MicroStrategy Usher Reviews

The Universe Designer is this product’s most valuable feature because it functions as a semantic layer that allows the users to manipulate data without facing databases' inherent complexity.

It allows self-service business intelligence, empowering the users and decreasing their dependency on the IT people. It also allows the developers to focus on more value-added activities, so in the end, I consider it a win-win situation.

The Web Intelligence graphic capabilities can be improved. They exist, but they are quite basic. These days, users require more advanced graphic capabilities than the ones provided by this version. One example that I can use is that once, we required a waterfall graph and it wasn't available, so we needed a workaround in order to overcome this limitation.

I have used it for three years.

We have encountered stability issues, but only rarely.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is good.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

Evaluate Power BI & MicroStrategy.

• Scalability: Regardless of the size of the database, I can use MicroStrategy to access it.
• Flexibility: MicroStrategy accesses a wider range of data sources out of the box than anything else I have used.
• Ease of use for non-technical user: Most of my users are non-technical and usually a one-day hands-on session with the software allows them to easily begin to become analysts instead of report writers.

Our customer service team had someone who was manually querying several databases, putting the information together into Excel spreadsheets and emailing them out, usually requiring most of the morning for that individual. Now, we have a dashboard that runs early each morning and is automatically emailed to the supervisors each morning. It also contains additional data that they previously did not have access to.

Some of the web interface is still not as good as it could be. I've seen more advanced and cleaner-looking interfaces. Some features available in the thick client are not available in the web client.

I have been using it for 20+ years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Technical support is 7/10. It takes too long for initial technical support cases to get action on. Once you get an engineer working with you, they stay with you until it is resolved.

I previously used Essbase and Cognos, both of which required too much technical knowledge by the user, are not scalable, and with neither is it easy to access multiple different data sources.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Don’t bother looking at CPU-based licensing, and get a good idea from the start as to how many true super users (or power users) you need and then just get simple web analyst licenses for the others.

We evaluated OBIEE, SAP BusinessObjects, and IBM Cognos.

If you are a small- to medium-size company, go with Windows based servers.

OLAP feature: It uses Intelligent Cube technology which is the most important and game-changing introduction from version 9. Intelligent Cube technology is an in-memory version of report data that can be manipulated by the MicroStrategy Analytical Engine. MicroStrategy Desktop, Web, and Office users can slice and dice data in reports within Intelligent Cubes without having to re-execute SQL against the data warehouse. It’s a huge performance-enhancement technique.

Data discovery: With the introduction on version 10, MicroStrategy enhanced its data discovery feature which helps any user to easily analyze their data by importing Excel spreadsheets, etc. It allows you to connect live with any database, Hadoop, or OLAP. You can import your own query and integrate it with MicroStrategy. These options give you powerful ways to analyze and discover your data, which helps enable important business decisions. See sample below.

It has a robust engine compared to other BI tools available in the market.

The product has improved our ability to provide self-service visualization/dashboarding capability. These days, business users are more inclined toward self-analytics, rather than coming to a developer with every small request. I think MicroStrategy has done great in this particular field.

They need to improve visualization and dashboards, as it is getting tough competition from Tableau in the area. With the release of version 10.4, they did very good.

I have used it for over six years.

There are absolutely no issues when it comes to stability, and it works best when you have a very good DB schema layer. A perfect schema has always been a strength of MicroStrategy, when compared to other BI tools.

No issues with the scalability; it’s a strength of MicroStrategy, because of the product’s robust SQL engine. It has a great SQL optimization process that pushes requests to the database.

It has a very active user community and they are more than happy to help you with your questions and issues. As far as tech support from MicroStrategy is concerned, I have seen a decline in last year compared to the past. I hope they improve in this area.

I have noticed that good technical guys left the department or no longer work there, which is affecting the quick resolution of any issues, but MicroStrategy is trying to rebuild its tech support department, which they were known for.

When it comes to business intelligence and reporting, I have almost always used MicroStrategy, with a little bit of Tableau.

Initial setup of the tool was very complex and challenging. They made you do lots of steps before you can say it’s done. However, with the release of the latest version, setup has become extremely easy and it’s just a single-step process.

It’s an expensive tool and I have seen that only medium- and large-size enterprise can afford its setup and maintenance cost. Licensing is a little bit tricky and it depends on the initial buying agreement.

We have evaluated other tools such as Microsoft BI, SAP’s BusinessObjects and IBM Cognos, but MicroStrategy came out the winner for the solution to the problem we were looking to solve, and it aligned with our team structure. We looked at Tableau and Spotfire, as well, but they were eliminated in the first round, because of the nature of the problem we were looking to solve.

Before implementing MicroStrategy, you have to get a good resource who knows the product inside out and a data warehousing structure for long-lasting performance.