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December 01, 2020
MicroStrategy is being implemented for our customers. I'm doing consulting assignment to plan design, architecture, blue prints and best practices to be followed
- Strong semantic layer to define all the business rules and tightly coupled
- MicroStrategy Analytics cubes are easy to create and deploy
- MicroStrategy Analytics cubes performance is best in the industry from performance point of view
- Slice and dice features are awesome
- You can define hierarchy, drill up and drill down within data set
- SDK for Customizing Analytical Applications means you can leverage metadata
- Embedding Analytics with MicroStrategy REST API
- Data Mining and Predictive Analytics
- MicroStrategy Analytics desktop support waterfall model
- Modern BI tools prefer agile methodologies
- Correlating unstructured data sets gets challenging
- Online training
Yes - Yes, upgrade was seamless. You need the right skills for the same.
November 08, 2019
We went with MS analytics to create internal operational efficiencies and Improve business process outcomes through enhanced decision making using better data points and metrics available at hand. Mainly the team was looking at using the data from the last 12 months or 52 weeks to create dashboards and have a meaningful representation of that huge amount of data. The team liked the options available with filters for using important data. We were able to save the templates with various parameters, filters, and rules which were easy to update with a refresh in a click. The visualizations also looked good as they had different color themes to separate out different parameters. We could also save the widgets and export them as excel sheets, pdf to extract data in shareable files. We intend to use this across a department.
- Filters and their customization to make meaningful widgets and have multiple widgets in one dashboard view.
- Ability to save templates that can be later refreshed without having to recreate them from scratch.
- Takes a little longer to configure initially and is a big load on the data server.
- Doesn't have a unified interface and has two separate interfaces for lots of features.
- Support team could be more efficient and have documentation ready to share after helping out with issues.
January 16, 2020
MicroStrategy Analytics is used in my organization to analyze the sales performance of products by specific SKUs, categories, or customer segments. It is a business intelligence tool leveraged by merchandising and marketing departments. The business problem addressed by MicroStrategy tool is to understand if a particular product category is growing in revenue after more SKUs were added or after a marketing campaign was run targeting specific groups, sales division or segment of customers. It does an excellent job of creating a custom performance report by dragging and dropping a set of objects which are correlated to each other in a relational database. As well as enables analysts to create quick visualizations.
- Dragging and dropping report objects to create quick reporting of marketing and merchandising success metrics such as cases sold, revenue, and margin.
- Segmenting a specific product performance report by filters such as a fiscal period, a list of SKUs, product categories, sub-groups, types, or a segment of customers.
- Not efficient when the volume of data sets increases to hundreds of thousands of rows, which results in timeout errors when exporting excel reports. So, often the analyst has to break large data sets into smaller subsets, which means more time to analyze.
- Doesn't do a great job of correlating unstructured data sets such as marketing banner impressions and clicks to structured data sets such as transactions, customer engagement, or cases sold attributed to a specific marketing campaign.
January 02, 2020
We use it in multiple business units within our organization, from [making] financial decisions to direct people impacting decisions. We are able to pull from multiple data sources and provide dashboards or report analytics from patterned data to make efficient and intelligent decisions to our business model and direction. It helps to provide a pathway to achieve our corporate strategic goals.
- Dashboards
- Reporting Analytics.
- Initial configurations
- Support costs
We are using for all data reporting. My some financial data reporting in MicroStrategy Analytics. For department financial budget officer can see their budget values.
- Visualization
- Speed of access to reports
- Easy report implementation
- Visual diversity
- New graphic interfaces
- Some mathematical functions
Microstrategy Analytics is widely used in the company across all departments. Different level of access can be provided to different level of responsible persons. It is a very easy tool to get access of past data with different reports and presenting it with the help of variety of dashboard and VIs. Data collection and analysis is an essential function of it.
- Data collection/data access- The tool uses different attributes and metrics to generate data for you in a required format with required filters.
- Data Visualization- The tool has great function of creating Dashboards which are specially useful for higher management to review it.
- Data Analytics- With great amount of functions, it does most of the excel work within itself. Eliminates excel in most of the fronts.
- Better user interface- The only thing that comes out is there is a high scope of modifying user interface. Currently it is not as good as Tableau in terms of user interface.
