MicroStrategy Reviews

• Enterprise reporting
• Mobile
• Distribution
• Dashboards

Most of our customers for whom I implemented the solutions were interested to see the level of detail. However, due to a couple of weaknesses we get from this tool, this was a bit painful.

We do consulting and Implementation of solutions to many industries like retail, distribution, manufacturing, oil & gas, wholesale, etc. Most of the solutions require the end reporting to be apt and simplified in nature. MicroStrategy’s built-in solutions help a very reasonable amount of customers. As they require customization, developers are required to use the desktop client. That is not simple.

Simplify the development environment and improve the visualizations.

I have been using MicroStrategy for one year and three months.

We have not had stability problems.

We have not had scalability problems.

I rate technical support 2.5/5.

We did not have any previous solution.

Setup was pretty much straightforward.

Licensing is completely dependent on the number of architects and developers the organization requires. The pricing is reasonable when compared with other industry leading tools.

We evaluated Oracle BI, Microsoft BI, Tableau and Cognos.

I recommend that they evaluate the in-built dashboards, test them with sample data and see how dashboards best fit your needs. As the development or customization of this tool is a crutch, people do not prefer to get into this technology.

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.

• Visual insights:
  
  • For ad-hoc and self-service visualization
  • Faster user adoption
  • Connection to different sources
  • Data blending / mashing: Blending and mashing is valuable since users right now are currently tied up with the traditional way of getting data from databases prepared by IT. This feature will enable business users to immediately have access to different data sources, whether from IT or from their personal files, and allows them to combine these sources, and create reports and/or visualizations quickly and easily.
    Saves time and empowers business users.
  • Visual data discovery / data visualization
• Developer: object-oriented BI modelling
• Web services: building highly customized BI applications
• Mobile: pixel-perfect mobile dashboards, building mobile apps
• Object manager: migrations
• Security: complete and secure for enterprise scale

• As a consulting firm: delivering BI solutions to customers effectively and efficiently at an enterprise level

• Developer: Simplify BI modelling features to increase learning curve and user adoption.
• Data visualization: Improve and add visualizations and features to prepare BI apps. Reduce clicks and steps.

I have been using it for 3-4 years, including earlier versions (9.2).

We have encountered minimal stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer support is great but can still improve TAT.

We did not switch from a previous solution. We use Tableau, Microsoft and MicroStrategy depending on the needs or requirements of the customer.

The setups I have done are all single-server deployments, both in Linux and Windows:

• I-Server
• Mobile server
• Web server

Further simplify the licensing scheme:

• Architect is expensive
• Match or beat the pricing of Tableau
• Tableau is still cheaper

All products have been used depending on the customer.

At the enterprise level, MicroStrategy is good but requires a longer learning curve to fully maximize the platform as compared to other traditional BI tools and niche products such as Tableau.

Mobile, Visual Insights, reporting and subscriptions with alerts.

From my experience, I see that it is definitely more useful for businesses to make effective decisions from the data used. One example I can recall is in healthcare, where it helps businesses to see hospital/facility level inflow/outflow information on a mobile device in real time fashion, and make decisions accordingly to improve the business.

Some of the basic features such as Axis Label formatting on Graphs, Quick Switch on mobile (iOS), properly updated documentation on their websites, and faster enhancement fixes when needed for customers/businesses that are simple in nature rather than holding it for longer durations to fix.

I've been using it for five years.

There are times where the installation cause problems – but those could be avoiding if we know the process or certified/supported items before doing it.

I would rate it as average as enhancements and defect fixes takes years or months to implement. Other than that, their turn around on issues will be quicker depending on the priority of ticket.

I’ve used Qlikview and Tableau – which is good in self service than enterprise delivery. I love MicroStrategy as it has full depth BI functionality inside right from Admin to End Users scalability. Hence, MicroStrategy is the best solution I have used to date.

It was straightforward to me and now they have made it much easier in v10.x with express install and a static licence key rather than updating it on every sub release within the versions.

I have done both as a vendor team and also in-house for my own organization. My advice is to read the complete install and upgrade guide that the product provides. This will help you to have a better implementation than doing it without this knowledge.

They should make it cheaper and add more value to the product by resolving small issues that are very key to businesses. Other than that, the current pricing and licensing model is good.

Understand your business needs and budget. In order decide whether or not to get this tool you need to know your the vision that will eventually help in growing your business.

