MicroStrategy Reviews

We use MicroStrategy to create dashboards and reports for our top management.

We are still not using it one hundred percent but we plan to be by next year.

Their basic tutorials could be improved; there are not enough. They should provide more tutorials and include some project files. 

They should create some project files. For example, if I see a project online, I can deploy that project and import it into my production. From there, I can learn how to create attributes from that project. 

I have been using MicroStrategy for one year.

I haven't come across any bugs, but as I mentioned, I am not using it one hundred percent at the moment.

We are paying a lot for MSTR support but we're not getting the proper support that we should be.

We actually got technical support from one of the vendors (which was not cheap for us), but still, we couldn't make enough dashboards, even with their help. I rely on google for a lot of help. I've been manually creating my existing reports in PHP and MariaDB to MSTR.

The initial setup was very complex and complicated. They have a very simple installation for Windows, but for Linuxware, it is far too complicated.

Deployment took almost two months.

The pricing is fair.

To be honest, I regret using MSTR. I think I should have gone with Tablo instead.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give MSTR a rating of seven.

We have about 50-plus applications that we're currently running on MicroStrategy, and most of these are around tracking demand and supply, profitability, and growth for the organization. 

We've also opened it up as an open BI platform, so that all our business analysts can build their own dashboards and Dossiers and the like.

We are a data-driven company, so a lot of decisions happen out of data at every level. Most of our tactical decisions are data-driven, our strategic decisions are definitely data-driven. MicroStrategy is now the de facto tool within the organization, it's the go-to BI tool in the organization.

We have yet to explore the prescriptive analytics and the SDK. I expect we'll focus on these most, moving forward in 2018.

I think what we're currently excited about is the ability to integrate R. Most of our data scientists use R for their modeling. I heard at one of the sessions, here at MicroStrategy World 2018, that you can put your R scripts directly into MicroStrategy, so any modeling effort that you've done in the past can be transferred into MicroStrategy. I'm hoping it will be a plug-and-play feature.

We've already rolled out self-service to business teams with MicroStrategy. I think it's good. We just need to ensure that there are some security guardrails around any open BI setup. There's a tendency to screw up something when you just leave it open. You have to ensure that there are some processes and guidelines before you open it up for a larger platform. But there have not been any serious issues so far, so we're good.

As part of this MicroStrategy World 2018 conference, we saw some of the VitaraCharts. If there are some advanced visualization features - maybe I'm not aware of them - but if there were a Vitara which could work on top of MicroStrategy, it would make sense for MicroStrategy to have that within their own library. So they should add more visualizations to the library.

No stability issues so far.

No issues with scalability. As I said, 50-plus applications so far, and it will probably get bigger and bigger from here on. No issues.

We do use the community a lot in terms of understanding some of the best practices and the like. We've never really reached out to support because we also have a couple of partners that we work with, so they help us with the consulting and any support requirements.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I was involved when we increased the number of licenses from 260 to now almost 950. I was involved in that deal making.

We prefer having the analytic capabilities in one platform, like MicroStrategy, as opposed to having them in many points. As it is, we deal with a lot of big data systems, tons of other vendors. It doesn't make sense to have to deal with multiple vendors and deal with different support issues. It's always better to have a single point of contact for our kind of use case.

Regarding investing in the mobile platform, out of the 800,000 odd users that we have on MicroStrategy, about 25 are already mobile. We've limited it to our CxO audience so far, but we will evaluate whether there is a use case for extending it to the larger organization.

We are still scratching the surface when it comes to our adoption. I would still rate it a 10 out of 10 for now. Once we get far and wide into the utilization of the product in the organization, that's when we'll probably realize this feature works better or that feature doesn't work better. At this stage, there are no complaints.

What we appreciate most in a vendor is their being proactive in terms of understanding what the customer needs, and showcasing their product roadmap so that we are aware of what's coming up next and can be prepared for it.

If a colleague were looking to implement this kind of solution, I would definitely ask them to evaluate MicroStrategy at some point in time. 

There's a lot of competition in terms of Power BI and Tableau. To be honest, the country where I operate in, not many people are aware of this, of MicroStrategy. Although MicroStrategy has a big presence in India, obviously Power BI or Tableau become the de facto choices. To be honest, even I hadn't heard of MicroStrategy until I started working in this organization. Maybe they should make their presence felt a little more.

The primary use case is that we want to get away from printed reports. So, not having to print PDFs and send them out; and the whole administration that goes with that. Rather, to make it all digital and interactive.

It is performing well, but sometimes we have complex requirements and the performance decreases, and then we have to find another way to make it perform again. That is what you encounter when use the project, but that's inevitable because if we would have used another product, we would've had the same thing.

