MicroStrategy Reviews

The most important feature is the way it handles ad hoc queries and provides formatted reports.

The In-Memory Capability (cubes) needs a lot of improvement. They have tried a couple of new things in version 10.x, but it has stability issues.

I have been using MicroStrategy for the past 10 years.

The current version that I am using is stable but it lacks some features. Also, version 10.x has some stability issues.

We haven't faced much of an issue in terms of the scalability. However, due to its design (as it is very tightly coupled with the database), it depends on databases a lot, which might be a big concern for scalability.

Technical support depends on which tech support center is answering your queries. The US-based tech centers are very good as compared to the centers in Asia.

The pricing for MicroStrategy is always on the higher side. They should seriously start thinking about their pricing and licensing strategy.

We evaluated SAP BusinessObjects as it was one of the enterprise-level tools at that point of time.

MicroStrategy is an enterprise-wide Business Intelligence solution. There are various components of the software which are independent modules, but which work in conjunction to give a holistic enterprise-wide solution.

The most significant product feature is its robust data warehousing capabilities and metadata management. MicroStrategy lets the user create a different data model on top of the actual physical data model, according to the project requirements. This is a very helpful feature for modelling data and managing the metadata from different data sources in a single place. Any changes in the project data model or inclusion of new data fields is fairly easily accomplished.

Another key feature is that MicroStrategy is mobile-ready. This is one of the few software applications in the BI field which is mobile-ready. It is easy to build visualizations for mobile phones and iPads, and deploy them to end users.

The server architecture is very robust and enables the user to blast company-wide emails with BI reports.

The product has enabled the organization to blend data from different business units of the organization and product reports on it.

It has also replaced the manual process of sending out reports in an Excel sheet every Monday to specified users.

The product needs some improvement in its visualization capabilities. A fair amount of training is required to use this product.

The product is not business-user friendly. It has a lot of IT components which require special expertise. Ad-hoc reporting capabilities can be improved.

I have been using MicroStrategy for three years.

The product is stable. However, performance issues could be encountered if the server architecture is not set up appropriately based on usage and requirements.

Product scalability is easy and MicroStrategy provides additional support if required.

This software requires some training and technical expertise. MicroStrategy provides training sessions for users. They also provide technical support while installing the software and setting up the architecture, which is helpful. Technical support is very responsive and helpful. For larger organizations, they usually have a technical support specialist assigned who would answer any question via email or phone.

I have used many BI solutions other than MicroStrategy.

The initial setup is complex. However, MicroStrategy sends technical support to assist with the initial setup. These consultants work in conjunction with the company's employees to get it set up.

The pricing and licensing is a bit different than most products due to the suite of standalone tools that exist within the entire product. A sales representative would be able to assist with the pricing.

I reviewed IBM Cognos along with MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy was a better fit for our company needs due to its robust architecture, mobile-ready dashboards and a good pipeline of features coming in the future.

I keep learning new technologies and products to stay relevant in the ever evolving BI market. MicroStrategy has a good place in the market right now and is used by many enterprises as their primary BI tool. It also has better in some capabilities (handling large databases, server architecture, mobile-ready) than other tools in the market and has a good pipeline of upcoming advancements.

This is an enterprise-wide solution for which the return on investment is long term rather than short term. Evaluate the product appropriately with others based on your needs.

Easy to develop new reports, easy to change metadata layer

We automatize daily management reporting, ad hoc reporting, and schedule reporting with fix structure

Web interface has to be more quick-response and user friendly. There is a desktop application that is still used. Creation of a report with complicated structure (documents) is not easy.

5 years

No

No

Yes, sometimes web-application works unstable with big amount of data (it's not actually the big problem for the most cases but if you need few hundreds of thousands records - there could be an issue)

We have good support from consultant company and we don't works directly with a vendor.

Same answer as above question.

Microsoft Excel (power pivots). Microsoft is the easiest and the more user friendly especially for beginners in the simple edition (pivot table). We don't use Microsoft BI products like report and analysis services - I can't estimate how they are easy to use and powerful.

Independently from the tool, initial setup is always complex. Usually complexity depends on the scope of the project. Few reports and 1-2 datamarts this one thing, plug-in data warehouse to the reporting - another.

