What is our primary use case?
MicroStrategy is basically a reporting tool, and I take care of the administration side, so I handle complete maintenance and administration of MicroStrategy servers across all environments.
Day-to-day activity actually depends on user account creation to MicroStrategy upgrades and installation. It depends on the tasks that we get. The regular activities would be user creations, deployments or migration of objects.
I wouldn't say there are any unique use cases for MicroStrategy. It's a regular reporting tool, so the usual creation of dashboards and other things. Apart from that, we do performance tuning of a few dashboards for better performance.
What is most valuable?
In my opinion, the best features MicroStrategy offers include the migration tool, the Object Manager, which is actually good compared to other tools. MicroStrategy Workstation is a pretty good tool. Also, Platform Analytics provided by MicroStrategy is a good thing for the insights of the complete project.
The Object Manager is generally a tool for migration of objects from a lower environment to a higher environment or vice versa. It's a main tool for movement of objects. Whereas Platform Analytics mainly helps to understand the load, the statistics on the project-wise or server-wise performance, and what areas we can actually improve, which thing is consuming more memory. We can analyze the pattern and act accordingly.
MicroStrategy has positively impacted our organization right from the beginning by getting the feedback and bringing up the updates regularly. That's one thing that we actually love from MicroStrategy. Every two to three months, they get a release wherein they give the updated version with a bit of tweaking and other things. Whatever use cases or bugs that we actually report, they take that into consideration and come up with the new release, which is actually quite good from MicroStrategy side. They listen to the customer.
MicroStrategy is actually very useful in building the dashboards and cubes. Even though there are a couple of other tools that are new right now, a bit easier than MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy is a well-known and renowned corporation, making it good for the overall company.
What needs improvement?
Compared to the new tools, MicroStrategy is still on the old mechanism, the attributes and metric creations that are still a bit vague compared to other tools. They can actually improve on the go, having derived metrics or derived attributes in MicroStrategy. If they have something like that for the attributes as well, it will be good. A pain point is MicroStrategy memory fluctuations that we couldn't actually read that much. If they can improve that performance, that would be great.
MicroStrategy struggles a bit with large data volumes, but they are coming up with new ideas. They have moved to Intelligent Cubes, which can actually handle better data handling. They are coming up with good measures to handle big data.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using MicroStrategy for about 16 years now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
MicroStrategy is actually stable in my experience.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Regarding scalability in my organization, whatever I've worked on, MicroStrategy was able to handle more than 15,000 or even 30,000 users properly. It is good compared to other tools.
How are customer service and support?
Customer support for MicroStrategy is actually good and bad in both ways. Since NTT Data is on MicroStrategy Cloud, we get exclusive customer support from MicroStrategy, which is pretty fast. In my earlier companies, we needed to log tickets and wait a long time for resolution, which took days. But with MicroStrategy Cloud, I think the customer support is pretty good.
I would rate customer support somewhere around seven to eight on a scale of 1 to 10.
How was the initial setup?
For user access and permissions within MicroStrategy, we actually go with security roles. We have different security roles, and we also have different privileged user and functional user groups, wherein we segregate users accordingly and provide access control as per the different roles.
For the compliance requirements with MicroStrategy, we regularly run the License Manager, which we use for compliance purposes. We regularly check for license compliance. For data governance, we have specific tools that can actually check for that.
What about the implementation team?
The integration of MicroStrategy is primarily done for the ETL side, involving several codes and workflows that we have integrated using Python codes. We even have Ansible, these are the main integrations that are done.
What was our ROI?
I haven't seen anything related to return on investment with MicroStrategy.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I would say on a scale of 1 to 10, I have only a four when it comes to pricing and setup cost because in my earlier companies, everything was done by another team. Here, we actually handle some of the pricing and setup, the license cost, and other things, so we get to know what's behind it.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We actually checked Tableau before choosing MicroStrategy, but we did not find enough features that we were looking for. So we went ahead with MicroStrategy. We also tried another software, but that also didn't help much. So we are continuing with MicroStrategy.
What other advice do I have?
When it comes to upgrades and patching for MicroStrategy, there are not many challenges. The process is actually pretty smooth. With the current company, it follows a regular process because there are different business units that we actually cater to. Based on their approval, we go for the patching. In my previous companies, we would give one specific date for upgrades, but here with NTT Data, we actually get a response from all the customers and agree upon a date, which makes it a lengthy process for the upgrades.
I have not gotten enough exposure to MicroStrategy's AI capabilities. But I hear they are coming up with new AI capabilities, and I'm yet to explore.
We have regular trainings for our customers regarding MicroStrategy. As a platform administration team, we conduct regular team meetings and presentations to educate our customers and help the new users who have actually onboarded.
For regular monitoring in MicroStrategy, we have Splunk monitoring and Sumo Logic, wherein we have regular monitoring of the servers. For troubleshooting, it depends on which areas we get the issues on, whether it is on the web server or the intelligence server, cube performance, etc. The troubleshooting depends on the task.
If someone is looking for stable software that can provide a good reporting experience, I would definitely recommend MicroStrategy. The customer support is good, and they keep coming up with good updates. But if they're looking for more ease of use tools, then I would suggest going for Power BI. Otherwise, MicroStrategy is a pretty good option.
My overall review rating for MicroStrategy is 7 out of 10. Whatever I've mentioned are the good aspects of MicroStrategy, and there are certain pain points.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Microsoft Azure