MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy is one of the best known vendors in the BI and analytics market worldwide. It was the first vendor to release a fully integrated product providing formatted reports, dashboards and interactive data discovery in a single solution with functional parity in its on-premises and cloud versions. With its library of statistical and advanced analytics functions, the vendor offers comprehensive analytics capabilities for a wide variety of use cases.
MicroStrategy is based on a tightly integrated architecture that can support hybrid or multi-cloud scenarios and was built from the ground up without acquisitions. The vendor focuses on providing the so-lutions a customer needs to become an ‘Intelligent Enterprise’. The analytics and mobility suite offers different clients, which connect to an enterprise semantic layer (schema) to deliver common and governed business logic across multiple data sources. The vendor has invested much over the years in supporting 200+ connectors to data sources, as well as offering native support for cloud databases, data lakes and Hadoop. Besides direct connectivity to source systems, MicroStrategy offers an integrated in-memory engine to ensure fast query performance on large data sets.
Business users can use the enterprise semantic layer (schema), typically created by technically savvy users, or create their own data models (datasets). For additional governance, datasets can be combined with the enterprise semantic layer or certified.
MicroStrategy has always taken market trends seriously and often leads the way. The vendor provides a no-code development framework to build native mobile apps. Offline capabilities and write-back data entry for transactions and operational use cases are available too. The vendor introduced ‘Dossiers’ to provide a modern way to analyze, present and visualize data. Dossiers are interactive applications that organize dashboards or reports in a familiar book-oriented chapter-and-page format.
Increasingly, MicroStrategy is taking an open approach by allowing third-party tools such as Tableau, Qlik, Power BI, Jupyter and RStudio to access its governed datasets. To extend the adoption of analytics by business users, MicroStrategy introduced ‘HyperIntelligence’ to surface contextual information to users directly in web applications, on mobile devices and in selected productivity applications with zero clicks. This allows businesses to inject real-time, contextual insights and recommendations into users’ browser-based or mobile workflows – bringing analytics closer to their work. Embedding analytics in business applications, in cooperation with service providers and often targeting distinct industries, is becoming increasingly important to vendors and offers further opportunities to differentiate.
User & Use Cases
MicroStrategy is a broad BI and analytics platform. Respondents to this year’s survey tend to use it for traditional BI tasks such as reporting and dashboards, and also in a number of trending scenarios such as self-service analytics and location intelligence.
Self-service is also a strength. For example, an above-average proportion of business users employ MicroStrategy for data analysis, report creation and data preparation.
MicroStrategy customers are typically spread all over the world, our sample has a strong European footprint (87 percent of respondents) with most (50 percent) coming from the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland). The dominant industries are those where MicroStrategy has a particularly strong presence: retail/wholesale (about a third) and financial services (23 percent).
In our sample, 63 percent of the companies that run MicroStrategy are large enterprises with more than 2,500 employees. Customers reported a median of 4,000 and a mean of 30,890 employees. This is also reflected in the numbers of users reported: Both the mean of 3,374 and median of 400 users are a long way above the overall The BI & Analytics Survey 23 average. Together with a reported median of 3,519 GB of data being processed, these figures clearly confirm that the platform can power large-scale deployments.
Current vs. planned use
n=99
5 products most often evaluated in competition with MicroStrategy
n=99
Percentage of employees using MicroStrategy
n=95
Number of users using MicroStrategy
n=95
Tasks carried out with MicroStrategy by business users
n=99
Company size (number of employees)
n=99
Want to see the whole picture?
BARC’s Vendor Performance Summary contains an overview of The BI Survey results based on feedback from MicroStrategy users, accompanied by expert analyst commentary.
Contact us to purchase the Vendor Performance Summary- Register for a free sample Vendor Performance Summary download
- If you have any questions, feel free to contact us