October 25, 2017
We are trying to use it across all the organization as the only tool where you can find all the data of the company, making all kind of dashboards for managers and final users. We've also made "live" dashboard showing the status of the company.
The major problem is to make end users move from Excel to MS. The company leaves all this effort to the IT Team and does not make this a strategic decision.
The major problem is to make end users move from Excel to MS. The company leaves all this effort to the IT Team and does not make this a strategic decision.
- Easy of use
- Has improved a lot the visualization of data
- Fast
- For use it take a lot of time to prepare the correct data. I don't know it there is some MicroSrategy magic solution to make it faster
- Better comunication with client
- Improve dashboards, losing with competitors
March 01, 2017
We use MicroStrategy to provide a business intelligence solution for our clients. We use it to create reports and dashboards that our clients can use to analyze their business.
- Customized dashboards between the desktop and web applications.
- Shared objects which allows reusability in a number of different reports.
- Web tool still doesn't have all the customization possible in the developer application.
- Rigid star scheme requirements creates complications in unstructured data.
- I would love to see out of the box "what-if" scenario functionality.
October 17, 2016
Microstrategy is extensively used within my organization and other retail and finance clients I have worked with.
MSTR is an efficient tool with numerous analytical, reporting and visualization features all clubbed in one - helps deliver grid reports, dashboards and mobile reports. We have used this for dynamic sourced reports and self analytics as well widely.
MSTR is an efficient tool with numerous analytical, reporting and visualization features all clubbed in one - helps deliver grid reports, dashboards and mobile reports. We have used this for dynamic sourced reports and self analytics as well widely.
- Integrated solution for delivering different types of reports through multiple mediums like web, mobile or distribution services.
- Unique Schema and public objects concept saves development costs by allowing reusable components and maintenance across.
- Having end to end MSTR implemented eliminates the need to look at different tools for in memory and visualization.
- Version control and parallel development limitation- I understand it somehow conflicts the architecture specialities but point to be thought over.
- Visual Insights capabilities to compete with Tableau like reports.
- MSTR services and technical support teams response time - not always a concern but can definitely be improved.
June 11, 2016
Microstrategy is used as a reporting solution in my work environment. Microstrategy is used to interact on Hadoop, Microsoft SQL Server Tables, and SSAS MDX Cubes. Microstrategy's Visual Insight is used as a self service tool replacing Pivot tables & graph building in Excel.
- Visual Insight is a very good tool for data discovery and for create quick dashboard presentation. This is is basically a online web based portal where you have capability to quickly slice & dice the data . Also it provides you options to create derived metrics & derived attribute (MSTR 10) with various mathematical or statistical functions. One of the major mention would be the map based data visualization where you can plot data based on Latitude & Longitude.Also with MSTR 10 following limitations were removed i) using hyperlink ii) HTML 5 is implemented instead of Flash ,so easy to be rendered in mobile too iii) Adding images is possible for hardcoding company logo & symbols
- Drilling Capabilities. This requires some good backend data modeling. Once you bring in all the facts and dimensions you are supposed to establish relationship between them & create hierarchies. Then it would be easy to drill more & more. For example - Device hierarchy - (Device Used by User--> Browser-->Operating System)
- Data Source Connectivity.
- Enterprise Manager is basically BI to BI environment which is used by administrators or executives to track reporting usage, report performance,developer efficiency or frequency of usage & thousands of other statistics which proves to be very helpful in monitoring the efficiency of the whole environment. Once you set up Enterprise miner( which is a bit tricky) you will be able to access all the in built documents or you can custom built dashboard based on your usage
- Visual Insight have multiple limitations. Few of them are listed here - i)Cannot change default graph colors ii) text/graph formatting are very very limited iii)Add metric to Color by / Thresholds is not possible iv)one of the worst limitation of the VI in older versions is that it is not possible to create filters that apply only to a specific visualization. For example if there are 4 graphs in one dashboard & if you have filters then those filters would be applicable for all of them
- Some formatting options are not there either on Web or Developer especially while dealing with a document. We have to use both Web & Developer to solve issues.
- While connecting with MDX cube reporting loses a lot of features.
September 16, 2016
MSTR is being used by approximately three departments w/in Casey's. We plan on having MSTR be an enterprise-wide solution
- MSTR Analytics does visualization very well.
