MicroStrategy Reviews

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.

We are using it for operations analysis and sales data analysis.

We are still getting it setup, so it is hard to say how it is going to perform. We are not really live yet. We are in the setup and test phase.

We do plan on rolling out the Self-Service to our business teams.

The dashboarding is probably the best feature for us. It is something that we have not had in the past.

We prefer having our analytics capabilities in a single platform, which MicroStrategy's offers.

In 2018, we will probably be using the documents and dashboards.

MicroStrategy seems to be very easy to use; user-friendly. Getting our data to work with it is where we are having issues.

We have not really scaled much.

I have not used technical support yet.

I was more on the data side getting it ready, not the administration of the product. The complexity is with our data, not really MicroStrategy.

Probably Tableau and some others, but I was not really involved in the decision process.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They need to fit what we are trying to accomplish.

Reporting on some daily sales activities. It works well in this task.

It is convenient having it right there on the phone. They do not have to login. They can get it from anywhere they are.

The convenience of it. Having it on the mobile, therefore someone has it right there in their pocket most of the time.

It is a pretty simple solution so far, so we have not really gone beyond where it is.

It is actually pretty complicated to use. It is complicated enough that user adaptation is sometimes difficult. We developed more experts rather than people using it.

If there was a server down, we are not allowed to use it offline. Therefore, if there is a server down, then it’s down.

They are pretty good most of the time. There have been a few times that I have left a message and not been called back for at least a day or two.

Previously, we did not know we could have a mobile app. We looked at having a mobile app with MicroStrategy when we found out that we could, then we tried it out.

The mobile setup was not too bad.

We set it up in-house.

Most important criteria that I want to see when selecting a vendor: One that provides good, stable software. MicroStrategy does this.

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.

We actually have two industries we service. We service the transportation industry, as well as the healthcare industry. We typically do patient transports for emergency and non-emergencies. We do them by helicopter, that is our airmen division. We have a number of other businesses that we serve, like alarm system companies and the like, but primarily we use our analytics to look at patient transport counts and volumes, by the day, by the week, and by the month.

We also look at specific parishes (we call them battalions) to see how we can expand businesses out in Texas and Louisiana. We have a large market in Louisiana, Mississippi, and the surrounding areas. Therefore, we do a lot of proof of concept reporting as well, and we use the Enterprise Manager for other things as well.

We literally have some issues with the high-end users using the data and trusting the data. A lot of it gets dumped into certain areas, therefore we made a central repository for it. Then MicroStrategy reports off of that central repository, so we can validate the data relatively easily. Thus we can say, "Look, this is what we are seeing for Louisiana. This is what you guys have from the communication center. It matches one for one."

It builds a lot of rapport between the top end users and us. When I say that, I am referring to the "C" levels, the executive committee people, and other high end users.

MicroStrategy self-service is on the horizon. We have a couple of groups of people that we are trying to test out self-service with right now, specifically, our quality improvement group and our business development group. The problem for us is we do not want self-service to become this thing where there are reports everywhere and we can't manage it, so we are trying to develop some auditing processes to make sure that we are not throwing ourselves to the wolves. However, the plan is definitely to move towards self-service. We want the users to be able to be intelligent enough to make what they need and see what they want.

Dossiers are going to change the name of the game for us. We want to be able to have the executive committee go into a meeting and tell a story. We want them to tell us a story, not us. I do not want to go in as an IT guy and say, "Hey, this is the story." We really want the executive committee to be able to understand that this is a way of telling a story with data, because data without information is useless. If we can get them to that point, which I am confident that we can, then MicroStrategy will have done a great service to us, and rendered time back to us to go spend on other places. 

That is really what we are shooting for. Dossier is a big thing for us. Geospatial analytics is huge for us. Anything that we can do with self-service is big for us. Those are the top three goals for 2018, in general.

The one thing that we have wanted to get more into, and we have touched a little bit of, is the Esri out-of-the-box: Esri mapping geospatial analytics. In fact, our presentation includes a piece of how we were able to leverage placing that airmen station in Texas for the first time, based upon transports from a geospatial map. 

