MicroStrategy Reviews

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.

I found the ability to create self-reports very valuable. This solution gives a lot of flexibility to analysts and support staff, in order to create reports on-the-go which do not need a fixed-forever template.

Combined with a data governance, it helped us to share information across the organization, to provide a unique source of relevant information, and to avoid duplicities.

The following are areas for improvement:

• Self reporting
• Metadata library / dictionary
• A better security implementation (in terms of usability, it is difficult as hell trying to set up security.)
• Ability to create big reports (e.g., tables are limited to 65000 rows, which is a limitation of the previous century).

We have used this product for about six years.

The servers fall quite easily.

There are some scalability issues. The solution is unable to respond quickly to big reports. I had to switch to Tableau, or perform pre-processing and then import data outside of the model.

We were evaluating Tableau, which everybody found to be a better solution. However, MicroStrategy is the official reporting tool in my organization.

Make sure you design the exploitation layer very carefully. If you don't, everything will turn into a mess. You will need technical gurus to understand the metadata, and the reports will be generated very slowly.

MicroStrategy is an enterprise-wide Business Intelligence solution. There are various components of the software which are independent modules, but which work in conjunction to give a holistic enterprise-wide solution.

The most significant product feature is its robust data warehousing capabilities and metadata management. MicroStrategy lets the user create a different data model on top of the actual physical data model, according to the project requirements. This is a very helpful feature for modelling data and managing the metadata from different data sources in a single place. Any changes in the project data model or inclusion of new data fields is fairly easily accomplished.

Another key feature is that MicroStrategy is mobile-ready. This is one of the few software applications in the BI field which is mobile-ready. It is easy to build visualizations for mobile phones and iPads, and deploy them to end users.

The server architecture is very robust and enables the user to blast company-wide emails with BI reports.

The product has enabled the organization to blend data from different business units of the organization and product reports on it.

It has also replaced the manual process of sending out reports in an Excel sheet every Monday to specified users.

The product needs some improvement in its visualization capabilities. A fair amount of training is required to use this product.

The product is not business-user friendly. It has a lot of IT components which require special expertise. Ad-hoc reporting capabilities can be improved.

I have been using MicroStrategy for three years.

The product is stable. However, performance issues could be encountered if the server architecture is not set up appropriately based on usage and requirements.

Product scalability is easy and MicroStrategy provides additional support if required.

This software requires some training and technical expertise. MicroStrategy provides training sessions for users. They also provide technical support while installing the software and setting up the architecture, which is helpful. Technical support is very responsive and helpful. For larger organizations, they usually have a technical support specialist assigned who would answer any question via email or phone.

I have used many BI solutions other than MicroStrategy.

The initial setup is complex. However, MicroStrategy sends technical support to assist with the initial setup. These consultants work in conjunction with the company's employees to get it set up.

The pricing and licensing is a bit different than most products due to the suite of standalone tools that exist within the entire product. A sales representative would be able to assist with the pricing.

I reviewed IBM Cognos along with MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy was a better fit for our company needs due to its robust architecture, mobile-ready dashboards and a good pipeline of features coming in the future.

I keep learning new technologies and products to stay relevant in the ever evolving BI market. MicroStrategy has a good place in the market right now and is used by many enterprises as their primary BI tool. It also has better in some capabilities (handling large databases, server architecture, mobile-ready) than other tools in the market and has a good pipeline of upcoming advancements.

This is an enterprise-wide solution for which the return on investment is long term rather than short term. Evaluate the product appropriately with others based on your needs.

The OLAP functionality of this product is best in class. The cubes created in MSTR can utilize all cores of the server and thus can be configured to use MPP architecture.

Another feature to highlight here is the latest Big Data Engine; MSTR's BDE is a Yarn based application that embeds right on top of Hadoop FS providing direct access to files in FS without need of any other language - Pig/Impala/Hive. I believe this is the closest a BI tool can embed on top of Hadoop FS.

The last one (not a feature though) which I would like to mention is the SQL that MSTR engine creates to retrieve data from warehouse. The multi-pass SQL is a very effective tool that provides lot of VLDB settings to tweak the SQL in regards to database, load and multiple other factors.

We were able to automate multiple repetitive tasks in the BI environment using administrative tools provided with this product. This helped the team focus their energies on critical work tasks.

Version control is still a major concern in MicroStrategy. I am aware that MSTR is working on it as an enhancement.

License cost is also on the heavier side. Perhaps the desktop version that launched recently, might help ease pressure on budget.

I have been using it for 7 years.

There are no issues with the stability of the product. It works well even with huge datasets and under heavy workloads.

Scalability is not an issue. Administrators can make use of clustering feature to balance out loads on MSTR I-Server. MSTR can scale vertically as well as horizontally.

Technical support has improved a lot in terms of response time as well as technical know-how. The trend was observed with the release of major version 10.x.

I have used some other solutions simultaneously and also at previous work places but I have never switched from one tool to another.

The initial setup is quite vast. Users need to install & configure a lot of components in the MicroStrategy toolkit. Starting from version 10.x, enterprise manager console is embedded in the operations manager console which requires additional configuration.

License cost is quite pricey with loads of add-on functionalities and tools. Organizations possessing an enterprise-wide vision should be the right customers for this tool.

The new addition - MicroStrategy desktop can be used as a standalone application and can help ease pricing pressure.

I did an assessment of Microsoft and MicroStrategy but I realized that both fall into quite different leagues. Microsoft is an ideal fit for low to mid-level companies while MicroStrategy is perfect for huge enterprises. The assessment is a part of market study and will be used for future prospect engagements to position MicroStrategy.

MicroStrategy requires a heavy dose of training and experience to master it. Prepare yourself with an experienced team before jumping into any project.

• 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.

• Mobility: Until very recently, I ran the marketing department for my online gaming company. The ability to review reports, have alarms, drill through the data and make actions (referred to as TRX services) was invaluable. I could decide on the go or at home which campaigns to run the next day, which products to advertise or which partners to invest on. My business is quite volatile and fast changing and so need to be the tools that manage it.

• Usher allowed us to let go of slow connections to VPN, speeding up the tasks probably by 10-fold and providing an improved security layer.
• Transactional services allowed us to code triggers to our affiliate system, CRM, and reporting services. This allowed us to clean up the data on the go, start and stop campaigns and partners, and better relay data to other departments. It's a strong offering that most BI systems lack.
• Visual Insights: This one is where most tools focus on, and although MicroStrategy is not the best – I rate Tableau and Qlik better – it is definitely up there; easy slice and dice of information and visually appealing reports for the non-techie businessman. :)

The main transformations came in the form of mobility, security and self-service.
Smaller benefits came, for instance, from the disappearance of point-in-time presentations for board members with Office integration.

Publishing centralized reports allowed a consolidation of metrics and interdepartmental cooperation and efficiency.

There are ways to go in the areas of newer technologies (big data), better integration with other visualization tools. For instance, MicroStrategy does not provide real-time reporting and integration with other services (social media listening, for instance).

Transactional services should have a big overhaul in terms of delivery, tracking, rollback and documentation.

On the major improvements I would recommend – I would say last but not least – is a review of the UX of the whole backend, as it looks a lot like it’s from the early 2000s.

I have used it for three years.

We encountered stability issues in the beginning; the learning curve for troubleshooting is not small. However, after training on the MicroStrategy server was done, we found the platform very reliable.

Not for our use case, yet. We use MicroStrategy just as the content delivery layer; all our backend is done using a Hortonworks "BigData" (dislike the term btw) stack.

Technical support is good.

We previously used several different solutions. :) I’ve been in business for a while. I actually for this business never switched, as Lottoland was a new business. The reason I didn’t use the technologies that I used in the past such as Oracle, SQL Server with Crystal Reports, Jaspersoft, Cognos, QlikView, SAP BO and so on..., is that I had looked at MSTR’s potential, but their pricing structure was far too complicated and convoluted. When that changed, it tipped the scales to choose them as our provider.

From a technical perspective, the default installation is quite straightforward.

However, initial setup complexity depends on the eye of the beholder I guess. I started with around 70 end users, 120 reports/dashboards across the company, one production server of MSTR with passive fallback, and transactional services for writeback on our data warehouse.

MSTR has no contact with nor at any point was used to manage the data warehouse or our data sources.

Pricing, as I understand it, is now based on:

• Users
• Cores
• A separate price for mobile

I have no advice, I'm afraid; it’s quite straightforward. As a rule of my company, we keep costs low so strictly report readers have no access; "inquirers", power users, and technical staff have full access. If at any point the cores become cheaper, we would switch. :) Then they have to reassess access strategies, as it becomes more important the time users access the platform rather than the amount. We'll never be in that situation because we run on commodity servers (we prefer more servers with more cores rather than a big mainframe). If I have any advice, it is to go cloud if possible; due to our regulations, we cannot.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated several other options, the usual subjects: BO, SQL Server, Tableau, Qlick,...

If you implement a specific refresh window, be very wary of refresh times and memory consumption; system refreshes block any other action on the system. Other than that, the platform is quite intuitive for anyone who has BI solution implementation experience.

MicroStrategy is the best of all enterprise solutions on a price/value axis.

• 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.