MicroStrategy Reviews

The solution is primarily used for customer management, Salesforce organization, and product purchasing analysis. 

The solution has excellent features available on mobile.

Their subscriptions are very good.

The solution offers us a strong SQL engine and enterprise tools.

Overall, the solution offers a strong set of features.

The solution lacks good visualization. They should work on the user interface to make it more slick and modern.

They could improve the maps they have on offer.

There needs to be more customization in the SQL engine.

The technical support on offer could be better.

I've been using the solution for ten years.

The solution offers very good stability. We find it to be reliable. there aren't bug or glitches. There isn't freezing. It doesn't crash.

The scalability the product offers is excellent. If a company want to expand outwards, they can do so with relative ease.

The technical support is okay. It could use some improvement. We aren't overly satisfied with their level of service.

The initial setup is not straightforward or complex. It has a moderate amount of difficulty.

I cannot disclose our licensing costs due to privacy concerns.

We're partners with MicroStrategy.

We're using the MSQL 2019 version of the solution.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

I have been using MicroStrategy for the last 10 years in the health sector in private healthcare, designing reports and scorecards for healthcare and billing areas, with health indicators including monthly and annual accumulators compared to the last few years.

I developed reports that were distributed daily by email to heads of departments and directors of hospitals of the company, with the information of each of them.

With the MicroStrategy reports, we got the directors of each hospital and each department to have daily information on the status of each center, with the time evolution, to make decisions based on real data and take corrective measures against trends in activity or billing, analyzing niches of activity or specialties that show seasonality.

MicroStrategy incorporates in itself a set of tools and utilities of incredible analysis that greatly facilitate the construction of elaborated reports.

The evolution of MicroStrategy in its latest versions facilitates the construction of objects, although it still allows the definition of schemes in the projects that give the reports a lot of functionality in navigation (drill-down), filters, ...

It is essential to have a good project partner in the beginning with MicroStrategy to be able to use their full potential. It is not a work tool that can be controlled in 2 days (triggers, attributes, derived metrics, transformations, etc) but I can assure you that there has not been any project that you have tried with MicroStrategy that has not been a success.

Great!

Good.

No, I didn't. 

It is very difficult to quantify the possibility of having the information analyzed from a large company with data from the previous day and some in real time. For me, the ROI is total since the first report was sent.

It is important to make an analysis of consumer users of reports that will interact with MicroStrategy because it is what most will condition the investment. It is necessary to take into account the training of the architects and designers of the project to try to internalize them since the dependence of a third party can be very expensive in the medium-long term.

No, we didn't. Currently, we have other tools that coexist with MicroStrategy (Power BI) but there are certain reports that by volume and functionality, we continue to develop them in Microstrategy.

For me, it's the best tool for BI.

As it stands now, the primary use is just for utilization, the mobile device, and the reports which are built for it. There might be plans in the future for spreading the entire platform to other areas and divisions as well. 

The truth is that this is not about business impact, such as high reliability. This is something that can be perceived, but other features are more compelling, like visualizations, which have a possibility of utilization around mobile devices with great GUI. Those stories, which are built for them, are something that they can really utilize. 

The most important features are its enterprise-based features. The platform can be easily monitored. You have quite a good overview of tasks which are being run. Also, you can see the users who are logged into the platform. Also, the tasks that are not performing well, you can easily kill them. These are core features which are not as common in other BI platforms, like Tableau or Qlik. 

In a few months, we will be distributing personalized alerts to users using mobile push notifications.

We hope the new tools will make a huge difference, especially considering the new workstation. We would like to see features that were introduced for the Operations Manager that have been discontinued. We would like to see those features somehow integrated into the Desktop Workstation tool. 

From time to time, there is for a specific project and the focus is that the support is close to the HAPS. We had three HAPS and the fourth one is currently under construction. We would really like to see MicroStrategy have some support teams based more in Europe, because for now it seems that there is one person for the whole CE region. That is not exactly what we would like to see. We do know that MicroStrategy supports most places, either in the US or India, but those are different time zones, people, and cultures.

In early phases of the 10th release, there were some issues, especially on several OS types like Windows, but then it stopped. It has been resolved, especially the issues with the intelligence errors were kind of serious, but it turned out that after some time we received a patch which worked. It is definitely better than it used to be. 

This is an area that could somehow improve, because the support was not exactly as responsive as we had hoped for. It is the reason why we utilized the MicroStrategy Community for solving these issues. 

I did not do the initial setup for the mobile solution, because that was somehow developed by third-parties. Otherwise, I was hands-on for the initial 10th releases, like 10.2, 10.3, and even 10.4.