There also are a few others that we have taken advantage of recently. I think the chat feature inside of 10.10 is huge, especially if you are doing collaborative dashboarding.

We mostly do MicroStrategy, so we prefer the single platform for analytics capabilities. There are some use cases to do multi-platform. We just have not been at a point where we can overutilize it yet, or even utilize it at all. The cases for us that come up, they are so far and few between that we really have to take advantage of it and spend a lot of time on it, so that we can sell it. I imagine in the future that we probably will have multi-platform stuff.

We have some mobilize licenses right now. We have a small amount: 25. We built a couple of mobile apps. We have not jumped on the mobile bandwagon just yet. We have some use cases for it. We have not really identified where we can get the most bang for our buck. I imagine 2018 might have some of that as well, as a minor goal, possibly 2019. This being a huge issue for us, our getting into it, because a lot of our trucks, our medics, our people who drive on our trucks, and do the transfers, they all have iPads. If there is something that we can give them which says, "Hey, avoid traffic here," or do something to make a decision, that could be huge. Use cases are always a challenge.

If I had no issues with the tool ever or if I did not have any problems when I upgraded, then I would probably give it a higher rating (a perfect 10). If the Enterprise Manager was a little bit less quirky when you build out-of-the-box customization reports for it, I probably would give it a 10, but just those small things bring it down a little bit for me. However, it is a good tool.

Let us say that you have someone who comes in who does not have a strong programming background and they want to use Enterprise Manager to do some things. It is sort of the way the warehouse is set up, they might need the statistics warehouse when they first get in and they could be very turned off by the UI. Just the way some of the reports tailor themselves out-of-the-box, it does not really lend itself to be helpful. 

Then you have to customize, and when you start customizing, you bring in these attributes that sometimes do not even fit together. You may want to see something and how it gets done, then you are kind of stuck. That can make you leave the tool alone completely. Luckily for us, we have found ways to work with our consultant, and just really try to tackle it as much as possible. We have found ways to get around it.

I actually enjoy MicroStrategy a lot. When it came to Arcadia Data, it was sort of dead in the water, a Lazarus project. It kind of came up from the dead. Mostly because people did not understand the tool. My grandfather always had a saying that you got to know the tool before you can use the tool. That is what we did. My colleague and I took MicroStrategy, and said, "What does it do, what is it?" 

We just started building simple reports from scratch and went from there. Now, that we understand it, people are like, "Oh, okay. I get it. It's not that bad, it's actually great."

I am a fan of MicroStrategy and other tools, but I think MicroStrategy is a great tool. It does really well for what it serves.

We like the tech support. They have done a number of things to help us out. They have sent us to rapid response before, when we really needed them. They have gotten back to us as early as a day, maybe half day, and even within an hour. 

We have had positive experiences with them. There are areas that I can specify that they can improve in, but I think that is with any help desk or technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup. 

I came in three years after its inception, and it was in the Lazarus stage. They were not going to spend any more money, get rid of the tool, phase out of it, and since then we have brought the tool back:

• We have bought 100 new licenses.
• We have ramped up user adoption.
• We have run on trips to do symposiums.
• We have found that it is starting to fit together.

Do not walk away without taking the time to get to know the product or the people intimately. If you are trying to do analytics, it is a fantastic product, a top-tier product. We have dealt with a number of other products. I worked with folks who have dealt with Tableau and others. Especially with what they are doing with Dossier and all the things that are coming out, MicroStrategy has really started to lead the way with analytics in the future. I would court MicroStrategy and spend some time with them. Get to see what the tool does and what can it do for you. Do some proofs of concept.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We try to court them as much as possible. We want them to come and see how we do things in Louisiana. We are very much a down to earth folk. I will say that. People mention the Cajuns. We are kind of rambunctious, too. We got to get to know the person that is selling the product before we even get to know the product, then we look at the product, and say, "What does it do? What can it do for us?"

