MicroStrategy Reviews

There are two use cases. One is on the transactional side. As we're doing insurance transactions, we're using the transactional side to assess risk on each transaction. On the portfolio side, we're looking at the whole portfolio of insurance risk.

Underwriters love the transactional side. 

The performance: We've thrown a lot of data at it, and now we're trying to improve the performance. But the underwriters love the content that's being delivered. On the portfolio side, we're just starting the launch, but underwriters seem to be responding well to it.

The goal is for all of our underwriters to see the risk of a property the same way. If I have 30 underwriters, they should all see and measure the same risk. With all of our modeling, we create a lot data. But with these dashboards, we're giving the same direction. So, underwriters are coming to the same risk conclusions on all of our risks.

Delivery, meaning the ability to create aesthetically pleasing information by providing dashboards.

In terms of self-service, we have an ad-hoc platform, where you can build portfolio reports on your own, so that's already released.

The capability of MicroStrategy that I believe we are going to be utilizing most in 2018 is mobile. We're trying to get to launch. We're having issues with legal, around the app store, those types of things.

• Tighter mapping integration.
• More Writeback capabilities that would allow our IT department not to be worried about the wild, Wild West of Writeback.

We did have issues with stability, and that was because we were co-located with another business unit, and we outgrew them on the unit. So we had to get to a separate physical instance.

There have been scalability issues which I attribute more to architecture than the tool. Meaning, we weren't leveraging capabilities that allow for the scalability, so we're incorporating them now.

I'm on the business side, the design of the metadata and the like; on the hardware and that type of stuff, I don't get involved.

We favor a single platform for this type of solution, versus a many-points solution like Cognos. Single point is always easier.

What I appreciate most in a vendor is when they bend over backwards. MicroStrategy does that, when I approach them.

I give it a seven out of 10, and the reason is, underwriters love the content. The performance isn't where I need it to be. When I get to the less than five seconds per click, it will be a 10.

In terms of advice, you need to think abstractly enough so that it becomes a metadata layer that's usable for all of the things you want.

We have about 50-plus applications that we're currently running on MicroStrategy, and most of these are around tracking demand and supply, profitability, and growth for the organization. 

We've also opened it up as an open BI platform, so that all our business analysts can build their own dashboards and Dossiers and the like.

We are a data-driven company, so a lot of decisions happen out of data at every level. Most of our tactical decisions are data-driven, our strategic decisions are definitely data-driven. MicroStrategy is now the de facto tool within the organization, it's the go-to BI tool in the organization.

We have yet to explore the prescriptive analytics and the SDK. I expect we'll focus on these most, moving forward in 2018.

I think what we're currently excited about is the ability to integrate R. Most of our data scientists use R for their modeling. I heard at one of the sessions, here at MicroStrategy World 2018, that you can put your R scripts directly into MicroStrategy, so any modeling effort that you've done in the past can be transferred into MicroStrategy. I'm hoping it will be a plug-and-play feature.

We've already rolled out self-service to business teams with MicroStrategy. I think it's good. We just need to ensure that there are some security guardrails around any open BI setup. There's a tendency to screw up something when you just leave it open. You have to ensure that there are some processes and guidelines before you open it up for a larger platform. But there have not been any serious issues so far, so we're good.

As part of this MicroStrategy World 2018 conference, we saw some of the VitaraCharts. If there are some advanced visualization features - maybe I'm not aware of them - but if there were a Vitara which could work on top of MicroStrategy, it would make sense for MicroStrategy to have that within their own library. So they should add more visualizations to the library.

No stability issues so far.

No issues with scalability. As I said, 50-plus applications so far, and it will probably get bigger and bigger from here on. No issues.

We do use the community a lot in terms of understanding some of the best practices and the like. We've never really reached out to support because we also have a couple of partners that we work with, so they help us with the consulting and any support requirements.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I was involved when we increased the number of licenses from 260 to now almost 950. I was involved in that deal making.

We prefer having the analytic capabilities in one platform, like MicroStrategy, as opposed to having them in many points. As it is, we deal with a lot of big data systems, tons of other vendors. It doesn't make sense to have to deal with multiple vendors and deal with different support issues. It's always better to have a single point of contact for our kind of use case.