With the new version that's coming out, I think they have simplified a lot of things. Also, when it comes to the administration part, and sharing, and the collaboration features, they are really great. You can send out comments with a filter to someone in your organization, and if the person clicks on it, he actually sees what you are seeing. So that's really great.

I think it streamlines business.

We also use Microstrategy's Writeback capabilities with financial systems.

We have the Multimedia widget but it's used for reports that we haven't yet converted to the mobile solution. So it's just to have them available aesthetically for reports but, again, on the iPad, so we don't have to print them.

You can now do data blending at the document level and data blending allows you to show results from different data sets in one grid, so to speak. I actually want to bring it a level lower. I want to be able to create that union of data sets under the document level.

I want to be able to create a data set that can receive data from multiple cubes, have it in one data set, and then bring it to the document, because then I can reuse it for other documents. Now, I have to do it in a document and then it's less reusable, because if I want to share that functionality, I have to copy the document, strip a lot of things, and then work on that basic element that I've built in that document. That's for complex documents, but I really would want that to be added to the solution.

It's pretty stable, and if something is wrong then we are also able to find out why, so that's also good. There's extensive logging capabilities, so we quite often able to manage on this front.

No issues with scalability.

It was necessary that they would assist when there were problems. They are knowledgeable.

Yes, we had Cognos TM1, we have Excel. These programs are still in use but they will be less in use in the future. We couldn't get rid of them yet but at some point in time we think we'll manage to.

When we started it was still version 9, and we deployed our mobile solution through MobileIron, and then we still had to do repping of the app. So there was more complexity, but that's due to the mobile device management solution and it would be the same with any other kind of solution. That's just complexity because of security.

We did evaluate other solutions. That's the whole RFP. There are so many things involved before I can answer that question. There will be political answers as well.

We are not yet distributing personalized alerts using native mobile push for iOS or Android. We want to do that for sure, but it's currently a "nice to have" and it takes some additional implementations on the server. You have to set up some certificates and then make the communication secure. That's some work that we still have to do.

As for choosing a vendor, we had our requirements. They were: 

• the app would be able to perform in offline mode as well because our audience, they're traveling a lot and then what if there's no Wifi? They can't get to their data; that was a strong requirement
• the speed
• the iOS look and feel.

From what I've seen today, here at MicroStrategy World 2018, from the presentation team, I found it very impressive. I also think that it's good that MicroStrategy keeps up with the pace and they also look at what the competitors are doing, and I think that they should really be continuing to do that because we need the "wow."

To someone who is looking at this type of solution my advice would be to start using it now. I think it will save a lot of time if you compare it with other solutions because I want to be able to create a data set that can receive data from multiple cubes, have it in one data set, and then bring it to the document, because then I can reuse it for other documents. Now, I have to do it in a document and then it's less reusable, because if I want to share that functionality, I have to copy the document, strip a lot of things, and then work on that basic element that I've built in that document., and they've improved so many things on the front end. If you compare it with other tools, which may or may not have an analytical engine, which MicroStrategy does have, with all of the other functions, there's so much. They've built in so many functions. It's such a vast solution. For me, it's the obvious choice. Maybe not for everyone.

If you have a big company and you want to do all kinds of analytics, it's an open platform. That's also important. You can create your own data connectors. There's everything you can do with APIs. It's not closed like, perhaps, an SAP system might be. 

We use it in sales and product analytics. We are using it for reporting at a national level, so we use it for a lot of different reporting for a lot of different groups. It actually works really well.

It drives us away from Excel. For what it is for, it is good. You can't run a business on Excel.

Some things are easier, some things are harder. A lot of things are easier.

We have some self-service reports and some of those went really well. It depends on the level. When you get to the executive level, they do not want to go out and run a dashboard. They love dashboards, but they don't want to run them. They want someone to send it to them and that does not work well for MicroStrategy. If I am going to run it and send it to you, I did not need MicroStrategy to do it. 

We will probably shift away from mobile because we are doing away with iPads. We have tablets or convertible computers, so there is no need to use mobile on those.

The most valuable feature is the ability to build reports, then customize for different groups instead of having to build multiple reports. Therefore, the ability to build customization in the reports for different groups.

I am happy with the UI.

The analytic speed would probably be what I would look for in terms of improvement because we have super huge data, and if I do not build views on top of data, then reports render really slowly.

Higher management does not have time to run reports. They need somebody to give them the bottom line.

I prefer the capabilities of a single platform, but it does not always work. We are a huge company. Some areas do not use MicroStrategy, so you have to blend whatever systems they are using together to get the data points that you are looking for.

I have never had problems with the stability.

No issues.

I have not used technical support.