The OLAP environment is valuable. The user can find all the data in a single place and through the web, without needing to install anything on their machines and, of course, once you have created the necessary metadata. That is not as easy in other platforms, such as Microsoft.

It gives people access to data in a single place (portal).

I believe they should move to the web completely and leave the desktop behind. Features available one time through one and another time through the other complicates things too much.

I have used it for three years.

We have had no stability issues.

We have had some scalability issues, but they have not been a big problem.

Technical support is poor. You have to read their manuals and that's pretty much everything you have.

The company I was working for chose that course of action. I'd rather we did a proof of concept with several vendors instead of choosing MicroStrategy up front.

The initial setup was complex, really complex! Lots of configurations and installations.

It's expensive. I believe there are others that can provide most of the features for a better price.

No other options were evaluated. My boss at the time didn't want to spend time with evaluations, unfortunately.

Compare, and if you're going to spend a lot of money anyhow, there are better options, surely!

In addition to its dashboard, reporting, and scorecard development tools, MicroStrategy has more than 10 tools in its product suite which help to integrate with other technologies and products.

• Enterprise Manager tracks the usage of the MicroStrategy environment. This helps management to know how well the stakeholders, such as sales and business users, are using the tool for decision making or for daily sales tracking. They can know if there is an ROI for this tool.
• Visual Insight helps top executives with little or no technical background to find the insights and visualize the data in no time. Multiple formats are supported: Excel, CSV, text, and more.
• More than 50 data connectors include connectors to relational databases, NoSQL databases, social media, and other BI tools. This enables MicroStrategy to connect to any other data source to extract insights from it.
• MicroStrategy's Distribution service is so robust that it can send notifications, emails, and send to FTP to different sets of users and locations with a different personalization for each subscription.

Our Finance team has to send alert emails to stakeholders for the open due balance during the first week of every month. The details include the bank account details for transfers, invoice details, and the repo rate.

This used to be done manually. MicroStrategy’s Distribution services became a game changer for us. We send around 1000 emails in 10 minutes. It also provides a mechanism to track the delivery of emails and notify the administrator in case of failure.

Compared to other BI tools in the market, the development time for dashboards, reports, and scorecards for this tool is high.

It has developer and web components that are that the other has. It becomes difficult for a developer to switch between them for development.

Many BI tools enable you to develop a dashboard once, and then view it on various devices, such as web, mobile, and iPad. MicroStrategy dashboards are not auto-sized based on the device. A separate dashboard has to be developed for each device.

For every release, there are new features with new bugs equal to them. The vendor has to come up with quarterly releases, which is good; but the applications in a production environment are unstable because of the frequent upgrades being done.

I have been using MicroStrategy for more than five years.

Until version 10.2, the environment was quite stable. After that, MicroStrategy started releasing new versions on a quarterly basis. This means that more upgrades need to be done on the production environment. This makes the system a little unstable.

With recent releases, MicroStrategy introduced the “Work Fencing” concept for hardware scalability.

MicroStrategy uses PRIME (Parallel Relational In-Memory Engine), which it claims as the “interactive exploration of terabytes of data with millions of users.”

MicroStrategy has been very good in upgrading itself to handle Big Data, both in terms of hardware scalability and the volume of data it can handle. We did not come across any problems in terms of scalability.

Technically, the support team is very strong in terms of troubleshooting the MicroStrategy logs and other system logs. They also suggest a few best practices for better performance and maintaining a stable environment.

However, they ask for too many logs and files if a help request is raised. It would be helpful to have a centralized log.

The time zone of the support team and the development team is usually different. This delays the resolution time.

Prior to switching to MicroStrategy’s Business Intelligence tool, we were using Excel and SQL queries to track business metrics. These solutions required more technical knowledge. There is no centralized ecosystem which can integrate and troubleshoot if there are issues.

We purchased MicroStrategy licenses, expecting our business users to like the seamless experience. MicroStrategy has a mobile component which helps our sales team track and showcase insights to stakeholders without any problems.

MicroStrategy setup requires a few hardware prerequisites, and a few other installations in the system. This include the .NET framework, IIS, etc. Once the prerequisites are met, it is straightforward.

Also, we can install different MicroStrategy components in different servers, assuming that those servers are able to communicate with each other. This avoids the overhead of having traffic on only one server.

