing with MicroStrategy if you go from per user to per CPU than to go the other way around.

I do not know if/what other products were evaluated prior to MicroStrategy.

• Do not attempt to ‘learn as you go’. It is a powerful platform and thus complex to understand. Attend MicroStrategy training classes. MicroStrategy offers on-line and in-house options, but take the classes at a MicroStrategy-sponsored training center; you need to be fully immersed. Those who’ve attempted ‘learn as we build’ are never satisfied.
• Your team needs to have at least one person who is an experienced data modeler and that person needs to take MicroStrategy Architect training and should become MicroStrategy certified in that.
• Your team should have a medium proficiency in SQL. They don’t need to be SQL wizards but they should have a solid base.
• Your initial developers will need to be dedicated MicroStrategy resources. Do not expect them to be supporting and developing a variety of other software/platform initiatives.
• Have a very good working relationship with your DBA staff. Communication is key.
• Document, document, document. Documentation is not for you and your staff – it’s for the poor developers that come in afterwards. Have an ER diagram available for all your source databases. Have flow diagrams showing data loads, schedules, events, outputs. Maintain your system server diagrams (including ODBC connections, etc.). Besides helping new staff with on-boarding, it will help analyze impacts of system changes and is a virtual requirement when doing upgrades.
• In your project plan, expect to utilize at least 25% of the timeline in building the data model (if one does not already exist).

It’s very scalable, the most scalable BI platform that I know of. By that I mean data scalability as well as being able to support a large number of users. The product is mature and stable. It supports a broad range of analysis styles and presentation formats.

We have deployed multiple BI solutions using Microstrategy, ranging from standard reports to dashboards to ad hoc analytics.

Microstrategy works best against a star or snowflake schema. While in principle it can work with a more normalized data model, it struggles with schemas other than star or snowflake.

Over 3 years. It had been installed before I started with the company.

Nothing major

Nothing major

The tool itself scales well, however in our experience the scalability of the entire solution is 90%+ a function of the underlying database.

Customer Service: GoodTechnical Support: Good

We used Cognos before. The main reason for switching is that at the time when we made a decision to switch, Cognos was unable to handle the data volumes that we required. Latest versions of Cognos have improved in this respect.

I can’t comment on this because initial setup had been conducted before I joined the company.

We used a mix of MicroStrategy Professional Services and in-house staff. Their consultants were superb.

We don’t measure ROI.

It depends on how you count costs and what you include.

The other option was to stay with Cognos.

Make sure your database design follows dimensional modeling principles. Avoid API-level customizations, they may break when upgrading product versions.

• Multi-user development environment: allows several power users to be changing the metadata, which accelerates development. Oracle BI doesn't allow this, for instance.
• Stability
• High-performance queries
• Flexibility
• Internal analytical functions
• Ease of integration with other systems
• Ease of dashboard design

• Quick time to market of analytical solutions
• In-depth, user-friendly business analysis

Simplify dashboard design; it is very powerful, but sometimes it might be like using a cannon to kill a mosquito, depending on the situation. Perhaps it is simpler in the newer version.

From my experience, the Dahsboard design from Microstrategy v9i was
very powerful and flexible. It was a "pixel perfect" design, but comparing
with other reporting platforms like Tableau and Qlik and OBIEE it is more
complex. I believe it is very good, but it needs some technical expertise
(Power User) to be fully autonomous.

I have used it for nine months.

I encountered minor stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is quick and efficient.

This depends on the client's needs and existing IT systems.

Initial setup is straightforward.

It is expensive, but there is a good quality-price relationship.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated QlikView and Tableau.

Consider it in terms of flexibility to manage and develop user-friendly and powerful interfaces for end users.

• Mobility
• Ease of use
• Multi-sourcing ability

Many of my users have iPhones and iPads, and being able to deliver mobile dashboards to them is a great asset for them. The coming years will prove that traditional desktop reporting and even working will be a thing of the past. All industries are moving towards mobile reporting and away from physical reporting (paper). Being able to deploy mobile reports on our user’s iPhones puts the necessary data they need at their fingertips. And actually, in 2017, I plan on pushing some Apple Watch reports.

I have created some transaction services reports that allow the field to comment on issues that the c-level might have questions on. This in turn creates a very open and productive environment.

https://www.itcentralstation.c...It would be great if MicroStrategy could incorporate into the Reporting Services dashboards the adaptive response that a Visual Insight dashboard has; being able to auto-adjust to the peripheral. When you create a Visual Insight dashboard, it would auto-adjust according to what the user is using to see the report; be that iPad, iPhone, or laptop.