- Ad-Hoc analysis
- As w/ any tool - the data underneath MSTR has to governed and structured correctly to use in a self service environment
- MSTR almost demands that you have an MSTR Administrator on staff to keep the semantic layer fresh
Microstrategy is currently being used by several different departments within the organization. It makes our reporting easier, where it provides the flexibility to automate much of it, as well as provide an easy to use interface for non sql savvy employees. It solves many of our reporting needs
- Central location for reporting, makes it easier for several different departments to access different information
- Automated reporting - allows us to schedule customized reports
- Well formatted reports that are easy to run
- My organization is on an older version of the tool with a lot less bells and whistles
- If an employee is familiar with SQL enough, they can avoid using microstrategy
- No other major cons
April 28, 2016
MicroStrategy Analytics is used by our organization to create highly interactive dashboards and reports with cutting edge visualizations. Currently, the front end and dashboards are being developed by only a single department but reports and dashboards are consumed across the organization and even clients.
The main advantage of MicroStrategy Analytics is that it can be accessed online through a web browser which eliminates the need to carry heavy Excel files. Also, the reports and dashboards are updated in real time which was not possible with Excel based dashboards.
The main advantage of MicroStrategy Analytics is that it can be accessed online through a web browser which eliminates the need to carry heavy Excel files. Also, the reports and dashboards are updated in real time which was not possible with Excel based dashboards.
- It helps create dashboards that are personalized to a particular type of user. The access to the specific sections of dashboards and reports can be controlled and only the intended audience can access that information. This helps with distributing the same dashboard to different departments and even competitors.
- The reports are completely responsive to different devices and can be accessed via any device of any resolution. Also, MicroStrategy offers a vast range of power visualizations like heat maps and can also connect with third party applications like Google Maps for additional functionality. Also, this functionality is present even on mobile devices.
- With its Online Analytical Processing capabilities, users can modify the reports by slicing and manipulating the data as per their needs without executing the SQL query in the backend. This helps in saving a lot of development time as individual users can modify the report online by using filters and slicers without requiring the coding know how.
- ESRI ArcGIS maps can only be integrated and accessed with internet connectivity which becomes a limitation when using only with LAN connectivity.
- The community/forum is not very active with a limited number of users and low quality content.
- Some functionalities are missing from the web version and are only present in the desktop version. Also, dashboards over the web still lack integration with HTML5.
- Build a complete Business Intelligence solution from the ground up. They provide desktop, web and mobile interfaces.
- Analyze and report on large volumes of data from an extensive number of source databases.
- Provides a full Software Development Kit (SDK) to personalize, customize and write your own BI applications and web sites.
- Support for HTML5 is still at the beginning. The latest features were developed with Adobe Flash, which sometimes is not the best and fastest solution. HTML5 with CSS and SVG would probably be more portable and a smoother experience to the user.
- I personally would like to see native OAuth 1.0 and 2.0 Support. And the ability to directly attach JSON data feeds like Google provided data.
- Web Services documentation could be improved and expanded with more examples.
June 27, 2016
Microstrategy is used in one of our banking clients. It's used by different areas, some use it for alerts. Others use it as a dashboard solution or for ad-hoc reporting.
- The governance and security layer, with the metadata layer.
- Easy ad-hoc reporting creations.
- Strong dashboard options.
- Merging data from different sources has been improved a lot but it's not easy to create a query manually.
- Training metrics - it's not easy to use for users. But the new method of R integration could change that.
March 01, 2016
MicroStrategy is currently being used throughout the organization to address various ad-hoc requests.
- Ad-hoc analysis
- Dashboarding and visualizations
- There's no clean tree/hierarchical display of attributes that allows me to see the entire tree on one screen. This also translates to a report with one column showing the indentation for nested categories.
- The interaction and user interface with dealing with a prompted report is less than desirable. Many users hate the interface and find it difficult to use.
- Not all features are available in web when designing dashboards. You often have to bounce back and forth from Desktop to Web in order to get to the option you're looking for.
March 01, 2016
- User Friendly
- Abillity to manage large volumes of data from multiple sources
- Narrowcast Reporting & Dashboard options
- Creating documents is very technical and requires training
- Graphing tools are difficult to use
- Setting up alerts and email distributions could be easier
March 01, 2016
- The Microstrategy web front end is easy to navigate which makes it even easier to train our users on.
