It’s been long time me posting information about MicroStrategy latest updates.
Recently Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence – gave once again “MicroStrategy in LEADER quadrant” – Link
Please find below the STRENGTHS & Cautions of MicroStrategy outlined as part of this Gartner Report.
In short below:
- Enterprise Platform for BI Offering – plus
- Good rating from customers – plus
- Mobile – major plus
- Pricing changes – plus
- Resource cut due to revenue less @2014 – cautions
- Steep learning curve – cautions
MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy offers an enterprise-grade and organically grown end-to-end BI platform that is well-suited to large and complex system-of-record reporting and governed data discovery requirements. It has a compelling product and vision for large-scale governed data discovery and has invested early in cloud and mobile BI; however, its execution during the past year has been poor and the company is regrouping.
Executive turnover and the announced restructuring may have contributed to eroding the customer experience at a time when the company must distance itself from its “old BI” brand and convince the market that it has a compelling platform for the future. MicroStrategy has made key executive hires and is refocusing and repositioning to leverage its differentiators into renewed momentum in 2015. We need to see execution at MicroStrategy during 2015, if it is to remain a Leader in the Magic Quadrant in the future.
Strengths
- MicroStrategy is an enterprise-grade platform with strong vision around governed data discovery (including for self-service data preparation), and is well suited to companies that need large-scale system-of-record reporting, mobile and dashboards, and are not tied to an enterprise application stack (such as Oracle or SAP).
- MicroStrategy continues to earn strong composite product ratings from customers and is most often chosen because of its functionality. It also ranked in the top five vendors in this Magic Quadrant as a platform used for IT-driven, centralized BI deployments. While most customers deploy the platform centrally, it scores well across all four use cases. It has particular strengths in enterprise features, such as BI platform administration, internal platform integration, metadata management and traditional styles of analysis. It is also rated highly for analytic dashboards, business-user data mashup and free-form exploration — largely due to its investments in its data discovery capabilities, Visual Insight.
- MicroStrategy remains an industry benchmark for large BI deployments running on top of large enterprise data warehouses, and is often viewed as the vendor of choice when enterprise requirements are complex. The company invests continuously in scalability and performance as well as big data-related enhancements (for example, Prime, a scalable multiterabyte in-memory engine developed with Facebook and direct Hadoop connectivity) for its natively developed and largely integrated portfolio. This enables it to support among the largest average data volumes accessed in data repositories and among the largest average number of users (2,648 versus an average of 1,554). Moreover, MicroStrategy is typically deployed in larger enterprises that consider it to be their enterprise BI standard more often than most other vendors.
- MicroStrategy is the only vendor in this Magic Quadrant whose customers report selecting it for their mobile capabilities as a top reason — 51% of customers either have deployed or are piloting it for mobile, compared with an average of 30% overall. The cloud has been another area of early and aggressive strategic investment for MicroStrategy compared with other BI vendors, with MicroStrategy Cloud customers primarily using it for hosted private cloud deployments.
- Customers not only value simplification in their user experience, they also want simplification in their vendor relationship. MicroStrategy has taken the bold and difficult step of simplifying its pricing (21 SKUs down to four) and making it public on its website. Pricing complexity has been a perennial complaint of MicroStrategy customers. This change is an important step in reversing this perception in particular, and in improving the customer experience in general.
Cautions
- A challenging year for MicroStrategy, 2014 saw sales momentum decline, a revolving door at the executive level and deep cuts in staff (20%) across the board, which has resulted in disruption across all functions. MicroStrategy customers report a below-average customer experience, including support, product quality, a more difficult than average migration experience, and below-average achievement of business benefits — consistent with the results of the other IT-centric vendors. The company is regrouping and has made a number of positive changes to improve in the future. It will need to regain momentum in 2015 to remain a significant player in the market.
- MicroStrategy must overcome a branding problem in the market and its installed base. It continues to be associated with “traditional BI,” due in part, perhaps, to competitors effectively pigeon-holing it as such — even though the product portfolio and road map is focused on important requirements for governed data discovery in very large deployments, with additional differentiators around self-service data preparation.
- While the MicroStrategy development environment is robust and flexible, there is a steep learning curve — even for seasoned report developers building any level of analytic complexity into parameterized reports that simulate ad hoc analysis and interactive dashboards for business users. Even though usability enhancements continue to be delivered with MicroStrategy 9.x (such as more one-click user actions, reusable dashboards and dashboard design wizards) and more planned in MicroStrategy 10, its customers continue to rate the platform as below average for ease of use for development, ease of use for end users, and ease of administration and implementation. Broader adoption of Visual Insight should contribute to resolving these issues and changing this assessment, but its relevance is still low in the overall user base.
Happy Reading!