MicroStrategy Reviews

I'm a system implementer, so I implement the system for customers. I implement whatever the customer needs at their site. It's generally all the BI information that they have in the data warehouse.

Its performance is very good.

Users are getting their reports when they need them.

The whole Repository side of things is beneficial because you develop it once, and you can use it anywhere, in the Enterprise grade.

If you compare it with Power BI with the DAX language, it would be great to put that into MicroStrategy.

It's pretty stable.

The scalability is excellent.

I would rate technical support at seven out of 10.

The choice was political: IBM Cognos against MicroStrategy, and due to IBM internal mechanisms.

My criteria for selecting a vendor are, first, that the application software works, and secondly, the support - and local support as well.

I was involved in the initial setup and it's pretty complex, but it's very powerful once it's set up.

Pricing, in general, is high. With Power BI, you get mobile with the license, whereas with MicroStrategy, you have to purchase mobile for extra.

If you're looking for enterprise BI, go for MicroStrategy.

I would give the tool an eight out of 10. The local office would get a two out of 10. But the tool itself is just a good enterprise-grade tool.

Primary is the enterprise reporting. That's our baseline. Everything else is "nice-to-haves."

It performs very well.

If you provide the necessary data to make decisions in a timely and visually stimulating way, then you can make better decisions. It profoundly impacts the organization.

It's such a rich platform, it's got so much to offer: it's mobile, In-Memory Analytics, and there are data connectors to just about everything you can imagine. It's a total package.

If they didn't do their enterprise reporting very well then it wouldn't be as successful.

I would say what's unique is that it's a comprehensive package, and wasn't done piecemeal. It was built internally. They didn't buy products and stitch them together. Everything works really well together. It's such a powerful platform and I've worked with it for a long time. It's amazing that I still continue to learn and discover new things even to this day.

We have rolled out self-service to business teams. Data governance is the biggest challenge.

Looking forward, for this year, mobility is something I think we'll utilize most. We're currently on the mobile platform but we're looking to use it more. It's going to continue to be a strong push.

I don't think that they will, but I'd like to see parallel processing, scalable parallel processing. 

Also, there are minor features, that I've already logged with MicroStrategy, nothing major.

It's one of the most stable platforms I've ever worked on. I've never had it fall on me, never.

It scales well. It used to have only a max of four I-servers, but I think recently, somewhere in version 10, they doubled that, so you can have eight I-servers now.

The only problem with that - yes it's a cluster, they raised it from four to eight - but your jobs aren't distributed. Your job goes to a single server - one of the eight. If you have a really huge job, it'd be nice to distribute it across all eight and cut the response time significantly.

They're actually pretty good. It's support, it's a difficult job. They're actually really good.

Windows implementation is pretty straightforward. Linux is pretty easy. High-level, it's very easy.

Take the time to find an experienced consultant. A good consultant can increase your adoption and lower your overall cost by saving you from costly missteps.

I would prefer having analytic capabilities from a single platform, rather than from many-point solutions, but in reality, I don't think that's very possible. 

I can give you an example. MicroStrategy, was very early to do In-Memory Analytics. I think everybody else is catching up to that. It doesn't really set them apart anymore today, but it did at one time. But beyond that, with MicroStrategy you're still limited to a single server, and to really crunch through a lot of data you need to parallel, across servers. MicroStrategy doesn't currently offer that so you have to go to something like Spark.

So I would love that on one platform, but in reality you can't get everything you possibly want in one platform. But MicroStrategy is smart. They have data connectors to open source applications. That may provide the functionality that you need to fill in the gaps.

Most important when selecting a vendor is 

• the support 
• their stability, are they going to be here tomorrow
• release schedule, a fairly stable, consistent, high-value release schedule.

I give MicroStrategy a nine out of 10. It's pretty solid. It's not perfect, but it's pretty solid. I think it is probably the best solution out there right now.