- Microstrategy Visual Insight has added a new dimension to our content which allow for a story to be told about the data.
- Microstrategy Mobile allows our executive team to analyze key KPI's at the swipe of a finger.
- I think that although Visual Insight is a new tool that it probably has the most upside to it. Adding features that are available on the Report Services side would be great for VI.
December 10, 2018
We use MSTR organization wide to track KPIs for our brands. We have several dashboards set up based on brand and channel. MSTR allows for real time monitoring of KPIs and provides views of performance over time. It eliminates the need to constantly run queries to check results, saving countless hours of employee time.
- Visual representation of data
- Ease of use for setting up and modifying dashboards
- Intuitive UX for non-experienced users
- Sharing custom dashboards
August 17, 2015
We're building a new data warehouse and reporting system. MicroStrategy will be at the forefront of our strategy, providing a robust, multi-language, multi-tenant architecture for our customers and internally. It replaces our Excel, CSV based reporting company-wide.
- Without a doubt, it scales, it is robust and the performance is great.
- The latest enhancements for version 10 (like replacing Flash with HTML 5) address some previous issues and concerns.
- They've closed the gap they had with Tableau and similar products with the introduction of Desktop, while still providing governed, data discovery. Something Tableau lacks.
- It is hard for me to point out room for improvement. Version 10 just came out and I haven't had the chance to fully experiment with it, but it looks very good so far.
April 08, 2015
We use MicroStrategy Analytics in many departments, the span of support goes from Business users to IT support. This tool is intended to be the "one stop shop" for all reporting needs. We are able to connect many different data sources which tend to be common in large companies. The current implementation met our needs in the past and we are adapting to use it better and more efficiently for future needs. I believe when configured correctly, this product can meet all requirements for our department and all other departments.
- Extremely fast and reliable sql generation, report and document development.
- Flexibility and integration with nearly all data sources.
- Self reliant product, many out of the box products that allow easy maintenance, development, and monitoring.
- Cost of product is more reasonable than many other in its class.
- Reports and documents produced can be pixel perfect and allow for extremely custom dashboards and scorecards.
- There are many tools and products in the whole Analytics suite, I find this cumbersome and would like to see all these tools brought together
- There is no version control built into the product. Versioning seems outdated and the principle way of handling versions is outdated and I think should be remodeled.
- To a new user, learning the entirety of all MicroStrategy products is difficult and can take a long time to adapt to.
- Online training
- Self-taught
May 11, 2015
- Standard KPI reporting.
- Scheduled reporting.
- Simple dashboards.
- Easy report design and creation.
- Discovery - visually dig through the raw data.
- Real-time updates.
- Connections to alternate data sources (APIs, local files).
- Limited visualizations.
- Built-in statistics and forecasting (lack of).
April 29, 2015
Microstrategy is our primary BI delivery environment and is being used for the entire organization. We have a unique business case in that our organization is the BI department for hundreds of other organizations; however, attributes, metrics, and nomenclature are different although using the same data set. In addition, our data sets are 10s to 100s of millions of rows of data. Microstrategy scales for large datasets and has just enough flexibility to address these problems.
- Aggregate awareness.
- The ability for the SQL generator to select the correct aggregate table, whether a hierarchy or dates, is invaluable to organizations with less mature database developer resources.
- Delivery of reports, particularly web-based delivery.
- Microstrategy provides the most options for report delivery, scheduling, and formats; a requirement of self-service BI.
- Managing metadata
- Microstrategy's architecture prefers a star schema; this can serve as a virtual ER builder and help locate possible bottlenecks in the database design.
- Scheduling delivery; the use of schedules is very inflexible.
- Instead of building specific delivery objects, a schedule builder (similar to MS Outlook) will push Microstrategy ahead of the competition. The schedule objects add to the maintenance.
- FTP/sFTP delivery options.
- Internal delivery to file systems and availing the file location to FTP is good, but often times external FTP/sFTP is required. Currently, BI engineers have to build external processes to deliver to external FTP.
- Desktop dashboard development; it is a bit disjointed.
- Dashboard development options are different between desktop (now called developer) and web are different. We often have developer and web open at the same time to build dashboards.
- Architect product; still hasn't gained global acceptance for schema management.
- More flexible cross-tab development.
