MicroStrategy Analytics vs. Movable Ink vs. smartocto

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

Any business that sends out a lot of email communications, and has accessible data that they can, at the very least, format in CSV sheets can utilize [Moveable Ink] with reasonable success. Depending on how your data is housed or received, the integration within Movable Ink is quite simple. I would recommend looking at the list of partners that Movable Ink integrate with. If your business is utilizing any of them regularly, it would make integration even easier. If you do not do a lot with email or your data is not easily accessible I would not recommend Movable Ink.

Incentivized

Great for setting up MEL measurements for web based media. Great for use in media environments especially where there is no dedicated data analytics staff. Not sure how useful it would be for those sites that are not content focused.

• 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.

• Personalization--Everyone likes to see their name in lights. Movable Ink allows you to pull in content such as their name, locations that are closest to them, and content they're actually interested in.
• Unique Features--Movable Ink provides a variety of apps that can plugged into emails to make the experience more unique and exciting, such as countdown timers, add to calendar features for events, maps, and social feeds.
• Tracking--Adding snippets of code to emails allow you to track data, such as opens, impressions, and clickthroughs. You can also track how individuals interact with specific pieces of the email.
• User Friendly--Easy to build within apps for those who aren't graphic designers.

Incentivized

• Provides detailed stats on overall blog performance
• Shows which blog topics resonate with readers
• Measures individual blogs against key performance metrics

• 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

• I think they could improve with how to provide strategic guidance to customers on applications and use cases. A lot of recommendations aren't applicable to new business models/scenarios
• Their transition to onsite/landing page use cases was somewhat effective but we ran into some hiccups with applying the technology onsite

Incentivized

• It has a lot of information and data all over the place. It took us some time to get used to it and get people properly onboarded. We have seen some improvement, but UX has more space to improve.

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

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.

smartocto is a very user-friendly tool, with a smart & clean interface.

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

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

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

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

Movable Ink is the better product by far. They offer more solutions across multiple channels and their platform is easier to use and better organized.

Incentivized

smartocto is much easier to use and is perfectly setup so that newsrooms can see the information they need in a quick and easy-to-use format.

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

• 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.

• Email performance has greatly increased overall
• Optimization and testing features allow us to pit directions against one another and determine the best course of action going forward

Incentivized

• It had a positive ROI in terms of support they provide and custom based approach to all our media partners
• Readiness to find solutions to any type of question we might have