Initial implementation was with consultancy, further - in-house. Consultant was good, at least they was more skilled as we were in the particular area.

The most expensive position is license cost. It is very expensive so this one of the reason why we can't expand the solution more widely in the company.

Microstrategy was the first our mature BI solution in the company. IBM Cognos BI was the next but it didn't get a lot of fans. IBM Cognos BI from our opinion is weaker in many places and not so handy.

Nice easy to use product, I can advise to use it for others.
General advice (not depends on the particular product), implementation of BI tools MUST be a general company strategy. Implementation has to cover significant part of the reporting and everyone who need a reporting has to use it. - in this case you will get benefit from reporting unification and control over new reports growing.
There is in the company has to be developed reporting creation rules (who are allowed doing what and there it's can be located - public or private)
BI team has to be fully responsible for reporting environment including testing and describing reports in the public area. BI team in the company has to be created with dedicated analysts who are responsible for making analysis of the reporting requirement from other people and make internal in-house support for the users
BI team MUST have rights not to make reports (at any level of complexity) but make changes and develop metadata layer as well in the BI, - that is very important, otherwise you will have "armless BI".

MicroStrategy is used to receive all the reports from their customers who are logging into their website, such as customers purchasing products online.

The most valuable features of MicroStrategy are user-friendliness and integration with the different data warehouse systems.

MicroStrategy should improve migration automation. Additionally, I would like there to be better partnership support.

I have used MicroStrategy for approximately six months.

The stability of MicroStrategy is good.

MicroStrategy could improve its scalability. When comparing the scalability options to other solutions they are not very good. The licensing is one of the reasons it is not as scalable as it could be.

One of my clients has approximately 1,000 users using this solution.

The responsiveness of their support can improve. There needs to be more support for system integrators.

I rate the support from MicroStrategy a three out of five.

Neutral

The initial setup of MicroStrategy is straightforward.

I rate the ease of setup of MicroStrategy a four out of five.

The price of MicroStrategy is reasonable.

I rate MicroStrategy a six out of ten.

There are two use cases. One is on the transactional side. As we're doing insurance transactions, we're using the transactional side to assess risk on each transaction. On the portfolio side, we're looking at the whole portfolio of insurance risk.

Underwriters love the transactional side. 

The performance: We've thrown a lot of data at it, and now we're trying to improve the performance. But the underwriters love the content that's being delivered. On the portfolio side, we're just starting the launch, but underwriters seem to be responding well to it.

The goal is for all of our underwriters to see the risk of a property the same way. If I have 30 underwriters, they should all see and measure the same risk. With all of our modeling, we create a lot data. But with these dashboards, we're giving the same direction. So, underwriters are coming to the same risk conclusions on all of our risks.

Delivery, meaning the ability to create aesthetically pleasing information by providing dashboards.

In terms of self-service, we have an ad-hoc platform, where you can build portfolio reports on your own, so that's already released.

The capability of MicroStrategy that I believe we are going to be utilizing most in 2018 is mobile. We're trying to get to launch. We're having issues with legal, around the app store, those types of things.

• Tighter mapping integration.
• More Writeback capabilities that would allow our IT department not to be worried about the wild, Wild West of Writeback.

We did have issues with stability, and that was because we were co-located with another business unit, and we outgrew them on the unit. So we had to get to a separate physical instance.

There have been scalability issues which I attribute more to architecture than the tool. Meaning, we weren't leveraging capabilities that allow for the scalability, so we're incorporating them now.

I'm on the business side, the design of the metadata and the like; on the hardware and that type of stuff, I don't get involved.

We favor a single platform for this type of solution, versus a many-points solution like Cognos. Single point is always easier.

What I appreciate most in a vendor is when they bend over backwards. MicroStrategy does that, when I approach them.

I give it a seven out of 10, and the reason is, underwriters love the content. The performance isn't where I need it to be. When I get to the less than five seconds per click, it will be a 10.

In terms of advice, you need to think abstractly enough so that it becomes a metadata layer that's usable for all of the things you want.

Our primary use case is to improve our profitability across our field organization. It's performing fantastically. We have over 140 branch locations, over 1000 users, and it's scaling great. Performance is great. The feedback from our field users is fantastic in terms of form and function, so it's meeting all of our expectations.