I was involved in the upgrading, not the initial setup. We did not have any issues with the upgrades.

We actually researched some of the other solutions. For options, price, and customer acceptance, this product has worked well for us.

We are happy, so far. It has worked well for us. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Ease of use
• Customer acceptance (my customers are internal), if I build it and they won't use it, then it is useless. 

• The ability to work directly on top of almost every known data source, while creating optimized queries for each data source type.
• The ability to take the load of the DB with cubes while still baeing able to access the raw data at the db level when needed.
• The ability to "complete" missing features in the big-data platform with mstr features.
• The ability to create very complex queries logic automatically.
• The flexibility to integrate various data sources without ETL.
• The freedom to generate reports and use both cubes and relational data in the same dashboards seamlessly.
• The ability to create simple but good looking dashboards easily while still being able to implement very complex logic and UI in more complex documents.

The ability to investigate high-level data in cubes and once an issue is found, you can directly drill to the row-level data within the same platform. No coding or integration is needed between different tools. It is all done within the same platform, using the same objects, which allows the best of both worlds, especially while working on large-scale projects (big data).

• The default color pallets could be improved, and they are improving with each version.
• Simplification of the various configurations: The product offers a huge amount of options and configurations. It takes a while to get a good grasp of it all.

I have used MicroStrategy very extensively for over five years.

We encountered a few stability issues in the early 10.0 and 10.1 versions. Since 10.3 was released about 6-8 months ago, it has been stable.

version 10.4 was the first "platform version" and is more stable , while creating complex dashboards in 10.3 you might encounter various UI bugs , for most there are simple workarounds though.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. The only thing is that if you plan on using cubes as a solution, prepare the servers with enough memory; processing the cubes is heavy on memory.

The platform now supports a cluster of eight nodes, which should be enough for over X *10K users.

the customer service is usually pretty high , support responses to cases within a day or 2 , even for cases which are not P1 priority.

Technical support is at a high level. Most of the time, they are quite accurate; most issues are solved within 2-3 iterations, even without remote login to the servers, which is not possible most of the time.

• I previously used Panorama on top of Microsoft SSAS cubes. I think that in today’s world, the cube is just a fragment of the performance tuning, rather than being the complete solution. Therefore, when people keep asking for the raw data, the cube simply does not contain it.
• In today’s big data projects, nobody thinks about taking all the data out to a cube, with very limited capability to drill back to the actual live data.
• Regarding SSAS cubes, today’s dashboards are complex, and only a small number of developers actually write MDX queries correctly. Therefore, each additional logic requires a very experienced developer and takes a lot of time.
• Panorama had stability issues.
• I also worked with Qlik, but I do not think it is meant for today’s big data projects. Nobody wants islands of data completely disconnected from the original data (no way to drill for further details, and no way the detailed level will be extracted from Hadoop/Vertica into an in-memory application).

The initial configurations of the server and the project require a high level of experience. The installation is rather straightforward, but the configurations require deep understanding of the product and the environment.

Most high-end tools cost roughly similar, but the TCO of MSTR is said to be lower than others due to the reuse of objects and the ability to work with the dependencies between the objects, instead of guessing which report/dashboard uses which metric.

Of course, we evaluated Qlik, Tableau and MSBI Suite.

If you are not a MicroStrategy expert, use one, especially in the initial phases of the projects; it will save you a great deal in the long term.

• Analytics power on a large scale.
• Unified metadata.
• Fully integrated platform covering all styles of BI.
• We deal in TBs of data and MicroStrategy works well at high data volumes with complex analytics and with high user concurrency.
• The common/reusable metadata, whereby many objects (e.g., attributes, metrics, hierarchies, custom groups, etc.) are defined, validated, and provided once and can be reused throughout the platform and use cases; a single truth is realized and maintained.
• The various components of MicroStrategy are fully integrated and built upon a single code base providing for optimal exchange of objects and deliverables across the various platform components. E.g., you can build an exploratory dashboard using Visual Insight and hit a button to convert it on the fly to a Report Services Document.

Most of our SaaS products are analytic in nature and against TBs of data with users accessing a broad array of standard reports, guided ad-hoc queries, data exploration, and dashboards. For our high volume (both data and users), MicroStrategy continues to be the backbone of these SaaS solutions.

In general, MicroStrategy objects within their metadata object model roll up to “project” as the highest level today. Given that most users equate a project to a BI “application”, if you need a Microstrategy object (e.g. Single panel objects, graphs/visualizations/reports/templates including depicted data, schema objects, templates, etc.) to be used across projects – you have to duplicate/build and maintain copies in each and every project using them. There could be several possibilities for handling this.

