MicroStrategy Reviews

Project Schema/metadata- Very flexible, connects to a variety of different data sources and is very flexible for many specific tasks. Attributes/metrics/filters created once used by everyone.

Intelligent Cubes- Can improve almost any report to run in seconds. Used often for dashboards and documents containing millions of rows of data.

Visual Insight Self-Serve tool - Allows users to create their own dashboards. There are multiple reasons this is important. Users create their own dashboards which saves resources. Users have better insight of the dashboards they require and a better on new data required in their schema and/or intelligent cubes.

Data blending for end users- They can use other data that is not yet part of our managed/governed data. It is seamlessly included it into some of the dashboard/reports that they have created. This allows users to get the reports they require without having to wait for your data team to provide the data in the data warehouse or MicroStrategy schema. It also provides you with requirements for expanding your governed data.

Mobile solution with iPad/iPhone - We haven’t gone this route yet but we did do some POCs and it was very impressive.

Management would spend half a week gathering data and number crunching in Excel. It was a long, slow and tedious process. In the end they could not calculate at the level of detail required. Today, management can focus on analyzing the numbers and also exploring other avenues of improvement using the self-serve features.
One example is reviewing actual route performance versus the expected performance. The result is better identification of problem routes and measurement of changes.

- Many users have requested some specific graphing capability. More precisely, they would like the ability to configure a graph to be formatted and displayed identically to their excel documents. This is not always possible.

- The web developer tool for documents creation does not have all the features of the client version. When adding a derived attribute you can no longer edit the dashboard in the client version.

- There is no type of version control to check in or check out items. As a result, users create multiple backup folders and this produces multiple versions on the go.

-Different functions and options available with intelligent cubes created from MicroStrategy Web and MicroStrategy Desktop. Options such as scheduling and multi threading/partitioning.

- We would really benefit with more mapping functionality and compatibility with different types of mapping data types. One example is a Microsoft geography data type. Using the ESRI out of the box map plugin to draw lines between two co-ordinates and colour code them based on a metric value.

- Visual Insight /Self-serve - Simple ways for users to total/percent their data to a specific level. Translating a grid developed to a graph. In summary, make the self-serve area even more intuitive/easy to use.

-Exporting to PDF is a major pain point in the dashboarding/self-serve area. Alignment and colours are not maintained. This was allegedly fixed in version 10.6. We are starting the process to upgrade to 10.8 so I can not comment further.

-Users were not able to login with using LDAP. We had to add an environment variable to ignore LDAP referral chases. TN#15655 on MicroStrategy’s website.

-IIS Web Server would have a long initial load time. A variety of IIS settings were changed to increase performance. This is more of an IIS issue than probably a MicroStrategy issue, but I think it should still be noted since it’s above and beyond the basic installation setup instructions.

3 Years

Yes there were a few unique setup steps and configuration settings related to Windows Active directory and Web Server setup.

2 years in production and I don’t believe we’ve had a single issue in regards to the system being down or unavailable.

No requirement to scale larger. Scaling infrastructure hardware such as additional severs would not be an issue.

I’ve dealt with a lot of vendors such as SAP, ESRI etc. I would rate them better than those but overall just average. You can talk to a MicroStrategy engineer in person if you call their support number. I find I mainly use their online tool and they will usually answer the question within a day or two. Any type of enhancements or bugs you will have to wait for another release or two before seeing a fix. We are signed up with the lowest support package offered.

No previous solution, we do have business objects within our environment but it was not selected as the platform moving forward.

Initial setup is straightforward. Reading through the installation documentation is a must. Afterwards, you have a had a good idea of what is required before installation. You can run through a number of installation prompts and the software is installed. It gets a bit more technical setting up your environment after the standard setup. Manual steps after the installation such as setting up a clustered environment, integrating windows authentication with windows AD groups, intelligent cubes, cache and history etc.

Was not involved in purchasing.

We've converted our CPU licenses to user named licenses since we have two 32 core I-servers that are clustered. That means 90% of our power was sitting idle and wasted because of CPU licensing. There are a lot of benefits to have multiple CPUs. We've increased our cube refresh performance. Cube performance can be partition to use multiple CPUs. Best thing we did.

I was not involved in the decision making process.

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.

Ease of use was valuable. It enabled our end users to do their own reports as self-service with little to no training, thus requiring less support.

It allowed end users to self-service their reports.

Metadata management could be improved. When you delete an object, if there is any object directly linked the metadata, this may become corrupted and break the software. The only way to restore it is to delete the linked objects, whether or not you know which of them have this issue.

I have used this solution for eighteen months.

We did encounter stability issues. We had a serious metadata corruption problem.

The cost of licensing made scalability unprofitable.

We would give technical support a rating of 5/10. The existing whitepapers and documentation were very useful, but actual support never answered us.

I cannot comment, as I took the server that was already set up by a previous colleague.

This all depends on your budget.

Ensure there is enough of a budget for continued support, or look for a different product where there is a bigger community.

