MicroStrategy Reviews

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.

We use MicroStrategy for our supply chain and merchandising, because we are retail.

Performance has been pretty good so far.

Because we are in retail, we do a lot of analytics. The way that we designed the graph is pretty cool for our analysis on a daily basis, so that we can define our forecast.

Definitely the dashboards and the VI, because they're pretty cool for our customers.

Our business users have access to self-service.

And looking at 2018, the feature we plan on using the most is Dossiers.

Right now, MicroStrategy is on AWS by itself. Since we are retail - and AWS is Amazon, which is our competitor - if they would move onto different cloud environments, that would be awesome.

Stability is pretty good. We have been using it for four years. We might have had some downtime, but it's pretty easy to bring it up.

It really scales. The stability and scalability are really cool. That's the beauty of MicroStrategy. It competes really well with Tableau, but data-wise, MicroStrategy beats all odds.

We have used tech support many times. Sometimes they're knowledgeable. I would say that there is a lot room for them to improve. The time that I spend with the technical support, if I'd spent the same amount of time doing my own research on the knowledge base side, I could get pretty much the same thing. 

Some of the technical support guys are really awesome, but others...

It was pretty straightforward.

We prefer having the analytics capability in a single platform, versus in a many-points solution, because our user base is pretty small. I don't know if we even offer multiple platforms. I'm not sure if we have tried that or not.

We have already invested in MicroStrategy's mobile platform and it's pretty good.

When looking at vendors to work with, we look not so much at name brand but at technical support and application features.

I would give it an eight out of 10. There's a lot of room for improvement, with all the other BI tools in the market.

Go for it. If you are a retail company, I would say go for it, do a PoC, it should be fine. Because I've been working with MicroStrategy for the last 12 years, I know what it is capable of.

Data analytics, as a reporting tool.

It's integral enough to make financial decisions in our organization.

The most valuable feature is predictive analytics. We also have some users that love using self-service.

In 2018, I think the most utilized MicroStrategy capability, for us, will be dashboarding.

I can't think of anything.

I think it's rather stable now, compared to where I come from. Earlier versions of MicroStrategy weren't so stable. Around v7's, they weren't as stable as they are now.

I think with all the APIs it's very scalable, although ours is a relatively new company so we haven't scaled yet.

In the last three years, I have probably opened three tickets. However, they do not get back to you quickly at all. The longest I waited for them to get back to me was a week.

Historically, MicroStrategy has been a technical solution. You could just call and get somebody on the phone. Now, you never know if you should call or you should open a ticket online. And then, if you get the ticket open, is someone going to call you back? The last couple of weeks been better. Last year, I complained to MicroStrategy quite a bit about the technical support.

I do love the tech notes, I do love the online community. I think that's very helpful.

I've been using MicroStrategy for 20 years but I've used Cognos, I've used Crystal, and there used to be another reporting tool called Eureka Suite. I've worked with Tableau too. It was a company decision to switch.

It's straightforward.

We have not invested in the mobile platform, but we do plan on it, towards the end of the year.

When selecting a vendor, I appreciate customer service. That's the best thing. No matter how difficult the tool is, as long as you have good customer service, it'll take care of itself.

I would rate it an eight out of 10, because I think they're still lacking on customer service. I think historically, MicroStrategy's customer service was a lot better than it is today.

I would definitely recommend MicroStrategy over anything I've worked with before. And I worked with Tableau too. If you want some pretty designs, Tableau is a good tool, but other than that, as far as analytics, it's definitely MicroStrategy.

We sell it as an underlier to our own analytics tool. It works pretty well. 

It does not really impact the way we function, so much as what we sell. It is a good tool to help our customers visually see loads of data.

We will be using Dossier the most in 2018.

The dashboards. The visual end side. Being able to do visualizations is important. 

The Geospatial and mapbox stuff that will be coming out should be really helpful. I know that is something that we have wanted: the map. That is coming, so it is good.

There are areas for improvement. Training would be an area that they could improve upon, but otherwise it is a pretty good tool. 

It is very stable. We do not have any issues. 

We have not experienced any issues with the scalability.

The technical support is good. We always get very responsive care, but we are a reseller so we probably get a little bit more support. 

The initial setup is complex, because of the customer's data and the configuration is time consuming.

The technical support of MicroStrategy can be helpful through implementation.

