MicroStrategy Reviews and Pricing

it_user220092

Project Associate at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Apr 20, 2015

It has helped a lot of business users gain insight into their business but the developer friendliness needs to be improved a bit.

What is most valuable?

Robust architecture
Scalable reports and scorecards
Integration with other products

How has it helped my organization?

It has helped a lot of business users gain insight into how their business is doing.

What needs improvement?

The developer tool-kit is bit like that of late 90's and the developer friendliness needs to be improved a bit.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for over four years.

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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No major issues.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

None as of now.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

How are customer service and support?

Customer Service:

Good. The support site is very helpful.

Technical Support:

Very good. The tech support team responds very quickly.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No solution was used previously.

How was the initial setup?

The setup is well documented and is easy to do.

What about the implementation team?

We used an in-house team.

What was our ROI?

As the licensing cost is, relatively, not high, it provides great ROI.

What other advice do I have?

A must have Gartner leader BI tool. Tableau and MSTR can complement each other but I would put my money on Microstrategy..

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user144300

Director of BI / Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Mar 11, 2015

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There are many niche players that may excel, but if you need to push the boundaries MicroStrategy is a leader.

What is most valuable?

Valuable features include advanced SQL Engine, Reusable Metadata, Data Exploration/Viz, Production Grade Report/Dashboard Automation, Mobile, Integration with rich SDK/API, and In Memory BI high performance.

How has it helped my organization?

Made self-service BI/Data Exploration possible for the end-user.

What needs improvement?

Simplified development tools.

Removing Flash from web interfaces

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this solution for 18 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No, very easy to install and manage environment.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues with stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No, highly scalable on all sizes of data and platforms.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

4 out of 5 – they have great tech support but are sometimes challenging to work with on contracts and pricing.

Technical Support:

5 out of 5 – they go above and beyond to resolve or enhance their product.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I have worked with many other solutions but keep choosing MicroStrategy whenever the requirements are complex. There are many niche players that may excel in certain specific areas but if you need to push the boundaries and have a complete BI solution that is not focused in a niche such as data visualization then MicroStrategy is a leader that should be considered.

How was the initial setup?

You need to understand the platform but once you have this understanding the installation is very straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

Internal/Off-shore vendor (Infocepts – 5 out of 5 off-shore vendor founded by ex-MicroStrategy employees).

What was our ROI?

It is providing both internal and external reporting for the business that was not previously possible. The first external reporting solution was delivered in less than 1 month of development.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

$150k for a single CPU of web/iserver capacity. Currently all development/administration is supported by a single off-shore developer at a rate of $35/hr. The new pricing model has allowed for simplified web user pricing allowing all web functionality to be available to all users.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, BO, SSRS?MS Power BI, OBIEE, TIBCO.

What other advice do I have?

If your BI requirements are complex and require significant integration into internal applications this can be achieved using MicroStrategy and the SDK but the appropriate skilled resources will be required throughout the implementation. Do not expect to be successful just throwing a java developer at the SDK work who has no previous experience with the MicroStrategy SDK.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

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it_user164241

MicroStrategy Expert with 15 years exp. at Strategy BI Consulting

Mar 2, 2015

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A full BI solution for any size/industry organization.

What is most valuable?

Centralized

Object oriented

Meta Data

How has it helped my organization?

All business data available to analyse in acceptable time and form with no extra efforts.

What needs improvement?

Visualisation will improved in the next version.

For how long have I used the solution?

15 Years

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Good

Technical Support:

Good enough

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

MS OLAP and SAP BW.

What was our ROI?

High

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

OBIEE, MS OLAP, Cognos, Tableau, QlikView

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user174993

MicroStrategy Consultant at Interstate Batteries

Dec 23, 2014

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Transaction Services is a good feature which I'm looking forward to seeing improve.

What is most valuable?

Web Dashboards, Mobile, Transaction Services, and Visual Insights.

How has it helped my organization?

I am a consultant so my list is big. Therefore, I will pick the most recent one which on my current assignment is directly proportional to the operational costs for a business. At Interstate Batteries using RFID Technology we have a couple of web dashboards that displays inventory in the field, lists all the shops and their respective out of stock counts, shops that need to be serviced, and shops that have old batteries. Participating distributors(people who own the business of selling batteries) have sold their unwanted trucks(reducing operational costs), increased the amount of batteries sold for every stop made), reducing hot shots(delivering out of stock batteries) and increased sales at an average of 50% .

