MicroStrategy Analytics is an enterprise business analytics and mobility platform. Key features include automatic big data analysis and reporting, data discovery and visualization, digital security credentials, and support for mobile devices.
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Salesforce CRM Analytics
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Salesforce CRM Analytics (formerly Tableau CRM) is a cloud-based business intelligence solutions and analytics software. It provides users with automated data discovery, CRM-connected analytics, top-down views of data, augmented analytics, predictive insights, and customizable data visualization tools.
Microstrategy is already used in the organization and it clearly is used by many leading industries. Tableau and Salesforce are comparatively new to this.
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
For us it really comes down to that book management and next best contact for our advisors. When we're thinking about a book of business that may range, depending on the advisor, from 400 clients to a thousand clients, how do they really optimize their time? Who do they call next? Who do they work with to make sure not only they're keeping those clients engaged, they're not leaving the firm going to other advisors who they haven't talked to in a while who might need their attention. That's really where that CRM analytics is really proven pretty powerful for us.
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.
Implementation takes time and resources. It is a heavy lift to implement and at first, it can take a little bit of time to understand what you are looking at. But once it's implemented it's easy to get started.
Without any BI expertise or resources available to your organization, the implementation of this is difficult. If you aren't used to BI tools and don't have an expert in house, the terminology can be difficult to understand at first.
Their support is not on hand to help you if you encounter any issues, at least not on all the plans or the basic plans. Real-time support service is an add-on, so you'll need to be patient if you require help or pay extra money.
More functionality for the tool is needed to compete with other heavyweights in the arena like Tableau, Qlik, and Microstrategy. Still lacks the robustness, functionality, and flexibility other competing products possess.
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.
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.
For someone who don't have coding background, this could be a useful tool and fairly easy to learn and use given the good support. However, if you know other open source tools, it would be much easier to use the other tools and the knowledge is more transferable in the future.
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.
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.
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.
I was not able to be in interaction much with Salesforce support team since every feature works the way it should be working. So far I have not experienced any bug or major glitches that would delay the result of my work and performance. There is also a hotline in our company for Salesforce issue but so far I have not used it.
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.
An implementation partner would certainly result in greater output in a more efficient amount of time. However, I have found implementation partners to be extremely expensive for the output received (at least working for a non-profit company they are frequently unaffordable). Internal implementation does help with usable output though since internal knowledge would better know the data architecture and business processes
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.
Tableau is the absolute top of the class when it comes to business intelligence, but it doesn't make sense for every business case. In our case, we needed a simple data visualization platform for our CRM platform and sales pipeline. Salesforce Analytics, while nowhere near as robust, did the job we needed it to do perfectly in a significantly more cost-effective manner.
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.
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.
I would say it's been positive just because as a company, anyone that has access to it can go in there and pull any company information and we're very up to date then on all of our client base. So I would say it's been a very positive impact.
