MicroStrategy Dresses to the 9s

Business intelligence (BI) platform provider MicroStrategy recently announced the availability of its latest product upgrade, MicroStrategy 9 -- the first major release in nearly four years. Company executives say that, in addition to an ongoing focus on large enterprises -- ensuring that the solution can scale to client's demands -- the new release simplifies BI by reducing the number of servers required. MicroStrategy 9 boasts an improved memory performance, a multisource relational online analytical processing (ROLAP) engine, and an evolutionary roadmap for users to span the entire enterprise.

Unlike the acknowledged migration challenges that plagued MicroStrategy's last significant update -- from version 6 to version 7 -- the new release's compatibility with MicroStrategy 8 ensures that the installation process is very "quick and easy," says Eric De Roos, the company's director of product management.

"The release plugs some significant gaps that relegated [MicroStrategy] to the high-end market," says Wayne Eckerson, director of research for The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI). Most notably, he says, were gaps in MicroStrategy's "lack of multisource support and a global federated semantic model."

Version 9, Eckerson adds, indicates MicroStrategy's commitment to supporting global deployments of BI, specifically with the "ability to present every report, dashboard, or OLAP analysis in the local language of each business user viewing the information," a feature that will automatically adjust based on the user's predefined settings.

According to De Roos, BI often exists in distinct departments, or small workgroups, that store data in Excel spreadsheets or various other databases. When attempting to extract data, departments are searching for data from various sources, some of which may contain information that is either overlapping or conflicting. "We found that the interdepartmental databases and workgroup databases do evolve over time," he says. "That's when IT gets concerned about how people are managing the data." The concerns also go up the chain of command, he adds. "CIOs [are] concerned about how many tools they've implemented," he says. "They have relationships with many vendors, no connection between any systems, no synchronicity between systems. Now, with multisource, we can go across these systems."

Version 9's multisource ROLAP "eliminates the requirement to move data from multiple source databases into a purpose-built data warehouse or data mart," according to company documents. In other words, in response to an end-user query, the tool's multisource ROLAP engine extracts information from all existing data sources, and then aggregates that information into a single format presented to the user.

While previous iterations of the solution had an aggregating capability, De Roos says that it wasn't available in the same way. "[Information] was not really merged together at the data model level," he says. The new offering, he says, is attractive not only for its ability to migrate data from very unstructured environments to a structured one, but also for its ability to not disrupt previously designed reports. "It's very easy to take an existing report and point it to a different data source," De Roos says. "Take a few of the metadata objects, point them to new data sources, and the reports work exactly the same [way]."

Without having to rework existing databases, MicroStrategy 9 is designed to open these pockets of information and make them accessible to the entire enterprise. "It's more flexible [and] more agile, and thus is better-suited to departmental implementations," Eckerson says.

De Roos says that, as MicroStrategy deployments expand from the departmental level to the enterprise, the company expects to see an evolutionary approach to BI among its users, especially those looking to jettison legacy applications. He reports that, with 90 percent of MicroStrategy users operating through a Web-based environment, the release offers a self-service component that's more efficient, easier to use, and less technology-dependent. Additional administrative capabilities have been introduced to the Web interface, giving users more features there for designing reports, dashboards, and applications.

MicroStrategy's in-memory ROLAP capability, De Roos says, enables companies to "handle more users on a single Web server." That, in turn, allows users to develop BI initiatives that are more robust with fewer servers and fewer administrators. An in-memory ROLAP operates directly on the main server, minimizing disk-access delays and improving query-response times, the company says. The feature comes standard with MicroStrategy 9, requiring no additional installation or data modeling.

"The in-memory option will help performance significantly," Eckerson says.

News relevant to the customer relationship management industry is posted several times a day on destinationCRM.com, in addition to the news section Insight that appears every month in the pages of CRM magazine. You may leave a public comment regarding this article by clicking on "Comments" at the top; to contact the editors, please email editor@destinationCRM.com.

Related Articles

Business Objects Ups the Ante on On-Demand BI

SAP's business intelligence division strengthens its abilities in data warehousing and data exploration with its latest BI OnDemand release.

4 Simple Tips for Business Intelligence

Making BI ridiculously obvious.

Building on BI with Predictive Analytics

Information Builders Summit '08: Information Builders strengthens its WebFOCUS platform, delivering on cost-effectiveness and demands for analytics.

10 Ways to Improve Your Business Intelligence

Friendly suggestions to help revitalize and maximize your company's BI strategy.

BI Tools Market Shows Continued Growth

A study by IDC reveals that BI software is both popular and necessary; Business Objects and SAS continue to lead the field.

MicroStrategy and Microsoft Move Up in Gartner's BI Magic Quadrant

Magic Quadrant '08: The research firm's assessment of the business intelligence sector shows the two vendors joining SAS Institute, Oracle, Cognos, and Business Objects in the top segment.