Spend a lot of time with the training. If you do not learn the ins or outs, it can be a difficult tool to use. You could do a PoC and get enough out of it to be able to use it. However, when it comes to administering it, you definitely need the training.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Usability
• Stability 
• Good support. 

Our primary use case is to deliver all data insights to our company. We do not serve our platform engineering computing teams, but we are working on that. We're actually trying to do that. We serve the entire business: the finance, merchandising, and marketing team. All those teams are meant to use our tool, so we produce a lot of reports for them. We connect it directly to our data warehouse, that is their direct connection to all the data they need to run their business. 

It is performing great. We have built some really cool tools. We would like our users to use it more. For some non-technical people who do not have experience with a tool like this, they were a little intimidated. Therefore, they use Excel a lot. Thus, our big mission over the last year, and we have been successful with it, was to get them off of Excel and to make them use MicroStrategy. The more we get them to overcome their initial intimidation, or whatever it is, the more they take to it more quickly.

We use it as a front-end application. We connect directly to MicroStrategy web.

There have been actual direct bottomline impacts in terms of extra revenue created from the reporting solutions that I showed them how to do. Without getting into any details, I showed our marketing team how to go after more high value products that they could then push out, which resulted in more revenue. I showed another team how to identify other products that would otherwise be swept under the rug, and because they found these, they made an extra push and we got an extra X amount in revenue from a specific sale because of it. Therefore, it has had a direct impact on bottomline improvements. 

The other win is a lot of productivity. I have shown our users how to stop using Excel. They would create these vast Excel files, and I showed them how to do the same thing with MicroStrategy, which saves a significant amount of time for them everyday. 

These have been the two big impacts from MicroStrategy. 

From the perspective of serving the users, the most valuable feature that we have been able to give them is the Self-Service reporting tool. For example, the cubes in the report builder and showing them how to do that has gone a long way over the past year to getting them to develop their own insights for specific problems that they have. 

We already got some demos of the next release, so we are really excited about the Dossier. It is going to be really big. 

The other one that we are excited about is the collaboration aspect, where you can ping somebody on a dashboard and it sends them an email. Those are two things that we want, and those are two things that we are expecting. 

Our users tend to say the interface is a pain, which I can go either way. I find that once you use it for about a month, you are fine. But for some reason, some users are maybe not tech savvy or they are not familiar with applications like this. They have a steep learning curve, for whatever reason. Everything else is great. It has integrated very well into our data warehouse. I find it easy to build dashboards and create stuff. So, I am happy with it. It is just the end user has that pretty common steady complaint, but we are overcoming it. 

Stability is good. It is really stable. We rarely have issues with MicroStrategy going down. 

Scaling is something that we also are going to have to do a lot of in 2018, because our user base is going to increase. We are connecting to other people that are producing more. Up until now we have had a stable base of users, so scaling has not even been a thing. 

We have grown along with it pretty well, so I have not had any issues. 

We will occasionally reach out to tech support. One of our Dev guys actually used to work for MicroStrategy, so he is our guru. He will occasionally reach out to MicroStrategy for error bug fixing, etc. However, it is very few and far in-between.

I was not involved in the initial setup. 

We are going to be looking for the next platform release. That is what we are hoping for, and so I will be involved in that. 

Explore the Self-Service tool functions to rely on cubes. I will also recommend to teach your users to become comfortable with the tool. Since we started doing this in 2017, rather than having our data team build everything, such as all the reports, we have started pushing it more towards the users. The response has been phenomenal. Create Self-Service tools and "force" your users to use them. 

We do not use it to embed analytics into the applications. Most of the people use the web access. We are working on actually building out more enhancements to our whole data warehouse. Right now, our data warehouse is sort of static; negative load and that is it. It is not as real-time as we would like. We are working on building that out first to create more real-time, at which point we will work on some potential integrations with other applications, but I don't think we are there yet. 

We have not used any of the APIs, but that is what we have just started to explore. A lot of the stuff that we have done, unfortunately, has been a lot of manual stuff. At least on our end, we have ETL intensive processes. We have data sense, which we write ourselves then have to send them. We have to create some job framework and all this really time consuming stuff. So, one thing we actually did start talking about recently is how to get more API-focused work done. That is going to be our goal for this year. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: responsiveness. That is probably one of the big ones. We are a relatively small company. Our parent company is huge, but we operate autonomously from them, so we are small compared to them. Being able to reach out and still have access to people that will help us, even though we are small, is really a big thing for us.