I don't have much information on this. MicroStrategy offers two types of license: per user and per device. The licensing is a litter higher compared to other BI players in market.

Apart from MicroStrategy, there are a few other players in the market which are actually doing good. There are the in-memory BI tools like QlikView and Tableau, and traditional BI tools like Cognos.

We have found some aspects of MicroStrategy which actually suit our business model, so we went with it.

There are around 10+ good BI players in the market. All of them have their own strengths in terms of visualizations, predictive analysis, self-service, mobility, scalability, etc.

I would definitely recommend this product, but I would suggest that companies identify what exactly the business users are looking for in a Business Intelligence tool, and try to evaluate the tools abilities and licensing cost before actually purchasing the tool.

The most valuable features are:

• A single integrated architecture: develop once, deploy anywhere.
• MicroStrategy Mobile: best in class mobile integration
• MicroStrategy Office: no need to connect to MicroStrategy web/mobile; open Microsoft Office documents, worksheets and refresh data as and when required
• MicroStrategy BigData Gateway: seamless connectivity to major Hadoop distributions
• Pixel perfect dynamic dashboards: high quality dashboards for board-level and management reporting
• Intelligent Cubes: load data once a day, no need to connect to the database.

We tried one of the leading reporting/BI tools in the market, but was it was not scaleable for enterprise levels. MicroStrategy does scale for enterprise levels.

There are a couple of areas that could be improved. Formatting the dashboard takes lot of time, which increases IT costs.

1. Dashboard development is time consuming, if you are doing corporate themes with a similar look and feel across all your visualizations. Starting Version 10.2, MicroStrategy provided features to re-use themes and templates across multiple dashboards. This does helps a little when you have grid/graph types of dashboards. However, when every visualization is different, it takes time to achieve pixel perfect visualizations. Having a Visualization Expert in the initial design stage helps with annotations and scales used within different panels, borders, etc., but it does take time to develop.
2. Tableau visualizations provide targeting from different data points to very different visualizations. There are some visualizations in Tableau which are much better than MicroStrategy.

We would also like to see more visualizations within Visual Insight. The existing visualizations are not at par with Tableau. I believe they were supposed to match Tableau capabilities, but they fall short on that. However, Visual Insight is better for end users who want to develop their own analysis and visualizations.

I’ve been using this product for 13 years; from version 7.5.2.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would rate technical support a six out of 10 (one-worst 10-best). Based on the level of support (Gold) we had, I have found tech support a bit sluggish. We had already resolved issues with workarounds before technical support came up with solutions.

We were using Tableau, but it had scalability issues and per-user licensing costs.

We did have some issues, but good documentation from MicroStrategy and the Technotes helped resolve most of them.

Pricing/licensing is little bit on the high side. Businesses buying this product should plan in advance what licenses to purchase. I would advise you to hire a contractor or free lancer with previous MicroStrategy experience to plan your project correctly.

If you have a user base that is going to increase over time, this product is best suited. Web-user licenses are unlimited for users who do not wish to create their own reports or dashboards and just want to view, download, and use.

The aesthetic capabilities of the dashboarding functionality are probably the most impressive. It enables designing really great looking widgets that I have not seen in other offerings.

A single management dashboard is visible on the big screens of all the company chiefs. This enables them to easily refer to it during meetings. They are able to drill down on specifics. It provides a view of the current position of the companies KPIs, and provides the main source of ‘true data’.

Licensing costs are extremely high and prohibitive for smaller to medium size businesses. This makes it the enterprise-wide reporting tool for larger corporations.

I have been using MicroStrategy for seven years.

I did not have any issues with stability.

I did not have any issues with scalability.

In South Africa, the level of support is very limited to Johannesburg. Very few local partners exist that support the application, compared to other tools in the market. I would, therefore, rate the level of technical support specifically in South Africa as mediocre.

Previously, the company used SAP Business Objects. I made the decision to switch over to MicroStrategy because Business Objects was acquired by SAP at the time. Most ongoing development on BusinessObjects became SAP-focused. This didn’t help us because we are an Oracle-centered organization. MicroStrategy seemed to be the best fit due to its being major database agnostic.

The setup was straightforward and relatively simple.

It’s very expensive. If the pretty picture isn’t one of your core requirements, then most other tools would fit the job.

We evaluated BusinessObjects, Cognos and QlikView.

It is essential to have resources available in the organization for harnessing the true potential of the tool.