What needs improvement?

Transaction Services is a new field which allows users to have interaction with the databases. I am pretty sure MicroStrategy has improvements lined up in this section.

For how long have I used the solution?

6 years

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues encountered.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

8 out of 10.

Technical Support:

9 out of 10.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

MicroStrategy is my first BI tool.

How was the initial setup?

It is straightforward to implement.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user8547

Consultant at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Sep 15, 2014

Microstrategy “Data Science to Business Value”

When a customer wants to implement BI, there are lots of options available in the market to choose from. The decision depends on various parameters such as scale of implementation, costing and performance. They can either go with the open source options, or they can plan towards a paid BI tool. The decision can also be driven based on strategic factors of the company. I personally don’t believe in tool agnostic approach, I feel every customer has his own BI needs and has some specific requirements. No tool in this world can meet each one of these requirements, but in my experience MicroStrategy provides a complete product, which meets most of the customer requirements. This would be my first product review on a Business intelligence tool “MicroStrategy”

MicroStrategy is a solution provider for enterprise software platform on business intelligence.When we talk about MicroStrategy the first thought that comes into my mind is the core focus of the company, which is to deliver Business intelligence solutions, unlike other companies, which have their focus on different horizons. This, according to me, is the core strength of MicroStrategy as a company. Mike Saylor (CEO) gave similar insights in the MicroStrategy World conference. According to him the biggest advantage of MicroStrategy as a company is that they are the largest independently owned BI platform. There are lot of companies in the market who acquire small firms to improve their technology and product,but MicroStrategy is not one of them. The fact that MicroStrategy has resisted the temptation to build a technology portfolio through acquisitions has become their core strength. They always believed in their core framework and everything was developed by their own team. According to the BI Survey 12, conducted by German-based Business Application Research Center (BARC), MicroStrategy has received the highest ranking in numerous KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) such as total Performance, user Recommendation, mobile, query performance, data volumes and big data.With the release of 9.4.1 they have integrated various current technologies with PRIME to support ultra fast processing of data.

MicroStrategy has a deep market penetration and is regularly used for industry level solutions in different domains such as Retail, Healthcare, Banking, Manufacturing, Social Media etc. There are lots of key advantages of using MicroStrategy which I will elaborate verbosely.