We are Reynolds American. We work in product supplies scenarios. In our environment, we work with any kind of volume data. We use MicroStrategy to deliver reporting to our trade reps who go into outlets, so account-level reporting. That's going to be more of our embedded reporting. That is an application that we created in Salesforce that links into MicroStrategy and links back and forth between the in-house application we've created.

But then, a large majority of our reporting is going to be that enterprise application where we have a fixed reporting environment on a monthly basis. We deliver reports to a large majority of our cooperate departments, anywhere from 300 to 1000 users.

We also have second, ad hoc environment, which is more of a weekly environment, where we typically do the same delivery of those static reports. But there is that component of the ad hoc where we facilitate the back-end development of all of the objects going through the STLC to Git, to production, so our business users can actually utilize what's available to them in the production environment. They can then take the next steps, pulling back those insights off of the data that we provide them.

I think one of the greatest things about MicroStrategy is their holistic approach to business intelligence. They don't put priority on one component of report development over document development, over administrative functionality, and security. I think they have a very holistic application. 

They offer us a lot of out-of-the-box tools, which give us the ability to automate a lot of our administrative tasks. Some things become menial: user creation, restarting a server at 10 o'clock on a Friday - simple things that they really give you the tools to be able to do. That's one thing I really like about the MicroStrategy platform from an administrative perspective. 

Regarding our users, the insights that they can gain, how quickly they can gather information, has been a huge benefit for us from MicroStrategy.

I think ease of use is definitely a benefit to our users, from an administrative perspective, as well as a business end-user perspective. I found that it's very easy to get users into the system, get them familiar. 

The biggest part is the caveat of our data. We have more trouble getting people to learn our data than we do the structures, the navigation, manipulation, and all of these things that you do as a report developer and end-user. Most of them are familiar with Excel and it's just so similar that they can pick it up very intuitively. When you start talking about the really specialized data sets that we have, that's when it starts to become a little bit more hairy, so that's not really a MicroStrategy component.

In terms of self-service, we make use of Enterprise Manager. We've been trying to involve it a little bit more with some of our actual rep data, so we can start to look at that enterprise report utilization on a geographical scale, departmental scale. We've made a few enhancements to our Enterprise Manager system to allow that self-reporting to grow. We see that as a very useful system. It's been incredibly beneficial in diagnosing production performance issues, diagnosing what reports are running slowly, where the SQL could be optimized, opportunities or metrics where we see long-time running performance. Enterprise Manager has been absolutely vital in giving us some of the insights about our system. 

We're starting to open it up to more and more people to give them the ability and start looking at these things themselves, but it's not the most intuitive system, Enterprise Manager that is, so it's tough. We're trying to bridge the gap between usability and who we let in the system, because you're not going to come in and just pick it up.

Personally, looking ahead at 2018, we're getting into the administrative side of our cloud implementations. We're really trying to move to the cloud in 2018, so I see myself getting more familiar with MicroStrategy on AWS Console. And even if we intend to go to the on-prem on AWS, I see us getting more familiar, and it's not necessarily a MicroStrategy component, but structuring the infrastructure of the server in such a way that we're cost-effective, we're maximizing our utilization when we can. I think that is going to be a large component for us in 2018, though it's not necessarily specifically MicroStrategy.

Then I think we have a huge enterprise-wide push to Visual Insight. Our environment has transformed over the last year. We were a strong "grid to PDF," "document to PDF," that's all we did. And then they came in with these Visual Insights and everyone was like, "Wow, that's kind of cool." We created a static reporting portal behind it and now, it's just taken our reports to another level. The level of insight that you get in a 30-second glimpse, it just revolutionized it for us. It gives the user a larger subset of the data so that they can actually maneuver around, rather than being specifically pointed at whatever your document is designed for. 

So VI, Dossier. 

If we can get on 10.9 this year, I would like to but we're not big on feature releases and we had difficulty with 10.9 on sandbox, so were hesitant right now.

Then our cloud implementation, coming in 2018, is going to be a big play on the 10.9, I think. There's no point in us upgrading and then going up the cloud two weeks later. It's a lot of stuff, but that's our focus.

The problem is the way that their metrics are designed. It can be difficult to understand what you're actually looking at. Then when you're comparing a document against the VI, you can't actually do that properly. So there are components, and there is a huge learning curve in the Enterprise Manager space. I think it would benefit them greatly if they were to exercise a significant amount of research and development in that space.

