We are happy to share some insights about MicroStrategy drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements.
In all of our Value Indexes, we utilize a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal and vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated MicroStrategy and 17 other vendors in seven categories: five relevant to the product – Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability – and two related to the vendor – Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment and Vendor Validation. To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and on data derived from our Benchmark Research on Analytics and Business Intelligence.
MicroStrategy is a publicly traded BI software vendor that has been offering its products and services for decades. It was categorized as an Exemplary Vendor and ranked second overall in this Value Index evaluation. MicroStrategy performed its best in Usability and was a Value Index Leader and first in Product Experience and within Usability, Reliability where it was first, and Adaptability.
MicroStrategy’s product includes a broad set of capabilities across many of the evaluation criteria in this assessment. While the product has primarily been offered on-premises, the company recently introduced a cloud-based service as well. Data is stored and managed in source databases coupled with a caching layer to enhance performance. The most significant recent advancement was the introduction of HyperIntelligence, which makes MicroStrategy analytics available via automated hyperlinks in web browsers, productivity tools and business applications.
Analytics almost universally involves collaboration among a team of individuals. Interpreting the results of the analyses, choosing a course of action and tracking the implementation of those actions spans multiple roles and even multiple departments within an organization. As a result, most of today’s analytics and business intelligence products support some form of collaboration. MicroStrategy supports sharing and emailing analyses, alerts and notifications, commenting on analyses and posting to discussion groups. HyperIntelligence also provides additional ways to share and collaborate in analytics processes by making analyses available in a variety of contexts. Assigning tasks and tracking them to completion would improve MicroStrategy’s Capability ranking, as would better ways to communicate and share the strategy and mission of the organization.
Analytics embedded within applications can more easily lead to action. We expect that by 2022, more than one-half of line-of-business personnel will have immediate access to cross-functional analytics embedded in their activities and processes, helping to make operational decision-making more efficient and effective. MicroStrategy offers developers JavaScript application programming interfaces for embedding content in other applications. It provides libraries for managing, customizing and rebranding various aspects of the product. MicroStrategy also exposes REST APIs and URL references with parameters. MicroStrategy would perform better in the Capability category with a few additional visualizations, better natural language processing and more machine learning assistance.
Many workers switch between desktop/laptop devices when in the office to mobile devices when outside the office, so integration between these two modes is important. Nearly two-thirds of organizations (65%) provide analytics support for both smartphones and tablets. MicroStrategy Mobile is available as a native application for iOS and Android devices. The product provides a wide range of analytics and is one of the few products that supports updates to data from mobile devices. It provides offline access with interactivity and supports native features from the device, including camera integration and location awareness. MicroStrategy also offers its HyperIntelligence HyperCard capabilities via native iOS and Android applications. MicroStrategy would perform better with additional collaboration and better support for wearables.
This assessment was based on MicroStrategy’s analytics products available in December of 2020. MicroStrategy has released several updates since then that include additional capabilities. For instance, new collaborative capabilities are available for discussions with individuals or groups. The Android mobile application has been enhanced to support additional gestures. There are a few new visualizations including waterfall charts and Sankey diagrams. Other new enhancements are noted here.
Organizations should evaluate their data and analytics requirements including collaborative, embedded and mobile capabilities to ensure the existing solutions are meeting the organization’s needs. If their existing solutions are not satisfying those requirements, they should consider whether MicroStrategy can help meet their needs.
This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of analytics and BI software in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Value Index by clicking here, and included vendors that wish to learn more can click here. Read the report here.
Regards,
David Menninger