One option could be to create the concept of a “global” project in which all consistent, build-once-use-everywhere objects would be built and maintained and a corresponding option within each specific project to decide if/what “global” project objects should be inherited. To maintain the integrity of these global objects, they should not be modifiable within each specific project. Today, the only option to achieving this would be to have a single "mega-project" encompassing everything – this would not perform, would not be advisable, and would create dependencies that no organization could navigate successfully.

I personally have used it since 1997.

9.4.1 HF9 has been quite stable; 10.0-10.1 was somewhat unstable but 10.2 delivered a very stable environment for us. We’re moving to 10.4 soon as that is the MicroStrategy “platform” release, where they will be issuing multiple hot fixes and will remain the core until they create a major new/next release.

I have never encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support continues to struggle a bit, although our recent downgrade of support level from Elite to Premium has been a good one. Our assigned technical account manager (TAM) has been doing a great job shepherding our various issues/enhancement requests effectively.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Installations/upgrades have been somewhat complex in the past and time-consuming; however, the increasing versions of 10.2 continue to reduce the number of total, and especially manual, steps.

The new licensing model is straightforward; I’d recommend to any new customer to push for CPU licensing to avoid having to track/count specific user licenses.

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

Ensure you have a solid/local sales engineer to watch over your initial and continued success, and ensure you subscribe to a technical support level that offers a technical account manager to be your voice into technology.

• Perfect reports, dashboards and widgets for end users
• Mobile and web access

Management can see how the business is going, financial stuff and analyze all sales processes. It is possible to build advanced beautiful reports, decorated with different graphs, charts, which is so liked by management, though this beauty can be infinitely improved, especially in mobile apps. Also, we can present analytics in dashboards, combine elements in a document, animate them, visualize them and more.

As an architect and implementation specialist, I think it must improve component integration, troubleshooting and diagnostics.

The evaluation possibilities for developers are very bad. Obtaining the installation key and activation code is a complicated procedure; there are problems with the extension of the evaluation period. Unfortunately, it sometimes takes a long time for customers to understand the benefits of the product and in this way, MSTR is less convenient for developers.

We had some problems with EM statistics ETL, Architect, and Operations Manager.

I have used it for two years.

I have encountered stability issues: unstable Architect mappings, IS crashes without diagnostics, and so on.

I have not encountered any scalability issues, because we did not risk using it for large projects. We use Oracle BI instead.

Technical support is a six out of 10. For example, MicroStrategy closed their office in Russia. Before that, customers could solve problems with the product through us, due to the lack of a Russian-speaking support line. After the office closure, they simply did not renew support.

Initial setup was relatively straightforward. However, beginner users can suffer from a lack of information and help from the community after using Oracle products.

The product has a nice price.

Usually, we use Oracle BI, MSAS or Pentaho. For only two projects, MSTR was the best choice for our customers. We also can use SAP BO.

Read the documentation, have patience and good luck in looking in the knowledge base.

MicroStrategy has what they call the Semantic Graph — an enterprise-grade semantic graph — and I think the technology is fantastic. 

MicroStrategy needs to do some more development to make the platform easier to use. It's a complicated platform that requires a lot of skill to effectively utilize. So they could work on reducing the complexity to make it more accessible for a broader community of people.

If you have a skilled individual to make sure all the settings are correct, it is stable. Once the setup is configured correctly, it's a very stable system.

MicroStrategy is scalable. It's built for enterprises.

MicroStrategy support could be more responsive. About 10 or 15 years ago, they were winning technical support awards, but I've not seen anything like that in the last few years. So I think there's a lot of room for improvement in their technical support.

If you have the right skills, it's not a difficult process. However, as environments change and become increasingly complex, it's harder to keep everything aligned on the administrative side, especially in large institutional settings. It's challenging to keep the backend administration of the system in line with those changes. Larger organizations have complex environments that the technology needs to interface with. So that's where it gets complicated. 

All BI software vendors' list prices are high. It's about a price that fits the customer's needs. And I think MicroStrategy has some flexibility in its pricing model where we can easily demonstrate a total cost of ownership comparison against any of the other players. But you could do that from any BI vendor's perspective.

I rate MicroStrategy nine out of 10. Doing business with MicroStrategy is relatively challenging because of the processes that are involved. But the technology is probably the best in the market overall. I think they could add a lot more graphs and charts into their standard product. At the moment, you have to go to third parties to get some of the latest charts and graphs. 

I would recommend it. But if you're going to implement it, you need to invest in educating and training your employees on the product because it is complex. Data literacy today is a big topic, so companies investing in BI technologies should also invest in promoting data literacy among the staff who will be accessing and consuming that information. Right now, most of the training goes to BI professionals. However, companies should also train people who need to consume the data coming out of those departments.