They need to supply the support system that's just not there right now. They don't have Enterprise Manager classes. You need in-depth classes to understand what those metrics are doing, to understand the table associations from one to the other. You can't just go and pick it up and understand that DT_DAY connects to all of these tables, without going into Architect, looking at the source tables. I, as a analyst, a slightly technical user, I don't have the expertise to do that. Business users definitely don't have the expertise to do that. 

What can they do embolden that system, to make it more intuitive? But also, to supply that support system so that they can get a higher level of reporting.

I know they're working on the telemetry initiative right now, and they have given us some reports in that system, the Enterprise Manager space, that really do help us look at those insights. But the biggest piece is that we can't get to them by ourselves, that's the problem. We don't see it by ourselves. We can't get to them by ourselves because there are association-joins and things that we don't understand, that are causing either cross-joins or any other crazy thing that you could think of. 

It's kind of like a trial and error deal, to see what's coming back. You look at the SQL, make sure it's a synched. It can be a little difficult to get in there and really figure things out.

In terms of features for a future release, I have a whole list somewhere. Row-level security, column-level security, on attributes. I want to be able to handle full-scale security model from the semantic layer, flat out. 

I want to be able to have one report that's delivered to 30 different people and all 30 different people see something different. Now, you can do that today with metrics. You cannot do that with attributes. There's a component of that which, if an attribute is on granularity-one and another is on granularity-two, and you remove granularity-one, you're now going to be summing to a level that you did not expect before. 

They have a long road ahead of them to be able to accomplish it. But, being that we're in a very regulated industry, it is incredibly useful for manufacturing, for research and development, for those in Earth sciences, environmental sciences, those folks who have a lot of SPI, a lot of that data that they want to restrict users having access to, I think that's a selling point that they don't have right now. I think is going to take them out of the Earth sciences space as a true competitor. There are so many out there, and it's a space that they have an opportunity in, and that row-level of security was a big component of what we would do.

Then there's significant digits, which my client team will probably laugh about if I told you that, which gave us a lot of difficulty trying to get to a scientific way to look at decimals, but it's not straightforward and it's a pain. 

Then a few of those consolidations that I mentioned. 

Then, if they could beef up Enterprise Manager - if I could go to my client team and tell them this report has been run three times in the last three months by these three people and they say, "Well, those three people, what are they doing? Why are they running it? Get it out of our system. That's a waste of our time. It's a waste of our resources. It's taking up space." So if we can get to that next level in Enterprise Manager, I think that would be huge for us as well.

We are running into performance issues on the database side right now. We have MicroStrategy issues. We upped to the named user licenses, no issues. Then we introduced some new things to the environment, which is causing, again, database issues.

From a stability standpoint, from MicroStrategy, I would say it's fairly consistent. I would give it a "B" because there are times where we have issues that are just inexplicable. They go away and then we have no resolution. To me, that's not acceptable. There are just times where our users can't access things and we're not sure why, and that's a problem to me. 

We had some failures on data load, whether this is a component of MicroStrategy or how our service is configured, I'm not sure. We just had some issues keeping our data loads running from an Enterprise Manager perspective, but from the production Intelligent Server, stability is fantastic. We've really not had many issues.

Scalability seems great. It wasn't great when we were on the core licensing, to be completely honest, because we were restricted to a single core across 2,500 users, so we moved to named user licensing, giving us eight cores - no problems, whatsoever. You start to think about how you move to the cloud, those eight cores become 16, then become 64 very quickly - not an issue. Scalability on that end, of the Intelligent Server, I think that's huge. We need to figure out the database component of that, but I don't think what you're asking about.

We have 24/7 technical support. They're incredible. We have the extended support plan, so we have actually an account rep assigned to us. If you go for the extended support plan, it's unbelievable. You email him and you've got someone talking to you within an hour; they're working to solve your problem. They'll go through iterations. Sometimes, they'll be taking shots in the dark, but it's IT, it happens; shut it off, turn it back on, things like, you've got to do the basics first. But they have some incredible resources on their team.

The majority of people that I talk to, that I get onboard with, absolutely understand our business model, how we incorporate MicroStrategy into it. But it's the occasional person who you get and you say, "Hey, I already did this troubleshooting stuff, etc." and they say, "Well, why don't you try this?" and you tell them, "Well, if you read my paragraph, I've done that three times." It's just like one in 10 that you get someone like that, but I think you're going to have that everywhere. Then you've got some people who know us by name, they know who we are. When we request support, they are the people who come to us. Creating that relationship with the support team has been absolutely incredible for us.