Our goal is to roll out self-service, because with the advent of our tool, being able to drive actionable intelligence is just the next natural thing for us; to give the users ability to perform analytics on their own. 

The most valuable feature is the ability to actually embed actions, comments, being able to leverage Transaction Services to embed the tool into a business process. 

We get so much more value out of this tool because it's part of a business process. It's not a normal BI or analytics tool that has nice gauges and "dancing bears." It's actually a tool that's being used on a monthly basis, even a daily basis by our operational users, because it's embedded within an existing business process.

Looking ahead at 2018, I think the MicroStrategy capability that we'll use most is Transaction Services. I think we'll continue to build upon Transaction Services, driving actionable intelligence to the business, aligning Transaction Services to those business processes that are most critical, to help drive profitability, to help drive quality improvements across the organization.

Maybe a feature where migrations are easier. When you migrate from certain environments, it could probably be a little cleaner. Sometimes it seems to be somewhat clunky when you migrate from one environment, say a development to a test or production environment. 

Also, having some use cases from MicroStrategy that talk more about self-service, what self-service is and the applicability of self-service to different types of use cases and different types of personas in the businesses.

We've submitted technical support tickets but it's never been anything where it was like "the boat was sinking" and we had to call technical support. Regarding the tickets, I would give the response to them a lukewarm rating.

We were using Excel. We use Hyperion for financial reporting but we got the point where we had to put on our "big boy pants" and get a real solution.

I don't think it was complex at all. I think the time to actually stand the solution up was relatively short. I think the complexity didn't come into the actual set up, it came into the actual configuration and development of solutions. The set up was easy. You just install the thing. It's the development that's the tricky part.

There were other vendors on the shortlist. I think initially, for us, it was some of the capabilities, the enterprise capabilities. And believe it or not, it was actually Transaction Services, that was really the part of the tool that made it very compelling for us, because it gave the opportunity to drive action.

I prefer having analytics capabilities in many points, rather just in a single platform like MicroStrategy. I would hate to say that we have just this one "basket." I think there are many different use cases, and I think you have to address the many different use cases that the business brings to you. I think MicroStrategy is very complementary to what we need from an enterprise standpoint, but I believe that you also want to be armed with other tools that may fit other use cases.

We don't plan on investing in the MicroStrategy Mobile at this time. I think when a tangible use case becomes relevant for our business, we probably would consider it, but not at this point.

When selecting a vendor I would say our most important criteria are 

• experience
• having a tangible real use case that can articulate into my industry
• credibility in the market place
• having a bench of talented resources.

I rate it a seven out of 10 because I don't think there's any silver bullet BI solution out there. The reason I would not rate it a 10 is, I think it's great for certain things but maybe not great for other things. I wouldn't put my eggs in one basket and say MicroStrategy is the savior for world hunger, because it's not.

In terms of advice to a colleague looking into a similar solution, I would say clearly understand your use case and make sure you understand the culture of the organization before you dive into this tool, or any other tool. You have to understand, what is the use case? What is the business problem, what are you going to solve?

What are the underlying support teams and resources that you need to actually manage, maintain, and support this particular solution? Because Excel, in some instances may be okay. In other situations it may not be okay. I would beg to say that there are probably a lot of organizations out there that are still running 80% of what they do on Excel, and basic reporting is fine. Some of these things that we talk about like predictive models, that's great stuff. But I'd say 70% of organizations need basic reporting. So focus on the basics. If you focus on the basics, then that should drive your decision.

We use it primarily for reporting. Most of the reports are grid reports. We do slice and dice, and use pivot tables on the reports. The data goes up to the level of CEO. Basically, we use it for basic grid level reporting.

It has helped our modern developers. It has helped the business users to design their own reports. They know exactly what the need, so the power is now in their hands. They do self-service and develop their reports. Dependency on development teams, as well as managing the platform, has reduced a lot with Visual Insight.

Visual Insight gives you the capability of doing self-service analytics. This has been the most powerful and valuable feature.

We have rolled out Self-Service, and the rollout has been smooth so far. Customers are happy. When I say customers, the consumers of the report. 

Maintenance and manageability becomes easier with a single platform. You do not have a complex environment for four or five different vendors to serve different purposes.

We are developing a mobile platform. Until now, I have not worked on it. There are plans in development of introducing a mobile BI with MicroStrategy.