Do your homework. Shop around. Really understand MicroStrategy and the alternatives. Do enough research to realize where the real value is at. It's a mature product, it's a mature suite. It's more than just pretty dashboards. If you look past that, the administration, mobility, the analytics, if you look at all of it and rate each of the categories, I think you'll realize that MicroStrategy is at the top of the list.

There is a steep learning curve with it, a skill set that goes with it. But they've balanced that with the new Data Discovery module that is fairly easy to use by anyone.

Predictive analysis with R, reporting and dashbaords.

With the advent of the partitioning concept in Cube partitioning, predictive analysis with visualizations, our organization is able to win back customers and customer appreciation.

• Its Cube performance
• Can be easily integrated to D3
• Can be easily integrated with third-party tools/products

Data writeback, and on-the-fly predictive analysis results from R and Python.

Cube publish time exponentially increases with MicroStrategy Cube size. Also, it has been observed that the Cube data gets unloaded from MicroStrategy's Cube cache resulting in reports and dashboards being impacted, having no data when executed.

With Cube partition (v10.1 and above) scalability has not been an issue, but the Cube publish time, and temporary space consumption while the Cube is being published, has almost doubled during implementation of Cube partition.

I would rate tech support seven out of 10, in terms of response and issue resolution.

We used SSRS reports, but the performance and visualization were always an issue.

Initial setup is bit of complex, this being an enterprise tool. It has three main components: Desktop, Web development, and Intelligence Server, and each has to be installed separately.

Before going ahead with MicroStrategy, we evaluated Tableau and QlikView, but in terms performance, data handling, and stability, we found this product scored highest. In fact, Tableau and QlilView are less stable and in no way match the Cube (cached data) functionality offered by MicroStrategy. A single report/dashboard can be created by pulling information from multiple cached data (called Cubes).

• BI reporting
• Dashboard
• Mobile

Provides seamless integration between browser-based BI and Mobile BI.

Mobile. It brings reports/dashboards closer to the business user. They can access it whenever they want with their mobile devices. It also provides consistent user experience similar to the same reports/dashboards on browser, and it is very intuitive. 

The product is designed for enterprise. A lightweight version would be easier for a smaller workgroup.

Not at all. MicroStrategy is known for its enterprise ready platform. 

Every software with a flawed design has issues. MicroStrategy is not an exception.

I would rate technical support as an eight out of 10.

Initial setup was straightforward.

MicroStrategy needs a certain level of back-end design skill. Choose the right back-end system.

Dashboarding first and foremost for financial power users.

Web authoring and report bursting for enterprise-wide business user community.

Mature product with a lot of features and connections to almost all back-end technologies used in the BI space.

• Semi-automatic support of implementing date dimensions, including delta to prior year implementation.
• Speed for high level aggregation by using Intelligent Cubes.

More flexibility for hierarchy displays, especially tree views with ad hoc expand and close. Consolidate the functional offering to be more concise in the front-end for web reports, dashboards, and self-service. 

Currently, the client view looks completely different depending on what you are building.

As it stands now, the primary use is just for utilization, the mobile device, and the reports which are built for it. There might be plans in the future for spreading the entire platform to other areas and divisions as well. 

The truth is that this is not about business impact, such as high reliability. This is something that can be perceived, but other features are more compelling, like visualizations, which have a possibility of utilization around mobile devices with great GUI. Those stories, which are built for them, are something that they can really utilize. 

The most important features are its enterprise-based features. The platform can be easily monitored. You have quite a good overview of tasks which are being run. Also, you can see the users who are logged into the platform. Also, the tasks that are not performing well, you can easily kill them. These are core features which are not as common in other BI platforms, like Tableau or Qlik. 

In a few months, we will be distributing personalized alerts to users using mobile push notifications.

We hope the new tools will make a huge difference, especially considering the new workstation. We would like to see features that were introduced for the Operations Manager that have been discontinued. We would like to see those features somehow integrated into the Desktop Workstation tool. 