We have had production problems, Enterprise Manager problems, and they're right there every step of the way, going through our installations, making sure things are coming through properly. In the event that we do have problems, they are always there to support. I think that's been huge for us.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but I have been involved in upgrades. The upgrade from 10.4 to 10.8, simple click of the button, but it just didn't go through as we had anticipated. There's really no explanation as to why. We ran it again and it went through without a hit. Again, that was one of those problems where we don't really know what caused it, we don't know why our installation wasn't working very well.

Then when we attempted to upgrade from 10.8 to 10.9 on our sandbox server, we spent roughly a month and a half trying to do that, completely and totally unsuccessfully. I don't know why. Again, I think that might be a component of how our servers are structured, the way our registries are structured, the way our security interacts with MicroStrategy, but it's a problem. We're working on that.

Being in the position that I'm in, I see the benefit of having the disparate locations. I love web. Web is great for the business user. I love Developer. Developer is great for me. I do not want my business users touching Developer. I don't even want them to know it exists. 

Honestly, MicroStrategy came and did a demo for our clients, and part of the reason they didn't get the contract is because they showed Developer. The business users got so confused that it just was not good. But for someone like me, highly technical, there's just so much more functionality. I like that they're trying to incorporate Developer into Workstation and Desktop into Workstation, so you get the all-in-one encompassing, highly technical Developer Workstation where you can do the VI, you can do the Dossier. But then you have your business users' side. 

Then I think there's another component: You've got all of your administrative apps in the back-end like Enterprise Manager, System Manager, Command Manager, Object Manager, and they're disparate.

I was talking to them a little bit yesterday about trying to bring all of this together under one platform. They've done a touch of that with System Manager, but not to the point that it's easily replicable to just run Command Manager out of System Manager. The only reason to use System Manager is if you have a large workflow. Otherwise, it will be quicker to go to Command Manager. Now, if they could kind of bundle that all under one umbrella, I think it would be possible. I think it would be huge from an administrative standpoint, giving your developers, giving the DBAs that level of access in one location that would really bring it to the next level. 

Then if you want to take it even a step further, you can start to think of incorporating Workstation, but that might be a little bit too much in one application, so we'll let them bite off what they can chew for now.

In terms of mobile, I plan on pitching and pushing mobile pretty hard. We have an initiative coming in 2018. We're going to replace all of our trade laptops. We don't use mobile devices today, but we will then replace those laptops in two years. That means that we need to get into the mobile space within a year, we need to validate that everything works, and then, quite frankly, we're probably going to have to redesign many of the applications that we have around that mobile platform. We use Salesforce for some of our trade applications which then import to MicroStrategy to pull in some information. With the new Transaction Services, where documents are now, and where VIs and Dossiers are heading, we could get to a point where we're no longer using that Salesforce application, and we're running a full-fledged customized application out of MicroStrategy. So, I would like to get to that.

That will be a large-scale push on my company, but the mobile platform: absolutely. I will be pushing very hard for that.

One of the beautiful things about getting into the cloud space is, it's already there. It's just a matter of us getting it tested, messing around with it, getting the credentials squared away. We've been through conversations of how to get security for people who don't have Active Directory on an iOS device. That's where we are in our talks right now, but mobile is definitely a big, big thing in our sights.

What I appreciate in a vendor is integrity. It's a fault and it's a benefit. Our team at MicroStrategy is honest. When they can't do something, they will very easily, flat out, come out and say, "I don't think I can do that. I will put this amount of effort into trying to figure out how we could do it. I'll put out a tech note, see what kind of pickup I get back." That's one of the incredible things, because you're not having someone who's saying, "Well, I can do this. I can do that. I can do this," and then you're thinking, "Well, he said he could do it," so now I could do it. Let me go out and spend X amount of hours to go and do something where he's going to pull in a third-party, spend $60,000, and complete something. 

I think that it has been great for us to be able to level-set our expectations as to what we can and cannot accomplish, what's realistic, what is pushing us to the next level. When they spot something, they'll say, "That's wrong." They'll laugh at us and literally say, "What are you doing?" and I love that. I think our client team is fantastic. They're unbelievably knowledgeable. Integrity, intelligence, and honestly. Those are my criteria right there.

