MicroStrategy Reviews

I would like to see enhanced features in the dashboards. This would enhance the solution in the future, and is currently missing.

It is reliable.

We have not contacted the tech support team. 

I was not involved with the initial setup.

When selecting a vendor, we consider all of the necessary requirements, and how it can incorporate the current data.

I was not involved in choosing this solution.

Our primary use case for this product are analytics and visualization. 

It has allowed us to standardize the reporting so that everybody is looking at the same view of the data.

The most valuable features are ad hoc reporting and the ability to create dashboards.

The product could be improved by adding additional visualization.  Also, another feature to consider in the future would be adding some additional offline capabilities without using desktops. In addition, continued development of mobile reporting. 

I have not encountered issues with stability. 

 I have not encountered any issues with scalability. 

We have used CognitiveScale in the past. 

The implementation was fairly straightforward. 

Make sure to do your due diligence and understand that the tools meet your needs. 

The licensing is a bit high per user. 

Yes, we considered Tableau, SAP Business Objects and Cognitive Scale.

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.