In 2018, we plan on significantly using the Dossier feature. It comes with MicroStrategy 10.9. We have set up a platform in that version, and we are exploring the Dossier option.

I would like to see some enhancements in distribution services and the way reports are delivered currently. It is mostly static reports. We want to be able to do dynamic subscriptions and all that stuff in distribution services.

They need to improve on distribution services. There are lack of features which were there earlier with Narrowcast, but they are not there in the distribution services. Then, they need to improve on having more professional, well-equipped premium support.

It is stable. I have worked on three different BI tools. I find MicroStrategy the most suited to the enterprise-wide BI platform, because of its scalability and stability.

It is scalable.

I would give them eight, eight out of 10. Sometimes there is a delay, because I am based out of Asia Pacific region. The support is usually done during the US business hours. There is a delay and it is difficult. 

If I am facing an issue today, then I have to wait for the US folks to come on and look at my problem and provide a solution, which I may see tomorrow. There is a one day delay. This goes on for different cases that I open. We are planning to take the Asia Pacific support license as well. We will see how it goes.

No, I recently joined my company.

I would suggest to explore MicroStrategy. It is a good tool. I have been working on it for seven years now. 

I would definitely recommend my friend or a colleague to use it, and implement it in their company.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

1. Security.
2. Stability.
3. Scalability.

It is very easy for non-IT personnel to create (grid) reports. And once the report is created, the user can switch rows, columns, and add filters. This avoids the creation of a lot of reports that have just a different look.

The drill-down functionality is also very good.

It did not really change the way the organization works. But it has improved our budgeting process. It also gives us a better overview of our warehouse management.

It has two versions: web and desktop. Some changes can be done with the web tools and some can be done with the desktop tool. Reconciling the two tools to make all functionality available in all tools would be a great improvement.

The graphs available for the new dashboard of version 10 are weak. You can include all the 3D graphs that you find, but you have to find them and include them or develop them yourself. By default, you should have at least the same possibilities for the graph so that you can add in a document. For the moment, I still use the document because I did not find a line graph that can use multiple metrics and multiple categories.

I have personally used it for three years now. The company I am working for has used it for four years.

We have not had stability issues, but we are a small group and we do not use the mobile functionalities.

We have not had scalability issues, but we are a small group.

I find technical support very responsive. If they do not know the answer, they search for it until they find a solution that solves your problem. The community site has also a lot of information.

I am an external consultant and I know the Microsoft BI suite. I also worked a bit with QlikView. The company that uses MicroStrategy had no other tools before it.

I was not there at the initial setup. I found it easy to add some new attributes, facts, and metrics.

I am not in charge of licensing. They made a change in the licensing module some time ago and we can now use all the enterprise tools for free. This was a big improvement. We are using a name license. The advantage is that these licenses can be used on all environments.

I was not there for the initial choice. But I know they had a PoC on SAP BusinessObjects and Microsoft BI.

If you use MicroStrategy on top of a data warehouse, put all the code translation in a snowflake schema. The reason is that often the last pass of the process translates the code into labels and it is easier if these labels are in separate tables.

Install the enterprise manager tools and projects at the beginning. You can create a lot of objects and you need to know which one is used. This tool is not perfect, but it will give you an overview of the utilization of MicroStrategy.

As an IT person, you have to create the model: define the attributes and the metrics. Once you have done that, if a user wants to create a grid report he must drag attributes and metrics and drop them in the grid area.

This user has to know the business a bit because he must combine attributes and metrics that make sense.

Another way of working is to create a big grid report with multiple attributes and metrics. A user can easily remove the attributes and metrics that he does not need and remove them from the grid. He then can save the report is his "my report" folder if he use it often.

For example, as retail company, we created a "big" grid report with sales and stock by articles, shop, sales persons, year and month. The sales period is part of the filter. If a user want the sales per shop and years, he just has to remove from the grid the attributes and metrics that he does not need. Same thing if he wants sales per users. For us, it simplifies our life because one report replaced eight existing reports in our system.

Now, the the reports are made by someone from the business that asks sometimes (but not often) for IT support.

If you only want simple grid reports, almost anyone can make them. If you want advanced reports (dashboard, pixel perfect documents) the user must follow a training.