The drawback to a Visual Insight dashboard is that it doesn’t come with as many reporting options as a Reporting Services dashboard. The drawback to a Reporting Services dashboard is, if you have users that span multiple ways they see the data – laptop, tablet, or phone – you have to create a specific dashboard for each.

I have used it for 12 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

The level of technical support depends; if it’s an easy question, then they will quickly answer the question. I find the majority of my help via the knowledge base.

Up until a year ago, I used ProDiver. We switched because our company merged with another and they were using MicroStrategy.

We are a Windows environment, so set up was very easy.

Before choosing this product, We didn’t evaluate other options.

MicroStrategy depends heavily on your data, so don’t purchase it if your company doesn’t plan to make investments to warehouse its data.

• In-memory cubes (aka Intelligent Cubes)
• Intelligence Server capabilities (SQL/analytical/etc. engines)
• Web
• Developer

Creating objects/reports in MicroStrategy is quite easy and is one of the main reasons for its success. The product also allows non-technical folks to create reports/dashboards with relative ease, which would explain its high adoption rate.

With MicroStrategy, organizations can allow their end-users to create their own ad-hoc reports/dashboards/visualizations, which greatly reduces their dependence on a dedicated development team. While a development team is still necessary for designing the schema and long-term solutions, this product reduces the burden on developers by empowering end-users to be self-sufficient.

The administration tools (primarily System Manager, Enterprise Manager and Operations Manager) need a major overhaul. These tools are generally used by MicroStrategy administrators to monitor the usage and bottlenecks in the system.

Enterprise Manager is one tool which is provided out-of-the-box by MSTR. It's basically a pre-built MSTR project with reports/dashboards to monitor usage at the user, project and system levels. This is primarily useful to see which objects are used most frequently and which reports need to be modified for improved response times, etc. Setting up Enterprise Manager can be cumbersome and it's a buggy product. A ground-up redesign of the EM project would be ideal. It is still a very powerful tool for its current design.

System Manager is also buggy (various workflows don't work as expected, documentation is lacking, etc.).

Operations Manager was a tool that MSTR released a couple of versions ago, but it was riddled with issues (a lot of errors during setup mainly). I believe OM has been scrapped in newer releases, if I'm not mistaken.

I have used it for 6+ years.

While the core feature (Intelligence Server) does encounter stability issues on rare occasions, it's still a very stable product.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. MicroStrategy has been quite friendly when it comes to scalability.

I would rate technical support 8/10. I used to work in tech support at MSTR. It is a very well-run department; very efficient, lots of smart and hardworking people (from technical and non-technical backgrounds). The support engineers aren't always given all the tools necessary to do their jobs and sometimes; they're working with certain black-box components, which makes troubleshooting very difficult. This in turn can increase the case/issue resolution times. But these are only a small percentage of all cases. All things considered, it's a terrific department/team to work with as an employee and customer.

We have always used MicroStrategy.

The initial setup is straightforward but can get complex as the requirements change. The product is quite flexible when it comes to accommodating special requirements.

Before purchasing licenses, be absolutely sure about the number of users that will be using the product. This will be useful when deciding to go with a named-user license (better for a small user base) or a CPU-based license (better for a large-er user base).

I wasn't involved in evaluating the various options. I joined when the decision was made to go with MicroStrategy.

Make use of their manuals and user community. There's a vast amount of knowledge out there in their community.

Recovering session finally works for all report types. Also, fundamental issues with ODBC causing involuntary restarts has been resolved. It has a couple of very useful end-user and developer features, such as copying panel stacks inside RS documents and the ability to attach images directly to a dashboard. They are pretty useful.

End users are able to work more on their own, so it lowers the cost of BI department.

The developer is a long-ago obsolete tool. Its interface and functions should be completely redesigned. The fact is not only is the user interface far obsolete (for more than 10 years), it is also quite often repeating tasks like dragging because it handles the actions incorrectly (like moving objects from report objects are to a grid). Also, it does not work properly when the resolution is too high, and the integration architect tool is far from being bug free.

They are working on a new tool with codename Workstation so we will see.

I have used it for three months.

We encounter fewer stability issues now (version 10.3 hf2); before that, there were pretty serious issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is getting better; there has certainly been progress over the past year, but it still could be so much better.