Regarding investing in the mobile platform, out of the 800,000 odd users that we have on MicroStrategy, about 25 are already mobile. We've limited it to our CxO audience so far, but we will evaluate whether there is a use case for extending it to the larger organization.

We are still scratching the surface when it comes to our adoption. I would still rate it a 10 out of 10 for now. Once we get far and wide into the utilization of the product in the organization, that's when we'll probably realize this feature works better or that feature doesn't work better. At this stage, there are no complaints.

What we appreciate most in a vendor is their being proactive in terms of understanding what the customer needs, and showcasing their product roadmap so that we are aware of what's coming up next and can be prepared for it.

If a colleague were looking to implement this kind of solution, I would definitely ask them to evaluate MicroStrategy at some point in time. 

There's a lot of competition in terms of Power BI and Tableau. To be honest, the country where I operate in, not many people are aware of this, of MicroStrategy. Although MicroStrategy has a big presence in India, obviously Power BI or Tableau become the de facto choices. To be honest, even I hadn't heard of MicroStrategy until I started working in this organization. Maybe they should make their presence felt a little more.

The use case for this is for our sales people who work in the field.

In terms of performance it's really good, they're giving good feedback.

I look at the front-end, the website. They have landing pages and that makes life easy for exhibiting things.

The architecture, it's very solid.

We are also using the Writeback capabilities. We are writing back to our CRM, Salesforce.

If they can make it more stable, in terms of the connectivity, that would help.

It is very stable. The only problem, I feel, is the connectivity - that has hiccups. Other than that, it's good.

Scalability is pretty straightforward.

We use tech support. They're knowledgeable and easy to contact.

It is easy because we didn't customize anything. If you know what are you doing then it's not difficult.

We are not yet using multi-media content in our ads, but we will. And we do have a capability for our mobile apps to work in offline mode.

When looking for a vendor the most important thing to us is the use case, the capabilities of the product.

I give it a six out of 10 because of the connectivity and a few other things. The main thing is the connectivity, and then there is the caching, so if they can work on that it would help.

Still, I would tell a colleague to definitely go for MicroStrategy.

We use MicroStrategy to generate enterprise-wide reports. It is used by all the store managers to track sales, stock, inventory, etc.

It helps all the store managers and supply chain people to obtain a view of the data and plan the next week, the next month, quarters, and so on.

We are still learning on our journey of how to roll out Visual Insights to all the business users and how much data input capability should be given to them.

In 2018, we plan on using Visual Insights heavily.

The most valuable features are drill down, dashboards, documents, bringing everything under one roof, and visualizations.

We are using mobile analytics, and it is amazing.

While we prefer having the analytic capabilities in single platform, it does depends on the use case.

More visualizations out-of-the-box. That would be my top priority. For example, the cool things that you see in 3D visualizations, if those could be made. If some of those things could be made available in MicroStrategy, that would be great. 

It is pretty good. We have not had any issues so far.

Scalability is the best thing. You can really scale. It has already scaled to approximately 2000 stores and more than 15,000 users.  

Whenever we have had some issues, we have contacted the technical support, and they are knowledgeable. However, it never really gets to the point where we are contacting them, because a lot of resources are available on MicroStrategy's support site, which is helpful. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

MicroStrategy was a little late with Visual Insights, but it is one tool which you can find everything.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. Technology
2. Flexibility
3. More partnerships.

Our primary use case is to use the business intelligence tool for court data, to make the court and judges work more efficiently, faster, and less expensive.

It's performing well, we are expecting a major breakthrough this year regarding the analytics bot.

The flexibility.

And looking ahead in 2018, we expect to be using dashboards and, hopefully, Dossier.

I would try to make it a little more basic, user-friendly. In terms of the UX, it's a bit sluggish there.

You should ask me this question when we get to version 10.10.

We have had downtime with the current version but I wouldn't put that on MicroStrategy. Maybe it's MicroStrategy's fault, but I wouldn't it put it that way.

I think the scalability is excellent.

We haven't used tech support directlly, we have our partners to help us.

Regarding rolling out self-service to business teams with MicroStrategy, we have been thinking about it, but I doubt that we will.