Core functionality and Ease for Development- Having worked on different reporting platforms, I feel that most of the functionality is directly available out of the box in MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy platform supports distributed development so many developers can work on the project at a given time. Most of objects are reusable and there definition can be reused across other business areas. It also has extensive control on formatting of reports / dashboard. It supports as many number of databases and next generation database along with multi sourcing. The security architecture of MicroStrategy makes designing and implementation very powerful. You can have row level, object level, application level, and all different forms of security. Any developer with a fair amount of development experience in MicroStrategy would be able to list down product features and limitations. Although limitations of the tool are not much but there are functionalities which can be handled using SDK.
Visual Data discovery-For any BI tool, the ease-of-use is very important along with the sophisticated analytics which can be presented using the best visualization framework. As the size of data is increasing day by day, this is not going to decrease in the near future as well. It has become very important for a BI to analyze these enormous data volumes in a best representable format. Data visualization is driving demand in the business intelligence (BI) market because it's intuitive and accessible to business users who aren't schooled in query languages or statistical analysis. MicroStrategy has a strong stand in these areas due to large number of visualizations in their library. This separates MicroStrategy, as a tool, for visual exploration from other competitors. Features like flash widgets and interactive flash PDF export make it very versatile tool. The advance dashboards visualizations make the dashboard appealing and are best way to represent data in a more intuitive format.
Impromptu BI- There are customers in the market who look for Impromptu BI as a solution for their BI needs. MicroStrategy provides a solution called as visual insights which meets this purpose and is best suited for such cases. MicroStrategy Visual Insight empowers you to discover insights from your data using compelling visualizations. Users can use any of the out of the box Visualizations or they can create their own custom Visualizations using SDK. Once the base cube is developed it hardly takes 10-20 minutes to create visualizations for the analysis and this is what most business users want these days. They are the people who understand their data and want to play around with the data. Other than visual insights there are solutions developed using Object prompt where user has an option to select what they want to view in a report. This makes MicroStrategy stand out in front of other competitors.
Mentoring and support offering-For any business intelligence tool the level and depth of customer support is becoming increasingly critical as BI becomes more integrated into organizations’ operations. Better product support results in higher application success rates and helps to ensure customers get full value from their Investments. MicroStrategy on that note has one of the best customer support offering in the industry. This helps you to report your issues and business cases enhancements to MicroStrategy which can be taken into consideration for the subsequent release/hotfix/patch depending on your business impact. The support offering also helps in providing solutions to MicroStrategy developers and Administrators for the issues they face during the development. Striving to maximize the business benefits of a MicroStrategy one should prioritize customer support strategy. Apart from the excellent customer offering MicroStrategy hosts customer trainings events at different Geographic locations as it is important to keep decision makers across the company educated on the tool. End user training and mentoring is very important for success of any BI tool. MicroStrategy also hosts their annual user conference called as “MicroStrategy world” which consists of lot of sessions; it is also a good opportunity for individuals looking for more networking opportunities in MicroStrategy.
Performance and stability- MicroStrategy provides unmatched Performance and Stability on a Consolidated BI Platform
Social media and big data- MicroStrategy is one of the first vendors to certify integration with Amazon Redshift. MicroStrategy constantly demonstrates leadership and innovation in both major dimensions of Big Data analytics. They are one of the leading innovators in big data space. When we talk about BI, social media analytics cannot be neglected. Many market research firms rely on data from social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to get some insights. MicroStrategy’s social intelligence platform includes a number of applications that help enterprises harness the power of social networks for marketing and e-commerce.
MicroStrategy Mobile- Michael Saylor who is the founder of MicroStrategy has also written a book called “The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything” and I believe that its Saylor’S vision on the Mobile technology that has made MicroStrategy to grow on the Mobile Side. The Mobile App Platform transforms business intelligence reporting from paper or the desktop, to the mobile device. Workers are no longer chained to their desk, or reliant on paper-based documents that are obsolete by the time they reach their target audience. Mobile applications provide functionality that is unmatched by paper or a web browser. MicroStrategy has created some really amazing apps for IOS and Android users. They also have a program called Mobile Quick strike for 10 days where they would come up with a fully functional app. It gives customers the confidence in the overall strength of the tool. MicroStrategy’s mobile intelligence platform helps companies and organizations build, deploy, and maintain mobile apps across a range of solutions by embedding intelligence, transactions, and multimedia into apps.
Integration and certification with other platforms- MicroStrategy tool is certified with various reporting databases and platforms which makes it easily usable across the organizations. MicroStrategy team adds new certification and support with every release of the product.

Although every tool has some limitations, MicroStrategy is no exception. I will list down a few:-

Sometimes it can be hard to quantify the ROI (return on investment) on software as the returns come indirectly through the better informed workers and decision makers across the company. The tool can be of limited use for some companies. MicroStrategy system still cannot be afforded by most of the companies. When they plan to buy this product they have various purchase options wherein the cost would be around some hundred dollars per user if they plan to go for a user based license or it can go as high as a million dollars for a CPU based license depending on the performance they want from their system. Although, in the past few years MicroStrategy has started modifying their services towards medium and small sized industries, but the fact is that many of such firms do not consider them to be highly essential as its hard to quantify the ROI.This stands true for other paid tools as well and that is the reason open source tools are getting some market share these days
Having worked as a developer on MicroStrategy I see Impact Analysis as a pain point area in MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy is an object oriented tool and in this world of business, change is something which is inevitable, so in case there is a request for change and you need to find the impact of the object in MSTR, it does a recursive search and doesn’t give the list of objects in one view which makes very difficult for any developer to know the overall impact of the object inside a big project implementation. Unlike other BI tools which list down all the objects dependent on a particular object in a single view which can be exported into excel for tracking the change and validation of test cases.
Version control is not a strong point for MicroStrategy and I feel there is a scope of improvement in this area.
Development in MicroStrategy is done mostly using desktop though they have included lot of features with their latest release in web but I feel full support of web based development is important and would improve with the future release.
A pain point for some organizations these days is to find a good MicroStrategy resource. Getting a Cognos/BO/OBIEE expert from the IT market is comparatively easier than finding a good MicroStrategy resource.

These are some advantages and disadvantages of the tool.Compared to the advantages the disadvantages are some minor improvements which i feel would be taken care in future releases. I haven’t listed granular details as I wanted to keep this review at a high level for product understanding. There are lots of features which one can explore. When you do the contemplate MicroStrategy is a great product over all. To conclude you should never forget "Owning a supercomputer gives you a special feeling but the question is, Are you really using it for what it is intended to?”