Overall I rate MicroStrategy a nine out of 10 because of a lot those things I mentioned before. We have issues where we don't really know what's going on. I think it goes back to that "B" rating I gave earlier. There are a few pieces that we're trying to get a handle on that we just can't. I think there are a few enhancements that they could do to make their system better. A "B" rating - I am very judgmental, I do not take things lightly. 

Then also, they need to work on their license structure. They are not competitive against somebody like SAP BusinessObjects.

We had a quote that was almost a third the price, coming from SAP BusinessObjects, and it's not a better platform. It's not cheaper. They do concurrent user licensing, while MicroStrategy does named user licensing, and that was literally the only difference. But it made a $500,000 difference. They've got to do something to make themselves more competitive. Maybe it's assessing your business users and what you really expect them to use, and maybe giving a reduced price on that. But they are already giving us a 60% discount and they were still a million or so above, over a three-year time period. That doesn't account for synergies as we get from on-site resources that are already available, and things of that nature, but I thought that that was a big, big deficit for them.

Regarding advice to a colleague who is looking to implement this type of solution, first, if you can get support online or at least aware that you're doing an installation so that they can be ready for some questions, that is absolutely huge. I know most people only get support for "nine to five," but that, for us, has been absolutely vital.

Also, planning and testing. It's really all you can do. It's just a typical installation. I don't think there's anything out of the ordinary. There are no caveats about MicroStrategy that are different than anybody else. It's relatively straightforward. You've installed a disk before. You plug it in, you pick what you want out of the drop-down box and then you go, boom. But then, when you start to get to the security setup and things like that, you need to be thorough. You need to plan properly, and you think of your use case down to the end user.

I think that one of the most important things that we may have overlooked is getting to: What are you going to do in your two, what are you going to do in your three, where are we going with this? Not, "What do we have now." You've really got to think about, are we structuring this in such a way that in two years, we're going to be so disoriented that we don't know where anything is in the system. I think that ensuring that you have a vision for what your three-year or five-year plan is, I think that's huge.

Again, coming from a project management background I would say plan, plan, plan, plan, and then plan again. That's the best thing that you can do, because implementation is not that long. It's not that hard. As long as you've gone through the settings, you know what you want, it's not going to be a 20 or 30-hour process where you're setting up. You'll install, it'll take 15 minutes, you come in, you set your settings, 30 minutes, and then, boom, you restart the server and you're done. It's just planning. Making sure you know exactly what you're going to do when you do it.

We have installed MicroStrategy and implemented a couple sample reports just to prove we can. However, we do not have all our current reports from Tableau replicated in a MicroStrategy environment, and we are headed that direction. 

We are planning on rolling out Self-Service and investing in mobile analytics.

In the immediate future as in the next month, because our other license expires in March, we want to hurry up and just get all of our reporting replaced and have them all in MicroStrategy, then we will move forward from there. 

We are still on the beginning stages, however having the intelligence server sit in the middle is huge for us. It is going to save us a lot of time, make our work a lot simpler, make it easier for deployment, and getting the reports in the hands of our users sooner. 

It was easy to install and implement a report with it.

It is too early to tell. We have some ideas regarding what we can do, because we have been using a different product all along. We will see as time passes as to what we could do before that we have trouble with MicroStrategy, but I do not think it will be a problem. 

No issues.

No issues.

During installation I had some trouble, I created actually a couple tickets with the support department and Micro Strategy helped us straighten those out. They were very knowledgeable.

We are currently using Tableau. We recently signed a contract with MicroStrategy. We are going to move all our reports from Tableau to MicroStrategy. We are not going to connect Tableau to MicroStrategy, which we could. We are just going to let our Tableau license expire in March, then we are just going to go MicroStrategy all the way. 

We do not want to pay Tableau and pay MicroStrategy. It is a business decision. We are going to do one, not both. 

Initial setup was straightforward.

They gave us a good deal. They convinced one of our executives that we are getting a deal, so they signed. 

We want to do what makes sense for our business. We are not married to one way of doing it. We will listen to our business people and we will do whatever makes sense depending on the situation. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We want a solution that we can implement in a short amount of time. We don't want to go back and forth in a month; we want it to work right now. Also, we want to be able to have a vendor who we can reach, and they respond when we submit a ticket. They need to respond in a short amount of time. Even though, they are busy answering requests from other people our requests are important to us.