Overall Satisfaction with MicroStrategy Analytics
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.
- Tableau Desktop,Emanio,QlikView,TIBCO Spotfire,Information Builders WebFOCUS,Pentaho,IBM Cognos
As a whole Microstrategy is good in more areas than the others are great in specific ones. It is probably not #1 in any particular category of BI Tool evaluations, but they are #2 or #3 in more categories than the all of the other tools we have evaluated. We selected Microstrategy originally as a client request. As we became disenchanted with workflow and or design, our evaluation of other BI tools fell so far short of functionality in Microstrategy that it was an obvious choice (using an 80-20 rule).
- (positive) Improved analytics delivery due to the flexibility of the web platform.
- (positive) Generated new lines of business via dashboard development.
- (negative) Long development cycles.
- (positive) Shorter QA cycles for analytics leveraging Integrity Manager.
MicroStrategy Analytics Feature Ratings
Using MicroStrategy Analytics
5 - Business Intelligence and overall analytics for the organization; both standard and custom.
4 -
- Database developers
- Data warehouse developers
- Business analysts
- Product Development
- Network Admins
- Standard analytics.
- Business intelligence.
- Dashboards.
- Custom report generation.
- Account management.
- Mobile dashboards.
- Client-specific, custom dashboards.
- Validation of datasets.
- Self-service BI.
- Data warehouse design validation.
- Two-way analytics to action system.
Evaluating MicroStrategy and Competitors
Yes -
- SSRS - Frontend management was difficult and could not integrate with our other systems; primarily because of security.
- Custom ASP - many features were missing from the ASP reporting packages that exist in MSTR (scheduling, view filters, schema binding, dashboards, etc.). in addition, the DEV cycles were too long.
- MS Excel - multiple versions of the truth were constantly beibg delivered to clients via unreliable means (emails, personal cloud storage, et al.)
- Price
- Product Features
- Existing Relationship with the Vendor
One of our largest clients needed a platform independent reporting system and had used MSTR in the past. We had evaluated several other products and determined that, based on price-to-value and maturity, Microstrategy was easily the best choice. Platform independence (web-delivery), delivery methods, scheduling, governance, and speed...all features leading to self-service analytics were best provided by Microstrategy.
We probably would have forced a full bake off between Microstrategy and the other vendors instead of selecting a production based on an extended POC. We gave Microstrategy, and their consultants, an opportunity to customize the demos and features around the limitations of the product. Had we given the same opportunities to other potential vendors, I think the other vendor's would've had a better opportunity.
MicroStrategy Implementation
- Implemented in-house
- Professional services company
HITastics
Change management was minimal - Modifications to the underlying schema must be made with care.
- Forcing query optimization via level metrics and VLDB settings
- Setting up DB connections
- Styling, styling, styling
MicroStrategy Support
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
Yes - fast paced environment needs quick responses.
Yes - Yes
There have been multile times that we have had product installation and licensing issues. In every case they were able to provide both a temporary and permanent solution to our issue.
Using MicroStrategy
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Like to use Technical support not required Consistent Feel confident using | None |
- Grid Report Generation
- User Management
- Installation
- Visual Insight
- Documents/Dashboard
- Database Connections
- Attribute/metric generation
- Report API
- Styling
Yes - The mobile interface is one of the bright spots of the product. To get setup on mobile is literally a 3-5 step process that is fairly intuitive. The reports are responsive and immediately convert to the mobile interface via the MSTR Mobile app. The only challenge is in the first versions of the app, Android was inconsistent and the focus was on iOS.