In the beginning, it looked straightforward, but each of the releases had its own issue for some reason. I did not see any additional value of providing one button for installation on the whole platform if it was going to be installed for different servers. You would have to make customization every time. There was no additional value in an installer. 

This should be an area MicroStrategy focuses on as well as the upgrade pads, especially Enterprise Manager and its statistics. This has always been an issue. Many of the reports were basically unusable. 

The mobile for MicroStrategy is the best of all the BI platforms. It has some drawbacks, but its functionality, if done by skilled developers, I am really not sure if there is anything better. Some people can consider, I would say dedicated mobile applications, for example, maybe SAP. Then, it is very nice for the end users as well. 

However, as a separate product for the mobile device, MicroStrategy is the entire BI platform. It is an enterprise solution, a separate unit, etc.

We are not using MicroStrategy's WriteBack capabilities, but it is something to be considered in the future, especially considering the fact that it is a unique feature that could be utilized. 

We help customers utilize MicroStrategy in multiple ways:

• We have enterprise analytics being used.
• We use MicroStrategy as an integrated solution with some of their other CRM type applications.
• There are people who are using MicroStrategy as transaction services. I have never been successful with it. 

There are a broad range of applications that we see.

MicroStrategy is one of our key tool sets which we are focusing on for 2018 and beyond. It has the potential to become a great evangelist for AI and other embedded analytics. For more futuristic design solutions, our organization as such, is focusing on this area in terms of artificial intelligence and analytics. MicroStrategy, so far, has based on their product roadmap to fit squarely to match the design that we have.

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

In 2018, we will be focusing a lot on artificial intelligence and analytics. Embedded analytics will be another key area that we will be focusing on, therefore we will be looking to see how the SDK shapes up and the road map for cloud implementation. This is the next major push that we see. The ease of upgrades and mobile analytics are also other key areas that we will be focusing on.

MicroStrategy's multilarity and the range of features which it comes with makes it a key building block of our entire data value chain, starting from the production of data, where you could essentially use the transactions services to become your app that generates the data through to data blending and data wrangling, which handles most of your cleansing and cleaning up of the data. Then, you have data storage and analytics, all the way through to presentation. The key value proposition for MicroStrategy is its ability to support each of these use cases. 

Distribution services are definitely something that sets it apart from the rest of the tool sets. Embedded analytics are a side of this field where not many key players are doing really well, and MicroStrategy strategy has the open APIs and SDKs that can be leveraged here.

We have seen mixed success with Self-Service. There are customers who are very happy with what they are seeing in MicroStrategy. However, there are some customers who are not as happy, but most of it has to do with the process of data governance and BI governance. They need to put it in place together with the tool set. The tool set will only give you features, then ultimately how you use it is what generates value for the business users. It is more about educating the customers, etc., but Self-Service in MicroStrategy has been a very successful deployment.

There are learning curve issues due to organizational processes. Most of the time, there are processes in which the user is not sure how to implement the solution and what the other surrounding processes and frameworks that he needs to put in place.

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

One of the things that I want to see MicroStrategy do is become more cloud native. Right now, the deployment on cloud is very easy to ruin, it is very much like spinning up separate VMs. We would like to see it be more modular on the cloud, where people can look and scale different portions of the applications as they want. That will be a very interesting feature if MicroStrategy could do this.

Their on-premise solution is very robust. 

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

The solution is scalable. A little expensive perhaps, but it is scalable.

We have our technical support team, but we have interfaced with the MicroStrategy technical support on several aspects. Most of the time, they are knowledgeable. 

We hear this from our customers mostly (about waiting long times for responses). Those customers that approach us, we have the right sort of contacts to give them the answers quickly. It is the customers that have direct interactions with MicroStrategy where we hear mixed reviews.

If you are a technical person, someone who has all the tools and processes to get you trained on the platform and be able to manage the platform and installation by yourself, it would be straightforward. But for a non-technical person, it could be a little heavier (complex).

We had MicroStrategy train us on the platform.

As a consultant, we have multiple tools which we are focusing on.

Definitely research the key business use cases. Make sure you have your key technical person trained on MicroStrategy and on how to implement the solution. One of the important things for people to keep in mind is the Henry Ford slogan, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." However, the horse might not be the right solution in this case. Just keep that in mind. I think MicroStrategy has everything else I need.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Customer support is a very key area for us. When we help someone through the journey, we want to make sure of the following:

• The vendor's equally committed.
• Has the resources.
• Ready to support us.
• The tool's key features and capabilities are aligned with the digital transformation team, which we see around us.

We use it for reporting. The performance is okay.

We are eventually looking to automate everything in our process.