We switched because MicroStrategy is the most-advanced and feature-rich tool.

Each release (even a minor one) is unique, so initial setup is definitely complex; each installation has its own specifics.

Negotiate at least a 30-40% discount.

We also evaluated SAP BusinessObjects and Tableau.

Get a person who has some skill and has already done several installations.

We use it mostly for business intelligence reporting, especially in personal lines of insurance, because of its pattern processing and other good functionalities, its key capabilities. It's a customer-friendly tool, especially with the Dossiers. And in the past we have had Visualization Galleries. So we leverage it, not only for reporting but for analytics and also for geospatial reporting.

In terms of its performance, when compared with other products that we have, Cognos, QlikView, Tableau, I would rate MIcroStrategy number one in the above terms.

Definitely in the past, when we had so many legacy systems, with Cognos and others, it was took multiple steps to get what we wanted. We used to extract data from Cognos, pointing to any database, load the data into Access databases, and then some BA or system analyst used to create reporting out of it. 

But 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. So, from that perspective, especially in personal insurance, it keeps BI, business intelligence, in the hands of everyone, rather than a developer or an analyst. Now mostly everyone in our area, the travelers, they have self-service.

Reporting for everyone; anyone from the customer, analyst, analytics, we have BAs. Everyone can use it because of Dossier and, in the prior versions, we have Visual Insights. It's custom-friendly, we can blend in a lot of data, single source software.

In 2018 I expect the capability we will use will be Dossier. That is story boarding. Because in late 2016 and early 2017, no other tool had this kind of story boarding, storytelling feature. Our CIO called for a PoC. There was a tool which was rated highly by industry reviews, which plays story data. We did a PoC. And although we liked the story boarding feature, thereafter, the things that we had to do behind the screens for the story boarding, we didn't like, we liked MicroStrategy more.

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.

The other thing is, now we have Workstation and Desktop on the client side. I think that will speed up some development activities.

The 10.4 release is the biggest. I want to play with it to see what else I might want.

Dossier is the thing we were missing previously.

Stability is very good. From stability, from usability, from adoptability for the end user. They're quickly adapting the new MicroStrategy features, functionalities. It's seamless for our users. It's a seamless integration.

No issues with scalability. Whenever we have any technical challenges or something we don't know how to, how to integrate, we engage our partners, we reach out to MicroStrategy, and they send their technical support to assist us.

Tech support is definitely knowledgeable. We have worked with them since 2010.

We prefer having the analytic capabilities in a single platform like MicroStrategy, rather than many solutions. That is one of the main reasons why, in 2012, we switched to MicroStrategy. 

Prior to that we had Cognos. To do report design we used to go to Report Studio, for analysis, Analysis Studio, for cubes different front-end applications. And it was so confusing. Now with MicroStrategy as a single-source software and single platform, we can do anything. Not only reporting and analysis; everyone can go to one single location and get what they want. So that is one of the primary reasons we have moved to MicroStrategy.

In the past, I'm talking about 2012, during that time period, we spent a lot of money and a lot of our budget - we allocated something like 20% or 30% for new users to be trained on Cognos and other applications, because there was no single platform. But when we saw MicroStrategy it was a single platform. So we quickly decided, a major decision: Going forward, for any strategy projects, we'll use MicroStrategy.

I was not involved in the initial setup but I have upgraded three versions so far. Upgrading has been straightforward.

Regarding MicroStrategy Mobile, we have some PoCs which will kickstart in few weeks.

Important criteria when selecting a vendor include

• technical support
• reliability
• transparency.

I would give the solution a seven out of 10 for now. I need to play with Dossier and other key capabilities, because initially I did a PoC in 2016-17. It went well when compared to the other products, but it was not sufficient for our requirements. But I went to a few sessions here at MicroStrategy World 2018, yesterday and today and it looks pretty cool. It seems they have improved a lot in the last two years. So I need to play with it more, to see what the footprint in geospatial is like.

Start small and know your goals. Don't try to solve the world.

That is what everyone seems to say. Last year I went to a Big Data conference because we have some Teradata relational databases. Most of the companies, because Teradata is expensive, they want to move to Big Data. And that's what they said too: "Hey, don't try to solve the world, start small. Know what you want to achieve and put together a great team, a great project manager, who can provide realistic information at the right time, rather than at the end of the project."

Those are the key things: the right people, first; the right scope, and start small.