BI Scorecard Blog

MicroStrategy Mobile, Cloud, and Social Bets Pay Off

MicroStrategy touted its mobile, cloud, and social business intelligence initiatives at its user conference last week and offered proof that those initiatives are paying off.

MicroStrategy has been ahead of the mobile BI market, both in terms of customer demand and BI competitors. While many companies are struggling with mobile BI and the shift from RIM dominance to Apple iPads, MicroStrategy was one of the first to have native support for the iPad. BI on the iPad has been a Trojan horse for some BI initiatives, with a number of customers citing mobile as the way they are getting a more direct line to BI decision makers.

MicroStrategy Cloud was released mid 2011, and after only six months in production, the vendor has continued to refine its strategy and build out its infrastructure. I was surprised that MicroStrategy decided to establish its own data centers, in contrast to other SaaS solutions that use public cloud services such as Amazon. MicroStrategy claims that owning the cloud infrastructure enables it to better control performance. Steve Stone, senior vice president of MicroStrategy Cloud, claims that in some cases cloud deployments boast better performance tha on-premise installs. Stone knows all about customer expectations for performance; the former CIO and 19-year veteran of Lowes had 14,000 MicroStrategy users.

MicroStrategy Cloud is a powerhouse of BI partnerships, with Netezza, ParAccel, and Teradata (announced last week) offering cloud-based data warehousing and Informatica adding cloud-based data integration. MicroStrategy also allows customers to leave their data on-premises, and the vendor’s well-established ROLAP engine has always pushed more of the processing to the database than many competing BI products.

MicroStrategy Cloud Professional, announced last week, gives customers three flavors of Cloud: personal, professional, and enterprise. Cloud Personal is primarily MicroStrategy's Visual Insight product (reviewed in-depth here) in the cloud. Cloud Personal is free, but it supports just a single, manually loaded data source. Cloud Professional brings workgroup management and security to the visualizations created with Visual Insight. (MicroStrategy calls them dashboards, but they really aren’t dashboards: there's a  just one data visualization per page). The Professional Edition also allows data to be refreshed automatically on a schedule.

MicroStrategy expects its cloud offerings to appeal to lines of business and departments that lack IT resources to install infrastructure on-premises. As a case in point, customer Enova was looking for the best-fit BI tool, not necessarily a cloud solution. A cloud deployment enabled Enova to get a fast time to value, with all the breadth of the MicroStrategy BI platform.

MicroStrategy Social garnered many of the headlines at the conference. The vendor’s approach to social media is drastically different than others.  Social movement in the BI industry has been of two flavors: collaboration and sentiment analysis.  For example, I didn’t see any moves to bring collaboration to the product, a miss in my view. MicroStrategy is not pursuing sentiment analysis either. Instead, they are focusing on using Facebook data and enabling customers to merge it with their internal customer data via their Gateway product. Another product, Wisdom, allows customers to do customer segmentation based on demographic data in Facebook. MicroStrategy  Alert  can be used to create targeted, personalized Facebook campaigns using the information discovered with Gateway.

All of this is certainly bleeding edge and compelling. The big “but” comes back to the data quality in Facebook. (Trust me: my 13-year-old son does not have 3 wives and 7 brothers.) As a case in point, MicroStrategy shared an interesting graphic from the New York Post that used Wisdom to explore interests between Patriots and Giants fans. The favorite book for Patriots fans is Harry Potter. For Giants fans it is Diary of a Wimpy Kid. (Note: the data set  is based on 4 million Facebook Wisdom users). I suspect this finding is not true of the general fan population. I suspect, too, that younger Wisdom users have been more likely than older users to fill out their profile interests, and that they have the more permissive security settings that allow for such data exploration.

The bottom line with all this is not that the apps are useless. Instead, I think there is big potential and clear first-mover advantage for those marketers who exploit Facebook effectively. But any initiative in this area has to be met with a high degree of skepticism.

