Apache Hadoop vs. MicroStrategy Analytics

Altogether, I want to say that Apache Hadoop is well-suited to a larger and unstructured data flow like an aggregation of web traffic or even advertising. I think Apache Hadoop is great when you literally have petabytes of data that need to be stored and processed on an ongoing basis. Also, I would recommend that the software should be supplemented with a faster and interactive database for a better querying service. Lastly, it's very cost-effective so it is good to give it a shot before coming to any conclusion.

Incentivized

MSTR is great for any organization that is looking for a way to deliver complicated data in an uncomplicated way. From business teams to marketing and finance, several departments benefit from using MSTR to keep track of KPIs enabling teams to make optimizations along the way. MSTR provides great visual representations of data enabling team members to distill thousands of data points into easily digestible charts and graphs

Incentivized

• Handles large amounts of unstructured data well, for business level purposes
• Is a good catchall because of this design, i.e. what does not fit into our vertical tables fits here.
• Decent for large ETL pipelines and logging free-for-alls because of this, also.

Incentivized

• They sell the product well, and make promises you will actually believe
• "checks the box" for most features a company would need. Doesn't actually deliver them though
• They answer the phone in a timely manner. Can't answer your questions or provide support, but the queue time isn't bad
• They have online documentation. It's not up to date, and likely doesn't reflect the version of software you are using, but hey... they can point to it.

• Less organizational support system. Bugs need to be fixed and outside help take a long time to push updates
• Not for small data sets
• Data security needs to be ramped up
• Failure in NameNode has no replication which takes a lot of time to recover

Incentivized

• The graph options are not as robust as an Excel user might want.
• The metadata layer can sometimes be slower, and it takes a long time for reports to run.
• Viewing the data feed entered can be cumbersome at times, in terms of validation with reports.

Incentivized

Hadoop is organization-independent and can be used for various purposes ranging from archiving to reporting and can make use of economic, commodity hardware. There is also a lot of saving in terms of licensing costs - since most of the Hadoop ecosystem is available as open-source and is free

I would always choose to renew MicroStrategy as long as they lead the market in features, functionality and price. The support of MicroStrategy is timely and professional, I frequently get answers to my questions within 24 hours and normally have solutions within 48 hours. Training available for MicroStrategy completely covers everything required to be able to expertly use MicroStrategy and understand data warehousing.

Incentivized

Great! Hadoop has an easy to use interface that mimics most other data warehouses. You can access your data via SQL and have it display in a terminal before exporting it to your business intelligence platform of choice. Of course, for smaller data sets, you can also export it to Microsoft Excel.

Incentivized

The standard grid reporting could look more like the styling and object used for the Import and Visual Insight products. In addition, object properties almost seem to be hidden when first using the product. It's as if they are asking the engineers to only use the presets we make available...and, these presets are 10+ years old. On the positive side, Microstrategy seems to be the only product, not named Cognos, which can scale to Big Data. The product is "hackable" via the SDK or tricking the Intelligence Server to do uncommon things. The Microstrategy development team also seems to be very involved with their OEM partners; especially when it comes to features and enhancements. A large majority of the improvements we suggested have made it into the product or on the roadmap for future enhancements. Only suckas fall for the shiny objects from most other vendors; Microstrategy is really the only choice for Enterprise BI.

I've never had an issue with MicroStrategy not being available due to MicroStrategy application malfunction. It is very robust and only failures I've seen were due to user error or the platform the machine running the service failed some how.

Incentivized

Being able to customize the performance based on the business need is extremely powerful. Proper configuration and understanding of the usage pattern is key, if the technical ability of the architect is not at top level, then the product will not be configured correctly which will lead to poor performance.

Incentivized

We went with a third party for support, i.e., consultant. Had we gone with Azure or Cloudera, we would have obtained support directly from the vendor. my rating is more on the third party we selected and doesn't reflect the overall support available for Hadoop. I think we could have done better in our selection process, however, we were trying to use an already approved vendor within our organization. There is plenty of self-help available for Hadoop online.

Incentivized

Good user community. Support team is available if you are under AMC. You get decent support after raising the support ticket. If it is product bug they will inform you and let you know which patch will resolve the same.

Incentivized

Hadoop is a complex topic and best suited for classrom training. Online training are a waste of time and money.

I have attended many trainings offered by MicroStrategy; both distance and in-person training. I earned my CRD (Certified Report Developer) certification via the online training. I found the training to be well organized and concise. Overall I will definitely continue to increase my knowledge with MicroStrategy via the online training offering.

We measured following KPI for the success

• Increase in Business Feeds Loads
• Reduction in Controllers Manual Work.
• Conversion of Manual Work into Systematic Workflows.
• Increase in Customer Spend
• Reduction in Service costs
• Reduction in time-to-market for new campaigns
• Increase in cross sell and Up sell
• Error reduction in customer Identification
• Existing client retained

Incentivized

Not used any other product than Hadoop and I don't think our company will switch to any other product, as Hadoop is providing excellent results. Our company is growing rapidly, Hadoop helps to keep up our performance and meet customer expectations. We also use HDFS which provides very high bandwidth to support MapReduce workloads.

Incentivized

Tableau is probably MicroStrategy Analytic's biggest competitor I've noticed over time, and I'm not sure why. Tableau only covers visualizations independently for each business user, which then creates the issues of every employee creating their own version of the data, and then you have 20 versions of the truth. A enterprise data warehouse and MicroStrategy's Visual Insight is a better method.

Incentivized

This software is extremely scaleable, one can add more core servers which performs as a load balancing. The configurations available to manage usage patterns and daily activity are as high a caliber as any other enterprise level software. This product can be installed on both a windows and unix platform allow for integration on a budget.

Incentivized

• There are many advantages of Hadoop as first it has made the management and processing of extremely colossal data very easy and has simplified the lives of so many people including me.
• Hadoop is quite interesting due to its new and improved features plus innovative functions.

Incentivized

• MicroStrategy was helpful for reducing the amount of time we needed to spend number crunching large data sets, and in doing so, allowed me as the primary users to spend more time gleaning insights from the data that in turn informed our leadership team to make strategic decisions.
• By creating numerous canned reports available to all members of the team through email distribution or basic access to the platform, we were able to reduce the time I spent showing people how to pull the data in Microsoft Excel by nearly 40% .
• We ended up needing to make many changes to the way our DMP was feeding data into MicroStrategy due to incorrect reporting that caused complications in accounting and finance.