As for having the analytic capability in a single platform like MicroStrategy, versus many-point solutions, we naturally prefer one platform. This is because of a single, standard mode. We don't have to scatter and search through eleven different platforms when there's only one there.

We are thinking about investing in the mobile platform of MicroStrategy but I can't say positive, we will, or negative, we won't. I don't know at this point.

For me, the most important criteria when selecting vendor, in general, are 

• flexibility
• and their Interest in work with us - I like devotion to our interests.

You should have a clear goal, and focus on a single thing for the tool, to yield the best results as fast as possible.

We use it mostly for business intelligence reporting, especially in personal lines of insurance, because of its pattern processing and other good functionalities, its key capabilities. It's a customer-friendly tool, especially with the Dossiers. And in the past we have had Visualization Galleries. So we leverage it, not only for reporting but for analytics and also for geospatial reporting.

In terms of its performance, when compared with other products that we have, Cognos, QlikView, Tableau, I would rate MIcroStrategy number one in the above terms.

Definitely in the past, when we had so many legacy systems, with Cognos and others, it was took multiple steps to get what we wanted. We used to extract data from Cognos, pointing to any database, load the data into Access databases, and then some BA or system analyst used to create reporting out of it. 

But now, it's a seamless integration. We can connect directly, in the form of In-Memory Cubes or live-publish cubes, to the data warehouse, and blend in the data with big data. Not only relational databases, but we can also integrate other third-party files, and create a single-source software. So, from that perspective, especially in personal insurance, it keeps BI, business intelligence, in the hands of everyone, rather than a developer or an analyst. Now mostly everyone in our area, the travelers, they have self-service.

Reporting for everyone; anyone from the customer, analyst, analytics, we have BAs. Everyone can use it because of Dossier and, in the prior versions, we have Visual Insights. It's custom-friendly, we can blend in a lot of data, single source software.

In 2018 I expect the capability we will use will be Dossier. That is story boarding. Because in late 2016 and early 2017, no other tool had this kind of story boarding, storytelling feature. Our CIO called for a PoC. There was a tool which was rated highly by industry reviews, which plays story data. We did a PoC. And although we liked the story boarding feature, thereafter, the things that we had to do behind the screens for the story boarding, we didn't like, we liked MicroStrategy more.

Now we can collaborate, in real time. In the past we had to wait for our business partners say if a visualization looked good or sufficed for their requirements. There was no real-time decision making. Now, with Dossier, it will accelerate the velocity of decision making.

The other thing is, now we have Workstation and Desktop on the client side. I think that will speed up some development activities.

The 10.4 release is the biggest. I want to play with it to see what else I might want.

Dossier is the thing we were missing previously.

Stability is very good. From stability, from usability, from adoptability for the end user. They're quickly adapting the new MicroStrategy features, functionalities. It's seamless for our users. It's a seamless integration.

No issues with scalability. Whenever we have any technical challenges or something we don't know how to, how to integrate, we engage our partners, we reach out to MicroStrategy, and they send their technical support to assist us.

Tech support is definitely knowledgeable. We have worked with them since 2010.

We prefer having the analytic capabilities in a single platform like MicroStrategy, rather than many solutions. That is one of the main reasons why, in 2012, we switched to MicroStrategy. 

Prior to that we had Cognos. To do report design we used to go to Report Studio, for analysis, Analysis Studio, for cubes different front-end applications. And it was so confusing. Now with MicroStrategy as a single-source software and single platform, we can do anything. Not only reporting and analysis; everyone can go to one single location and get what they want. So that is one of the primary reasons we have moved to MicroStrategy.

In the past, I'm talking about 2012, during that time period, we spent a lot of money and a lot of our budget - we allocated something like 20% or 30% for new users to be trained on Cognos and other applications, because there was no single platform. But when we saw MicroStrategy it was a single platform. So we quickly decided, a major decision: Going forward, for any strategy projects, we'll use MicroStrategy.

I was not involved in the initial setup but I have upgraded three versions so far. Upgrading has been straightforward.

Regarding MicroStrategy Mobile, we have some PoCs which will kickstart in few weeks.