Hope this review helps customers who are preparing their BI strategy. In case you need more insights, or you are planning for a BI implementation and have some questions do write to me on my Email. I would be more than happy to help.

Disclosure: The company I work for is partner with Microstrategy

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user395070Works at a tech company with 51-200 employees

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Feb 25, 2016

thanks for the great information on visual data & bigadata

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it_user5598

Senior Director, BI Architecture at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 12, 2014

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The product supports a broad range of analysis styles, but it struggles with schemas other than star or snowflake.

What is most valuable?

It’s very scalable, the most scalable BI platform that I know of. By that I mean data scalability as well as being able to support a large number of users. The product is mature and stable. It supports a broad range of analysis styles and presentation formats.

How has it helped my organization?

We have deployed multiple BI solutions using Microstrategy, ranging from standard reports to dashboards to ad hoc analytics.

What needs improvement?

Microstrategy works best against a star or snowflake schema. While in principle it can work with a more normalized data model, it struggles with schemas other than star or snowflake.

For how long have I used the solution?

Over 3 years. It had been installed before I started with the company.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Nothing major

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Nothing major

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The tool itself scales well, however in our experience the scalability of the entire solution is 90%+ a function of the underlying database.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service: GoodTechnical Support: Good

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We used Cognos before. The main reason for switching is that at the time when we made a decision to switch, Cognos was unable to handle the data volumes that we required. Latest versions of Cognos have improved in this respect.

How was the initial setup?

I can’t comment on this because initial setup had been conducted before I joined the company.

What about the implementation team?

We used a mix of MicroStrategy Professional Services and in-house staff. Their consultants were superb.

What was our ROI?

We don’t measure ROI.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It depends on how you count costs and what you include.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

The other option was to stay with Cognos.

What other advice do I have?

Make sure your database design follows dimensional modeling principles. Avoid API-level customizations, they may break when upgrading product versions.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user125418

Owner/Principal at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Aug 7, 2014

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Data access could be improved but I find the totality of the product to be the best in the business

What is most valuable?

The ability of the end user to be able to design and modify their own solutions, as well as the ROLAP architecture that provides almost unlimited scalability.

How has it helped my organization?

With MicroStrategy's focus on end user empowerment, a business analyst can make any modifications needed to follow wherever their analytical thought process leads them. With a multi-dimensional cube solution (Cognos, for example), if the analyst falls into the "white space" between cubes he/she needs to stop and request a new cube from the IT shop, interrupting the analytical thought process, possibly for a significant amount of time.

What needs improvement?

Data access could be improved. MicroStrategy has a data import capability but it only works for data in a Excel spreadsheet or a CSV file. It would be helpful if one could point the data importer at a web site, or provide it a URL of a data source and have it import the data.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have followed MSTR's development for nearly 20 years and find the totality of the product to be the best in the business because of scalability, single metadata, SQL generator, and end user usability. I organized a review of 6 then-current BI applications in 1996, including MicroStrategy, Holos, Information Advantage, Essbase, Oracle Express, and Cognos. Only MicroStrategy, OBII (formerly Oracle Express) and Cognos are still standing.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Not on my personal WIndows 7 Pro 64-bit machine. I've never deployed the Server product.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Not on my personal WIndows 7 Pro 64-bit machine.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Not on my personal WIndows 7 Pro 64-bit machine.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service: Unknown.Technical Support: Unknown.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

One customer was using Cognos and I advised them that they may want to consider switching to MicroStrategy for the reasons I stated above.

How was the initial setup?

On my personal Windows 7 Pro 64-bit machine. I don't know how different it might be on an enterprise server, although an acquaintance who has deployed it says that there are no issues.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I've also looked at Tibco Spotfire and Pentaho, and read reviews and evaluations of Tableau. All of these are seductive, but their solutions ignore the challenges of dealing with masses of data. MicroStrategy's single metadata also makes it possible to track every object and action in the system, and to autogenerate documentation.

What other advice do I have?

Look at the complete package, considering TCO, administrative ease and end user usability/empowerment.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user114918Professional Services Manager at a tech consulting company with 501-1,000 employees

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Aug 7, 2014

Hi Keith,
I am not sure what version you are working with, but MSTR 9.4.1 can import data from files (CSV, Excel and Text) located on your computer or anywhere (using URL). It can import data from databases, Salesforce, and Freeform (scrits made by DB professionals) too.
Cheers.

it_user136422

Industry Analyst at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 27, 2014

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