From time to time, there is for a specific project and the focus is that the support is close to the HAPS. We had three HAPS and the fourth one is currently under construction. We would really like to see MicroStrategy have some support teams based more in Europe, because for now it seems that there is one person for the whole CE region. That is not exactly what we would like to see. We do know that MicroStrategy supports most places, either in the US or India, but those are different time zones, people, and cultures.

In early phases of the 10th release, there were some issues, especially on several OS types like Windows, but then it stopped. It has been resolved, especially the issues with the intelligence errors were kind of serious, but it turned out that after some time we received a patch which worked. It is definitely better than it used to be. 

This is an area that could somehow improve, because the support was not exactly as responsive as we had hoped for. It is the reason why we utilized the MicroStrategy Community for solving these issues. 

I did not do the initial setup for the mobile solution, because that was somehow developed by third-parties. Otherwise, I was hands-on for the initial 10th releases, like 10.2, 10.3, and even 10.4.

In the beginning, it looked straightforward, but each of the releases had its own issue for some reason. I did not see any additional value of providing one button for installation on the whole platform if it was going to be installed for different servers. You would have to make customization every time. There was no additional value in an installer. 

This should be an area MicroStrategy focuses on as well as the upgrade pads, especially Enterprise Manager and its statistics. This has always been an issue. Many of the reports were basically unusable. 

The mobile for MicroStrategy is the best of all the BI platforms. It has some drawbacks, but its functionality, if done by skilled developers, I am really not sure if there is anything better. Some people can consider, I would say dedicated mobile applications, for example, maybe SAP. Then, it is very nice for the end users as well. 

However, as a separate product for the mobile device, MicroStrategy is the entire BI platform. It is an enterprise solution, a separate unit, etc.

We are not using MicroStrategy's WriteBack capabilities, but it is something to be considered in the future, especially considering the fact that it is a unique feature that could be utilized. 

Primary use case would be for mobile apps, exposing mobile data to people who need data at the right time and the right location, and MicroStrategy does that. 

It does so extremely well. They have one of the best mobile BI apps available. They've the got the whole power of the MicroStrategy ecosystem, and they just expose it through the app. It's a stand-alone mobile development app that you don't even have to do business intelligence on. You can just use it to build apps. It's pretty cool.

In the old days - which is not long ago, about 10 years ago - before iPhones, you literally had to go back to your desk to run a report, and your report could take an hour to run. 

Now, you can run that same report, you can access it from Starbucks, or wherever, to your mobile device, and you've got access to information. The decision makers within your company have access to the information wherever they want it, whenever they want it.

Building apps is easy. You just drag in your data, and then you drag in all the elements that you want on your app. It's drag and drop design, and then you can customize your visuals. They make it all easy with plug and play widgets. That just makes it too easy. Don't tell my employers.

We use Writeback mainly for regular database transaction tables. It's just a feedback loop, back into the mobile dashboards. You can type into those and then writeback whatever you wrote in, back to a database. And then, when you refresh your dashboard, everybody can see your input refreshed, instantly. It's an instant feedback loop, we don't writeback to any source systems. It's just for MicroStrategy's circle of functionality, an "interloop."

Since I'm a "mobile-dashboardy" guy, I would like to see more capabilities on the mobile side to bring it on par with apps that you see in the App Store, like Uber or Facebook. They've got all the bells and whistles - well, maybe not Facebook. The interface you can design in MicroStrategy is great, but I feel it needs to be refreshed, add a bit more functionality. As a developer in 2018, at least I have features that we're seeing in other apps in the App Store. I feel like we're a few years behind with our features, but still pretty excellent features.

We haven't really had issues with stability. 

Well, in the old days, say a few years ago, upgrades only came out once every year and they were more stable. But MicroStrategy has moved to a quarterly release, so they've got a lot more new features in there, which means there's an opportunity for bugs to slip through. So, occasionally, the Mobile Server does crash, but it instantly recovers and users typically don't even notice it. 

If the disconnect happens when they're on a screen, at least their data is there, and because there are local device caches holding the data, there's a certain offline capability that is just built-in naturally, so you don't need a connection all the time. By the time the Mobile Server comes back, they didn't even notice. Typically, downtimes are very limited.