Important criteria when selecting a vendor include

• technical support
• reliability
• transparency.

I would give the solution a seven out of 10 for now. I need to play with Dossier and other key capabilities, because initially I did a PoC in 2016-17. It went well when compared to the other products, but it was not sufficient for our requirements. But I went to a few sessions here at MicroStrategy World 2018, yesterday and today and it looks pretty cool. It seems they have improved a lot in the last two years. So I need to play with it more, to see what the footprint in geospatial is like.

Start small and know your goals. Don't try to solve the world.

That is what everyone seems to say. Last year I went to a Big Data conference because we have some Teradata relational databases. Most of the companies, because Teradata is expensive, they want to move to Big Data. And that's what they said too: "Hey, don't try to solve the world, start small. Know what you want to achieve and put together a great team, a great project manager, who can provide realistic information at the right time, rather than at the end of the project."

Those are the key things: the right people, first; the right scope, and start small.

Our primary use case is to improve our profitability across our field organization. It's performing fantastically. We have over 140 branch locations, over 1000 users, and it's scaling great. Performance is great. The feedback from our field users is fantastic in terms of form and function, so it's meeting all of our expectations.

Our goal is to roll out self-service, because with the advent of our tool, being able to drive actionable intelligence is just the next natural thing for us; to give the users ability to perform analytics on their own. 

The most valuable feature is the ability to actually embed actions, comments, being able to leverage Transaction Services to embed the tool into a business process. 

We get so much more value out of this tool because it's part of a business process. It's not a normal BI or analytics tool that has nice gauges and "dancing bears." It's actually a tool that's being used on a monthly basis, even a daily basis by our operational users, because it's embedded within an existing business process.

Looking ahead at 2018, I think the MicroStrategy capability that we'll use most is Transaction Services. I think we'll continue to build upon Transaction Services, driving actionable intelligence to the business, aligning Transaction Services to those business processes that are most critical, to help drive profitability, to help drive quality improvements across the organization.

Maybe a feature where migrations are easier. When you migrate from certain environments, it could probably be a little cleaner. Sometimes it seems to be somewhat clunky when you migrate from one environment, say a development to a test or production environment. 

Also, having some use cases from MicroStrategy that talk more about self-service, what self-service is and the applicability of self-service to different types of use cases and different types of personas in the businesses.

We've submitted technical support tickets but it's never been anything where it was like "the boat was sinking" and we had to call technical support. Regarding the tickets, I would give the response to them a lukewarm rating.

We were using Excel. We use Hyperion for financial reporting but we got the point where we had to put on our "big boy pants" and get a real solution.

I don't think it was complex at all. I think the time to actually stand the solution up was relatively short. I think the complexity didn't come into the actual set up, it came into the actual configuration and development of solutions. The set up was easy. You just install the thing. It's the development that's the tricky part.

There were other vendors on the shortlist. I think initially, for us, it was some of the capabilities, the enterprise capabilities. And believe it or not, it was actually Transaction Services, that was really the part of the tool that made it very compelling for us, because it gave the opportunity to drive action.

I prefer having analytics capabilities in many points, rather just in a single platform like MicroStrategy. I would hate to say that we have just this one "basket." I think there are many different use cases, and I think you have to address the many different use cases that the business brings to you. I think MicroStrategy is very complementary to what we need from an enterprise standpoint, but I believe that you also want to be armed with other tools that may fit other use cases.

We don't plan on investing in the MicroStrategy Mobile at this time. I think when a tangible use case becomes relevant for our business, we probably would consider it, but not at this point.

When selecting a vendor I would say our most important criteria are 

• experience
• having a tangible real use case that can articulate into my industry
• credibility in the market place
• having a bench of talented resources.

I rate it a seven out of 10 because I don't think there's any silver bullet BI solution out there. The reason I would not rate it a 10 is, I think it's great for certain things but maybe not great for other things. I wouldn't put my eggs in one basket and say MicroStrategy is the savior for world hunger, because it's not.

In terms of advice to a colleague looking into a similar solution, I would say clearly understand your use case and make sure you understand the culture of the organization before you dive into this tool, or any other tool. You have to understand, what is the use case? What is the business problem, what are you going to solve?

