Ground level perspective of MicroStrategy

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.

MicroStrategy Analytics is very well suited for small and large companies and for varying degrees of budgets. The price model is fair for the type of features and functionality out of the box. There will have to be someone dedicated to MicroStrategy and the lifecycle of the business data model. It is not a light weight product on the back end, but can be very lightweight to the end users. No-SQL allows the domain experts, people who understand the business and not technology, to analyze and dig at questions without being burdened by asking database experts for advanced SQL generation. I give this product a 9 out of 10 because it is not fully HIPAA compliant and the means to make it HIPAA compliant means we must cripple some basic functionality.

Implementation is not easy, but also not difficult. With enough training on how to create a schema, and with the proper data warehouse schema the implementation can be very quick. If there are a lot of unknowns in the beginning phase of modeling, that can greatly extend the overall time taken for a fully implemented project.

The MicroStrategy training is incredible, they have great online teachers. I was fortunate to be learning MicroStrategy while also implementing a project from scratch. This helped to solidify a lot of the concepts and be able to ask questions about real world problems in addition to class room exercises.

If the staff does not know they answer they either find it out at some point, or put in a feature request. I have never been left hanging or been given an answer that is unsatisfactory to the solution. Even if there was no current solution, I was still told the logical reason and why.

It is difficult to learn, but once you figure it out through training, it becomes simpler and the reasons for it's complexity becomes apparent.

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.

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.