On our mobile solution you can deploy up to 100,000 users. In our case, we're up to about 10,000 active users, and MicroStrategy's server technology behind the scenes, the Intelligence Server and the Mobile Servers, are very robust and they can handle the workload, which is impressive.

I've learned by trial and error, but I've been working in it for about 10 years, so I've seen everything. We do use support occasionally in our company, for the bugs that we can't find a solution for.

They have different levels of support. The front-line support is okay resolving problems. I couldn't put a percentage on it, but once it escalates up to the next it usually gets resolved.

They've got a robust knowledge base that's open to the public, in the Community. You can literally search any problems there and somebody else has usually encountered it. You can fix a lot of problems yourself using the knowledge base, or talk to service. They usually fix the problems pretty fast.

Regarding upgrades, for version 10, which is the latest version, the upgrades are more robust. There aren't as many issues as in the previous version, version 9. There were definitely issues upgrading from 9 to 10 because it's a huge upgrade, but typically it's the same issues that you're going to encounter. 

Unfortunately, MicroStrategy is known for upgrade pain, so a lot of companies don't upgrade. You will encounter problems, and when you have major enterprises that can't run some reports for days or weeks on end, that's not acceptable. But that happens rarely. 

Version 10, I've noticed that in the upgrade process I have not encountered any problems, so there something has changed in the upgrade process for the better.

We are embedding multimedia content in our apps. Last week, I did a for-fun dashboard. It was all about Star Wars and Return of the Last Jedi. I had some active video in there that I started streaming from Vimeo. You can do that, you can embed streaming video from websites, or you can host the video files on your internal media servers. The video is clear, absolutely.

We are also distributing personalized alerts using native mobile push ads, for IOS and Android. It's pretty easy on MicroStrategy. There is a bit of configuration involved, so you definitely need to have a technical administrator help you get it set up, and your Apple developer to get all the certificates. There are a lot of moving parts, but once you get it set up, the alerts are great. You have to manage them, because you don't want an alert, the same alert, coming to the same person every 10 seconds because they will get annoyed and they will stop using your app. So, there's a fine line between too much information and too little.

We have configured our mobile apps to work offline to a certain extent, but most of ours do not work offline because there are some limitations involved with the offline modes, the performance issues, and sometimes performance is more important. There are tradeoffs. In some cases, we need offline data sets, but most of our clients use WiFi in the stores where they can launch their mobile app, and they're always connected. So they don't need offline. It depends on the use case. In our case, it doesn't really apply.

What I appreciate most in a vendor would be transparency, that they're being upfront with me. I would like to be able to purchase a piece of software that I know is going to cost me a lot of money, but I want them to be giving me their best price and not trying to give me a higher price and then I have to haggle with them to get a lower price. It would be nice if there was a sticker price that says, "This software costs this amount of money." But I think that's just indicative of all software vendors. A lot of people are in it to make money, commissions, so it's just the nature of the business. But I would like to see more transparency, more equality, on pricing. Some people get better deals than others, I think.

From my perspective as a mobile-focused, dashboard kind of guy, looking at how the business intelligence solution looks, I would rate it, capability-wise, an eight out of 10. It is dragging behind other tools on the self-service visualizations, like Tableau. I would rate Tableau as a 10. For the same visualizations, I would say MicroStrategy is an eight, maybe nine. They're still behind on the self-service visualizations, but on mobile visualizations I would give them a nine or even a ten. It depends on what part of the tool you use. Some parts are older and haven't had any "love" in the past, and some areas, like Dossiers, are getting all the love right now and they look modern. From my point of view, I would rate them pretty high, overall.

Think about how many people and how much money it's going to cost to implement a solution. It's not just buying the software, which is pricey. You have to think about all the servers - you need multiple servers. You need a lot of people, you need an administrator, an architect, you need developers, mobile developers. I was talking to one guy, he has a team of 40 people, and this is just building reports. So that's a hidden cost there, if you want to crank out a lot of work, you're going to have to have a lot of people. It's not just for a small company. It's just too much.