We do a lot of proofs of concept. We are doing telemetry in our trucks, ambulances, and vans, possibly. What we found is the MicroStrategy reps travel a great distance to see us, and we appreciate that. We need to see them face-to-face. If there is a quote, it is amazing what you find face-to-face. That is huge for us. We have to have that.

MicroStrategy is just readily available for us.

We use it mostly for the operational reporting. We also use it for the insurance claims and how to track them. 

The product is working fine. We feel they understand the healthcare system. 

The features of the product have definitely been beneficial. We do plan to roll out MicroStrategy Self-Service to our business teams.

We prefer having the analytic capabilities in a single platform, like MicroStrategy provides, because it is easier. The customer gets to use one type of tool, then sticks with it. The customers are looking for Geospatial in 2018, so that is where we will be using it.

We have been using it mostly for grid reports and its exporting features. We are going to start using the Geospatial, which is a new feature. We are also looking forward to the 10.9 and 10.10 features coming out. 

We have not invested nor are we planning to invest in MicroStrategy's mobile platform.

It is a very stable solution, meaning the application is very good. MicroStrategy works very well.

It is highly scalable. We have quite a few customers who are the users themselves. They use it and have not had any issues yet. 

I sometimes use technical support. When I do, I have found them to be helpful. The right person answers me when I contact them.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

However, I have been involved in upgrades of the solution, which were mostly straightforward.

The vendor technical support assisted in the upgrades.

This is definitely a solution worth investing in. It will be useful for the long term. Anyone who is researching similar solutions should look for the longer term.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• The technical capability.
• They are able to deliver it.
• They understand the product. 

• Mobile
• Data marts
• Cubes
• Visual Insights (VI)
• SQL engine
• MicroStrategy Office

Perfect balance between self-service and governed BI.

While VI gives self-serve agility, report wizard brings governance specifying limits on MicroStrategy and database end.

Development tools (developer and architect) need improvement.

Native VI on mobile apps and better android support are lacking.

More than 10 years.

While deployment is easier, the upgrade is painful process.

Developer, iServer, Webserver all are very stable.

Some versions have memory leakage or cube index issues, but overall very stable software.

No, scalability is strength of MicroStrategy.

Very average customer service.

Sales is very responsive, but technical support is below average.

Below average.

Used Tableau, Cognos, SSIS, BO, and Pentaho.

Moved to MicroStrategy for a scalable and mobile solution.

Straightforward.

In-house.

Hard to calculate but offering a single BI platform brings down maintenance and time to market time.

While initial cost of MicroStrategy is still on the higher side, the long-term benefits brings down overall cost of ownership significantly as compared to other tools like Tableau/Cognos.

Yes, Looker BI.

The real difficulty is finding a correct development resource for MicroStrategy as it has a steep learning curve and is unlike other tools on the market.

Centralized server and repository: It reduces the development and maintenance effort for the team, and provides a unified user experience.

MicroStrategy also provides a full set of BI features, including:

• OLAP reports
• Dashboard
• Data discovery
• Visualization
• Scheduling and alert
• Comprehensive security control and more.

All these features are built on the same architecture and repository, and support unix-like OS. Thus, we can easily fulfill a user's needs, and align with all the system and security policies of my organization.

All the business units rely on the information provided by MicroStrategy for their decisions on daily basis. This increases data accuracy and saves time to build reports.

The design process of the mobile dashboard development. Now, MicroStrategy's mobile dashboard is still not a RESTful design, which means we need to design a different layout according to the device's screen size. It costs us more effort if we want to support the mobile and tablet at the same time. It would be better if MicroStrategy supported a RESTful dashboard design pattern.

More than 10 years.

No.

No.

A nine out of 10.

It is somehow complicated for a user/analyst without a DWDM background. But for an experienced DWDM modeler, it would be an easy task.

If your are looking for an enterprise level BI product for the standard BI platform in your organization, MicroStrategy would be the best choice.