• Ad-hoc capability is critical to our customers
• They depend on the ability to take a standard set of data and organize it in a manner that is meaningful to their particular field of interest.
• Our product delivers POS transaction analysis in grids, dashboards, and documents.
• We group analytics under multiple areas, including Operations, Loss Prevention, Merchandising and Inventory, Loyalty and Fuel. 
• Our customers’ users can modify a ‘canned report’ to deliver the information their organization finds key. 
• Distribution is key as well. Typically there is one person within the organization or department ‘writing’ the reports. The reports are distributed to a larger group of consumers. Automated, scheduled distribution of information has become key to running their day-to-day operations.

Our customers and their users have used our product to:

• Find theft
• Reduce product waste
• Increase profits
• Make better staffing plans
• Improve store and staff performance measures.

The examples are numerous, so I’ve attached a couple of articles and included a link to our website. http://www.pinncorp.com/soluti...

There are a number of different applications bundled together and delivered under an umbrella product. It needs to be easier to determine which application controls which features and functionality.

I need to point out is that our company is a MicroStrategy OEM partner. We use the MicroStrategy products to build a BI solution for our own retail clients. 

With our EPM solution, we offer different user tiers to our customers, allowing them to acquire minimal functionality for Store Managers.

Each tier includes a particular set of MSTR applications. The Store Manager tier was created so that a single report could be run, but the output for each Store Manager would be limited to that store’s data.

This worked great on grid reports, but when our customer wanted to run dashboards and post them on a server instead of emailing them, it didn’t work. 

After casting about, we learned that we had to add a Report Services license for each Store Manager in order to support the posting of docs and dashboards to a server folder and distribute emails with links. That was a financial hit and it was not what we understood our clients would be able to do with the licensing they were getting.

This particular example actually got resolved when MSTR repackaged their solutions. This included many services in the server umbrella.

We have used this product for eleven years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

I am not aware of any previous solutions.

There is an added complexity in an OEM setup because we ultimately have to be able to deliver a ‘reusable’ solution to our customers. The user setup seems flexible, but it can be complex. 

My experience may be OEM-centric. It was, for the most part, addressed when MicroStrategy repackaged their applications under fewer solution umbrellas.

I don’t typically advise others regarding the pricing. We tend to serve lower user count customers so they are not getting any volume discount consideration.

That was a long time ago. I believe they were using Cognos and Crystal Reports.

• Take advantage of their training which they often offer to prospects. It will allow you to use the solution to your advantage much more quickly and efficiently.
• Get a clear picture of the type of development skill that is required to get a quick start.

• Dashboards
• Documents
• Reports
• Filters

Working as a BI Consultant, I have to develop different analyses, reports and dashboard documents to analyze the status of different business measures. We are using OBIEE and MicroStrategy for the purpose of enterprise performance management by defining and describing different business perspectives and objectives, initiatives and results are analyzed on the basis of these defined attributes.

There are limited features available for the overall enterprise performance management and analysis. There isn't a proper mechanism to define proper KPIs, collaboration or analysis of numeric data separately.

I've been using it for six months to a year.

Sometimes there is an issue of font size, spacing and other related formatting document issues.

We've experienced no issues with performance. However, the larger amount of number of selectors, filters etc. you have, the longer it will take to display an analysis.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

7/10

8/10

I started with OBIEE, and I am still using it for References.

It was straightforward.

We implemented it in-house.

We're also using MicroStrategy.

If you are looking for purely Performance Management of whole enterprise, then you should choose OBIEEE, otherwise choose MicroStrategy.

The best feature is R integration. This uses predictions for medicine consumption.

I really appreciate Visual Insight because it is easy for end users and it breaks IT dependencies.

We have a small technical staff. If we give opportunities to our clients to develop their own reports and graphics, we can concentrate our efforts on increasing the quality of other reports that demand a little bit more knowledge and expertise.

We need to act in advance of situations. I would like to be able to:

• Gather information about how long the partner will take to bring us a product.
• Find out what our real consumption average will be against our supply for that item

This information would help us decide if we should wait until we reach the resupply point or if we should start the process immediately.

I have used this solution for five years.

I only encountered stability issues when using the enterprise manager.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

We enjoy a high level of expertise from technical support.

The initial setup was easy.

It is not worthwhile if you have a small budget, although it is worth every penny.

We evaluated Pentaho and OBIEE.

Look for a solution that covers all enterprise areas, from the IT department to end-users, that will help you build a robust, star schema model.

I really value that MicroStrategy is a complete suite built to enable organizations to quickly deploy sophisticated analytical and security applications. It has a very good balance between features, usability, and pricing options.

It enables you to build decision support systems. MicroStrategy has improved the decision-making process through Enterprise Reports with automated and corporate information management.

Analysis self-service could be improved.

I have used this product for six years.

I did not encounter any stability issues. There were just some minor bugs that were fixed by the manufacturer in their regular patches.

I did not encounter any scalability issues. This is one of its strengths.

Technical support was good.

The initial setup was straightforward and very easy.

If you really need these features, it is an excellent product with a very good price. Sometimes you do not need much functionality and then other alternatives at a lower price might be a better option.

In our company, we help our clients identify the option that best suits their needs. We then develop/implement the data warehouse, ETL process, data integration, and visualizations.

Keep in mind your global and corporate design. It is best to start with a specific, small, and well-defined area.

• 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.