We help customers utilize MicroStrategy in multiple ways:

• We have enterprise analytics being used.
• We use MicroStrategy as an integrated solution with some of their other CRM type applications.
• There are people who are using MicroStrategy as transaction services. I have never been successful with it. 

There are a broad range of applications that we see.

MicroStrategy is one of our key tool sets which we are focusing on for 2018 and beyond. It has the potential to become a great evangelist for AI and other embedded analytics. For more futuristic design solutions, our organization as such, is focusing on this area in terms of artificial intelligence and analytics. MicroStrategy, so far, has based on their product roadmap to fit squarely to match the design that we have.

The single stack solution will always be more profitable, scalable, and elastic for organizational needs. 

In 2018, we will be focusing a lot on artificial intelligence and analytics. Embedded analytics will be another key area that we will be focusing on, therefore we will be looking to see how the SDK shapes up and the road map for cloud implementation. This is the next major push that we see. The ease of upgrades and mobile analytics are also other key areas that we will be focusing on.

MicroStrategy's multilarity and the range of features which it comes with makes it a key building block of our entire data value chain, starting from the production of data, where you could essentially use the transactions services to become your app that generates the data through to data blending and data wrangling, which handles most of your cleansing and cleaning up of the data. Then, you have data storage and analytics, all the way through to presentation. The key value proposition for MicroStrategy is its ability to support each of these use cases. 

Distribution services are definitely something that sets it apart from the rest of the tool sets. Embedded analytics are a side of this field where not many key players are doing really well, and MicroStrategy strategy has the open APIs and SDKs that can be leveraged here.

We have seen mixed success with Self-Service. There are customers who are very happy with what they are seeing in MicroStrategy. However, there are some customers who are not as happy, but most of it has to do with the process of data governance and BI governance. They need to put it in place together with the tool set. The tool set will only give you features, then ultimately how you use it is what generates value for the business users. It is more about educating the customers, etc., but Self-Service in MicroStrategy has been a very successful deployment.

There are learning curve issues due to organizational processes. Most of the time, there are processes in which the user is not sure how to implement the solution and what the other surrounding processes and frameworks that he needs to put in place.

MicroStrategy is not cloud native today and some of their APIs are a little limiting.

One of the things that I want to see MicroStrategy do is become more cloud native. Right now, the deployment on cloud is very easy to ruin, it is very much like spinning up separate VMs. We would like to see it be more modular on the cloud, where people can look and scale different portions of the applications as they want. That will be a very interesting feature if MicroStrategy could do this.

Their on-premise solution is very robust. 

However, we have seen some stability issues with MicroStrategy on cloud. We have a few unhappy customers.

The solution is scalable. A little expensive perhaps, but it is scalable.

We have our technical support team, but we have interfaced with the MicroStrategy technical support on several aspects. Most of the time, they are knowledgeable. 

We hear this from our customers mostly (about waiting long times for responses). Those customers that approach us, we have the right sort of contacts to give them the answers quickly. It is the customers that have direct interactions with MicroStrategy where we hear mixed reviews.

If you are a technical person, someone who has all the tools and processes to get you trained on the platform and be able to manage the platform and installation by yourself, it would be straightforward. But for a non-technical person, it could be a little heavier (complex).

We had MicroStrategy train us on the platform.

As a consultant, we have multiple tools which we are focusing on.

Definitely research the key business use cases. Make sure you have your key technical person trained on MicroStrategy and on how to implement the solution. One of the important things for people to keep in mind is the Henry Ford slogan, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." However, the horse might not be the right solution in this case. Just keep that in mind. I think MicroStrategy has everything else I need.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Customer support is a very key area for us. When we help someone through the journey, we want to make sure of the following:

• The vendor's equally committed.
• Has the resources.
• Ready to support us.
• The tool's key features and capabilities are aligned with the digital transformation team, which we see around us.