Likelihood to Recommend The platform is most scalable-- works for small and large companies alike. Key for most of our clients is the little to no IT support required to implement and run the platform. I would definitely explore this when looking at a marketing automation platform beyond the "batch and blast" solutions. We've yet to have an issue working with our clients' sales and/or marketing teams to implement. And most of our clients work in the platform independent of the programs we run; are able to set up acampaign, upload lists and/or pull for CRM, and run reports on their own in very short turn.
Read full review 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
Read full review Pros Really easy to use. We can build a campaign in about 30 minutes and our new hires can learn to use it very quickly. Free phone support. I can always get someone to help me and they actually return calls quicker than most all companies. We are able to create campaigns before we finish all the assets. We can launch, then change the flow and add assets when they are ready. Integration with Google AdWords is very easy to setup, and has lots of ROI and campaign peformance reporting. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons I've never been too crazy about the reporting within DemandCenter. There is always a solution for any type of report I'm seeking, but it involves report designing (choosing data points dragging/dropping columns & rows) which is made difficult by the lack of descriptions & values for the data points. To their credit, they did release a new suite of simplified (and pretty) reports, dubbed "Marketing Effectiveness". Relegating the older, complicated (yet super-flexible) reports as "Business Analytics". The UI will be a little unfamiliar at first. That is, where you think you should be clicking, you'll need to double-click or drag-and-drop. And I would say DemandCenter has always (and still does) have an issue with UI elements that are "windows within windows" or modal windows with scrolling. But, at least these UI components are consistent throughout the entire application - so once you're used to it, you can actually achieve some pretty impressive speeds. One of DemandCenter's greatest features is being squished down to uselessness: Derived Data. As mentioned, I scrub our data on a regular basis, and this means filling/appending data, or extrapolating to fill missing data. DC released a feature called "Derived Data" that scours useful info from the prospect's IP address (mostly geographical info). Now, while you can create campaign & list conditions based on derived data, there is no easy way to simply extract that oh-so-valuable derived Country or State and have it map those values to the standard fields. Or at least let you export derived data. They have plans to fix this - but for now it's like dangling candy in front of a baby. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have tried other systems and eTrigue is the easi est to use , easiest to train new people on, and m ost responsive support team we have ever experienced. They ask our input on new features they are developing, and have implemented some of our suggestions in their product rollouts. We get new features almost every month. We get live support without any cost, and they return our phone calls within an hour every time. They treat us like a true partner.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Usability Having used Marketo, Act-On, and Pardot, eTrigue is MUCH easier to use and easier to train new team members to use.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating Been very happy with their responsiveness and ability to resolve issues
Read full review 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.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating You will need to think about which users you want to have each role, and the features allowed in each role. You should watch the training videos before you get live training. It saved us several hours as they had already answered 90% of our questions.
Read full review 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
Read full review Alternatives Considered Constant Contact offered now tracking, lead alerts. Marketo wasn't as flexible-- for example not easy to schedule campaigns in advance, to launch in the future. Also liked the interface and the DemandCenter lead alert format more than Marketo.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment We get the upper hand on follow-up with return visitors... not by reverse DNS lookup or pattern match but by direct cookie validation. Inside sales productivity is boosted by 33% easy with eTrigue. The alerts and data are lightning fast, giving marketing immediate feedback on campaign data and prospects. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots