Likelihood to Recommend I would be likely to recommend IBM Planning Analytics, particularly in scenarios where comprehensive financial and operational planning is essential. For instance, in our construction company, it is awesome for optimizing resource allocation across multiple projects, creating detailed project budgets, and conducting risk analysis to mitigate project uncertainties.
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 Forecasting after taking into account seasonal trends and exceptional transactions Unlike spreadsheets, there is no fear of an user making changes to the mastercopy accidentally. Each user gets his or her own workspace to analyze. For entities operating in multiple countries, connects seamlessly with IBM Cognos Controller for taking into account variation in currencies 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 IBM Planning Analytics was an upgrade from an older version of TM1 that is experiencing some growing pains, some functionality is harder to reach than it has been in the past It is easy to learn as a surface user with created reports, but it does require some technical skills to make advanced calculations and reports if there is no reliable consultant available, much like Excel 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 Since IBM Cognos Express is suitable only for medium data warehouse environment, we are not sure if this tool solves the long term need as the business keeps growing rapidly. So its a 50/50 ratio to renew Express license. But having said that, the components of IBM Cognos Express are also available in other Cognos BI suites like Cognos 10.x version. So we will probably upgrade our environment to IBM Cognos 10.x which comes with more new features.
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 For developers, admins and end users looking for flexibility, IBM Planning Analytics would rate very highly on usability. For example, a developer has access to a highly performant built-in ETL (Extract Translate Load) tool and scripting language called Turbo Integrator that can (among other things) bring in data via flat file or direct connection from many data sources, move data around Planning Analytics, perform batch calculations, export to files or other data stores. In the rare situation where limitations are encountered there is a well documented REST API. Admins and end users benefit from the intuitive PAW (Workspace) interface as well as the rich Excel integration through Planning Analytics for Excel (PAfE). Since flexibility inherently comes with a little more complexity, so an organization with simple and "cookie-cutter" requirements may rate Planning Analytics a little lower.
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 Although I find the IBM Planning analytics documentation quite time consuming, their support with email and call is something i can term as very considerate and patient, I have had few calls about the features and how i would want to implement them within my projects, and the teams have been super helpful to resolve my 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 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 Anaplan does not handle sparsity; this is very problematic for large volume data sets (many 0's). There also are limitations to the number of dimensions that can be used in a module. If more dimensions are required, then separate modules need to be built and intertwined. IBM PA does not have these limitations.
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 One of the advantage is on its ability to ease budget and planning Secondly,the fact that it allows for forecasting means based on such insights means that organisations are able to prepare for future eventualities Thirdly, since it can accommodate data from multiple sources means that one is able to carry out best business practices like planning. 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 IBM Planning Analytics Screenshots