- There's an idea I have about joining data sets where there's aggregate data combined with crosstab data. The example i use is a annual budget (metric) along side monthly spend (metric). Today, the annual budget must be an attribute which means it cannot be used in calculations.
December 04, 2014
- MicroStrategy is a very powerful BI tool that, with the right training, can open the world of analysis to consumers, allowing your data to assist the masses with important business decisions, by offering a layer of abstraction between your data and users.
- MicroStrategy does a good job with any type of security model you need to implement. Security can be regulated on a large scale down to the object level. Sending reports to multiple people and being able to limit the data to each of those people based on group security is a phenomenal aspect.
- The flexibility of dashboards, reports and grids within MicroStrategy desktop was remarkable and allowed for a highly customized BI interface.
- Administration and implementation of MicroStrategy exposed fatal flaws in their software as a whole. I expected much, much higher quality software for the licensing/pricing demanded from MicroStrategy.
- Although their tech support staff were always friendly, it took multiple (and I mean multiple) attempts to solve issues, some of which were never resolved. Many of which were drawn out for weeks with support staff asking me to perform troubleshooting steps that I'd outlined I'd already performed in the ticket comments when posted. Just very ineffective support as a whole.
- Their error code base is not well documented. I can't count how many times I found an error being thrown and could not find reference of what that error meant, or was caused by. I found many people complaining about the same error in their community discussion boards, with no responses from anyone at MicroStrategy offering assistance.
February 25, 2015
- Fantastic features for mobile applications. Out of all of the BI tools out there, it is by far the best on an iPad
- Lots of features for the end-user to custom the output of reports
- In-memory processing allows for very quick responses
- It has a very steep learning curve for report developers. I found it the most difficult to learn from a developer perspective
- A lot of system administration overhead is required. Probably not suitable for a small organization. The cloud version would probably be better.
- The remote training that they offer (such as through the PEP program) is terrible. I had training classes online that would've been better served getting a root canal. Training is one of their most deficient areas in my opinion.
MicroStrategy Analytics Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
What is MicroStrategy Analytics?
The MicroStrategy platform differs somewhat from competing platforms in that it does not include a data warehouse.
The platform integrates with a wide range of third-party data warehouses however. MicroStrategy also built a free discovery/visualization tool called MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop, which is not completely integrated with the rest of the platform. MicroStrategy has strong mobile and cloud capabilities which are differentiators for the platform. MicroStrategy's cloud offerings are unique in that they host the software in their own data centers and allow customers to keep their data on-premise to alleviate security concerns. Analytics is a platform for Business Intelligence (BI) and self-service analytics. It enables organizations worldwide to analyze the vast amounts of data stored across their enterprises to make better business decisions.
The platform integrates with a wide range of third-party data warehouses however. MicroStrategy also built a free discovery/visualization tool called MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop, which is not completely integrated with the rest of the platform. MicroStrategy has strong mobile and cloud capabilities which are differentiators for the platform. MicroStrategy's cloud offerings are unique in that they host the software in their own data centers and allow customers to keep their data on-premise to alleviate security concerns. Analytics is a platform for Business Intelligence (BI) and self-service analytics. It enables organizations worldwide to analyze the vast amounts of data stored across their enterprises to make better business decisions.
MicroStrategy currently has 3 versions:
- MicroStrategy Analytics Enterprise: Enterprise-grade business intelligence
- MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop: Free self-service visual analytics
- MicroStrategy Analytics Express: Free cloud-based self-service visual analytics
MicroStrategy Analytics Competitors
Information Builders WebFOCUS, Looker, QlikView, Tableau Server, Oracle Analytics Server (formerly Oracle BI Foundation Suite)
MicroStrategy Analytics Pricing
- Has featureFree Trial Available?Yes
- Does not have featureFree or Freemium Version Available?No
- Does not have featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?No
- Entry-level set up fee?No
| On-premise Edition | Pricing Details | Terms |
|---|---|---|
| Desktop | $600 | per named user |
| SaaS Edition | Pricing Details | Terms |
|---|---|---|
| Web | $600 | per named user |
| Web | $300,000 | per CPU core |
| Mobile | $600 | per named user |
| Mobile | $300,000 | per CPU core |
MicroStrategy Analytics Technical Details
| Deployment Types: | On-premise, SaaS |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems: | Windows, Mac |
| Mobile Application: | No |