MicroStrategy - Great for some, overkill for most.

MicroStrategy, for the use by our company, was WAY overkill for their needs, both in functionality and price. It can be a great tool, but their licensing scheme is frustratingly painful and expensive for the quality of software they provide. If your company does not want to pay a DBA or DB Developer to write optimized T-SQL or queries, then by all means MicroStrategy may be your answer. For the price, you could pay an employee who knows your data and writes much more optimized T-SQL, and utilize the great features of MSFT Excel to slice and dice your data - this would work for 90% or more of the companies who want a great data warehouse. As far as the current implementation of the data warehouse, so much investment and time went into rolling out MicroStrategy that, unless there was a major data structure change, it does not make sense to recreate all the reports in Excel.

It would really depend on the size, scale and needs of your data warehouse BI tool. I would say a good rule of thumb if you have a minimum of 50 users that are going to be constantly creating/slicing/dicing your data, this may be the tool for you. If fewer, then I would suggest investing in a great data warehouse developer and Excel classes for your consumers. Also know that, even though it touts itself as a fast, self-service BI system, unless you have a skilled SQL Developer or DBA, it will be slow as molasses as it creates the tSQL for the queries itself, in a very poorly designed manner.