What are the underlying support teams and resources that you need to actually manage, maintain, and support this particular solution? Because Excel, in some instances may be okay. In other situations it may not be okay. I would beg to say that there are probably a lot of organizations out there that are still running 80% of what they do on Excel, and basic reporting is fine. Some of these things that we talk about like predictive models, that's great stuff. But I'd say 70% of organizations need basic reporting. So focus on the basics. If you focus on the basics, then that should drive your decision.

The primary use case is that we want to get away from printed reports. So, not having to print PDFs and send them out; and the whole administration that goes with that. Rather, to make it all digital and interactive.

It is performing well, but sometimes we have complex requirements and the performance decreases, and then we have to find another way to make it perform again. That is what you encounter when use the project, but that's inevitable because if we would have used another product, we would've had the same thing.

With the new version that's coming out, I think they have simplified a lot of things. Also, when it comes to the administration part, and sharing, and the collaboration features, they are really great. You can send out comments with a filter to someone in your organization, and if the person clicks on it, he actually sees what you are seeing. So that's really great.

I think it streamlines business.

We also use Microstrategy's Writeback capabilities with financial systems.

We have the Multimedia widget but it's used for reports that we haven't yet converted to the mobile solution. So it's just to have them available aesthetically for reports but, again, on the iPad, so we don't have to print them.

You can now do data blending at the document level and data blending allows you to show results from different data sets in one grid, so to speak. I actually want to bring it a level lower. I want to be able to create that union of data sets under the document level.

I want to be able to create a data set that can receive data from multiple cubes, have it in one data set, and then bring it to the document, because then I can reuse it for other documents. Now, I have to do it in a document and then it's less reusable, because if I want to share that functionality, I have to copy the document, strip a lot of things, and then work on that basic element that I've built in that document. That's for complex documents, but I really would want that to be added to the solution.

It's pretty stable, and if something is wrong then we are also able to find out why, so that's also good. There's extensive logging capabilities, so we quite often able to manage on this front.

No issues with scalability.

It was necessary that they would assist when there were problems. They are knowledgeable.

Yes, we had Cognos TM1, we have Excel. These programs are still in use but they will be less in use in the future. We couldn't get rid of them yet but at some point in time we think we'll manage to.

When we started it was still version 9, and we deployed our mobile solution through MobileIron, and then we still had to do repping of the app. So there was more complexity, but that's due to the mobile device management solution and it would be the same with any other kind of solution. That's just complexity because of security.

We did evaluate other solutions. That's the whole RFP. There are so many things involved before I can answer that question. There will be political answers as well.

We are not yet distributing personalized alerts using native mobile push for iOS or Android. We want to do that for sure, but it's currently a "nice to have" and it takes some additional implementations on the server. You have to set up some certificates and then make the communication secure. That's some work that we still have to do.

As for choosing a vendor, we had our requirements. They were: 

• the app would be able to perform in offline mode as well because our audience, they're traveling a lot and then what if there's no Wifi? They can't get to their data; that was a strong requirement
• the speed
• the iOS look and feel.

From what I've seen today, here at MicroStrategy World 2018, from the presentation team, I found it very impressive. I also think that it's good that MicroStrategy keeps up with the pace and they also look at what the competitors are doing, and I think that they should really be continuing to do that because we need the "wow."

To someone who is looking at this type of solution my advice would be to start using it now. I think it will save a lot of time if you compare it with other solutions because I want to be able to create a data set that can receive data from multiple cubes, have it in one data set, and then bring it to the document, because then I can reuse it for other documents. Now, I have to do it in a document and then it's less reusable, because if I want to share that functionality, I have to copy the document, strip a lot of things, and then work on that basic element that I've built in that document., and they've improved so many things on the front end. If you compare it with other tools, which may or may not have an analytical engine, which MicroStrategy does have, with all of the other functions, there's so much. They've built in so many functions. It's such a vast solution. For me, it's the obvious choice. Maybe not for everyone.

If you have a big company and you want to do all kinds of analytics, it's an open platform. That's also important. You can create your own data connectors. There's everything you can do with APIs. It's not closed like, perhaps, an SAP system might be.