What we are trying to do is eliminate the need for them to actually do anything Self-Service. We are trying to establish interface agreements so we no longer have to deliver Excel files, and things will just be there when they need it. 

For example: They tell us what we need. We put it in the batch. It gets put to them right when they need it, right where they need it, then they can just process it. Therefore, we can automate everything. 

In 2018, we are going to be using the pretty charts and graphs. What I want to do is move us more towards using machine learning artificial intelligent type capabilities in order to process all our data. It is a 100 terabyte database. You can't just aggregate everything up to a day or a month and say you understand everything. We are going to have to have some automated features. Therefore, we can actually parse the data and do some doppelganger analysis, then we can get some of our things solved. 

It is always nice to have one solution in a single platform. I think that was part of the reason for selecting MicroStrategy. You can do pretty much everything, instead of having to get a little bit here or a little bit there.

I don't think we have actually taken advantage of anything that differentiates it from any other product. All the reports are very simple and straightforward. We probably could have worked with any application, but we chose MicroStrategy. 

I hate the user interface. I hate having to sit down and put in every little thing. It is almost like we are always having a start from scratch in order to build something new or to build something similar to what was there before. It seems klutzy. 

We would like access to more storage and access to more metadata to build the right programs that can construct all the stuff for us instead of us having to type it in all the time. 

We have the mobile server. We have not used it. That is because the people on our team have not been trained on it yet, but that is something that we want to do. We would like to have everybody with a phone, but again, this gets into what KPIs are you going to put on this phone that are going to be immediately accessible and actually usable because we have got thousands of them. If we put two or three on there, we do not have one RF engineer that is just going to use two or three. 

We are unable to boil everything down to a number, like Nike did with their shoes, your exercise, your workout routines, etc. We don't have that capability. We are really going to have to lead the realm of pretty charts and graphs and build an AI. 

It has performed fine. There have been instances where we wish it could have perform better. My suspicion is a lack of expertise on our end. We probably need some consulting help. We have not had time to go out and try to acquire it, but performance is fine for right now.

We have seen that it scaled in other places, and it works, so it is possible. 

I have not used support, but I know a couple of my team members have. They did come through for us. I am not sure if it was tech support or if it was sales support. I can't remember when they did that, because there was a person that was helping us almost full-time to get the product implemented and get some of our first reports to them. 

No. We were producing Excel spreadsheets and putting them out in order for people to consume, then we produced those. Now, they are just in reports that we can access over a website instead of pulling it down from our file server. 

I think that trying to get into all the analytics and all of the visualizations is what turned everybody on: the colors, the pretty charts, etc. I do not think they really know how to use it yet, but we will get there eventually. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

At corporate, up in the C-Suite office, they had chosen MicroStrategy. We wanted to fall in line with them. That ended up being the primary reason why we chose MicroStrategy rather than just going to jQuery and making a web page with some jQuery objects in it. 

MicroStrategy is probably overkill for what you are going to use it for. Just like when we were in school at tech studying electrical engineering. We studied all calculus, then finally, you get up into the upper echelons of electrical engineering at a bachelor's level and it is all algebra. 

You did not use your calculus. That is what this product is. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Functional capabilities
• Tech support.

Mobile, Visual Insights, reporting and subscriptions with alerts.

From my experience, I see that it is definitely more useful for businesses to make effective decisions from the data used. One example I can recall is in healthcare, where it helps businesses to see hospital/facility level inflow/outflow information on a mobile device in real time fashion, and make decisions accordingly to improve the business.

Some of the basic features such as Axis Label formatting on Graphs, Quick Switch on mobile (iOS), properly updated documentation on their websites, and faster enhancement fixes when needed for customers/businesses that are simple in nature rather than holding it for longer durations to fix.

I've been using it for five years.

There are times where the installation cause problems – but those could be avoiding if we know the process or certified/supported items before doing it.

I would rate it as average as enhancements and defect fixes takes years or months to implement. Other than that, their turn around on issues will be quicker depending on the priority of ticket.

I’ve used Qlikview and Tableau – which is good in self service than enterprise delivery. I love MicroStrategy as it has full depth BI functionality inside right from Admin to End Users scalability. Hence, MicroStrategy is the best solution I have used to date.

It was straightforward to me and now they have made it much easier in v10.x with express install and a static licence key rather than updating it on every sub release within the versions.

I have done both as a vendor team and also in-house for my own organization. My advice is to read the complete install and upgrade guide that the product provides. This will help you to have a better implementation than doing it without this knowledge.

They should make it cheaper and add more value to the product by resolving small issues that are very key to businesses. Other than that, the current pricing and licensing model is good.

Understand your business needs and budget. In order decide whether or not to get this tool you need to know your the vision that will eventually help in growing your business.