With more than 3,000 people attending its largest annual conference ever, it was clear this vendor has continued to grow despite a tough economy and fierce completion from mega vendors. Just after the conference, MicroStrategy released  2011 financial results showing a whopping 23% increase over 2010 total revenues.  As Gartner estimated 2011 BI growth rates at 9%, it’s clear MicroStrategy is outperforming many of its BI competitors and that the seeds of innovation MicroStrategy has been planting are paying off.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

MicroStrategy Offers Cloud BI

“Cloud” is on my mind, and not just because a hurricane might be hitting the North East coast for the first time in a hundred years.

Vendors big and small are trying to make “Cloud” a household world. For the most part, such hype seems to be falling flat. Microsoft’s commercials touting “To The Cloud” are generally met with puzzled looks by anyone outside of IT.  (As if moving to the cloud were the end game!) A survey by TDWI last year, found that only 9% of BI professionals were “very familiar” with Cloud BI. (Share your thoughts on Cloud BI in this survey.) If so few professionals understand the promises and the pitfalls of cloud BI, we have a long way to go before it becomes a commonly considered option in deploying BI.

Cloud BI is exciting for its promise of faster deployment, lower entry costs, and elastic scalability. To date, cloud BI efforts have blended purpose-built software with cloud infrastructure. Solutions like PivotLink, Birst, and Indicee all have their own application layers. Customers buy these solutions for both the  front-end capabilities and for their Software-as-a-Service approach. SAP BusinessObjects BI onDemand is a little bit different in that it supports sharing of documents created in Xcelsius and Crystal Reports, but is not as robust as the on-premise SAP BusinessObjects suite. Meanwhile, MicroStrategy Cloud promises to be as easy to get up and running as current SaaS offerings, but with all the BI robustness in its traditional on-premise solution.

In the BI world, one of the biggest pain points for companies just beginning to deliver BI is the initial deployment. For the most part, BI software is painful to install and configure. Configuring BI for thousands of users and for extranet deployments requires specialist skills that are not required on an ongoing basis. Expertise in designing data models and authoring reports and dashboards, on the other hand, are skills to invest in and needed on an ongoing basis. With a Cloud BI environment, the vendor provides the infrastructure and the software. Customers pay to use the service on a monthly or yearly basis. The work and expertise seems more smartly divided; but concerns about security, loss of control, and general lack of knowledge abound.

MicroStrategy has taken a different approach than current BI SaaS offerings on a number of points. First, it is using its own data centers, whereas SaaS BI startups tend to rely on the Amazon Cloud. MicroStrategy says for now it will own the infrastructure to be able to control performance.  The data centers are powered by Cisco, NetApp, and Dell hardware.  The vendor will invested $100 million in the data center infrastructure over the next three years. As MicroStrategy has long been known for its enterprise capabilities and data scalability, I can understand why the company wants to keep a tight rein on its Cloud offering. However, I question if managing data centers moves too far beyond the company’s core competency.

MicroStrategy also is blending its cloud approach allowing customers either to keep their data on-premise (and use the cloud only for the MicroStrategy application layer) or to load the data into the cloud. This addresses one of the biggest fears about cloud: who controls the data. Few other SaaS BI vendors allow such a hybrid approach, although Birst was one of the first to introduce it back in 2009. With the full-cloud implementation, MicroStrategy has partnered with IBM Netezza for the BI appliance, ParAccel for the columnar data base, and Informatica for ETL capabilities. I would imagine small to mid size businesses as well as departments who lack their own IT resources would find this latter approach to cloud BI appealing.

In an era of SaaS vendors who tout their multi-tenant architecture as being “SaaS ready,” I am concerned that MicroStrategy is not multitenant. In the post-mortem on one-time SaaS vendor Lucid Era, its single tenant architecture (and higher costs to maintain) was cited as one of the reasons for failure. Architects can get religious in their arguments for and against. The “for” multitenant arguments: multiple clients on a single hardware, shared-everything infrastructure makes it easier and cheaper for the SaaS-vendor  to maintain the environment,. The “against” arguments: customers want to customize their own environments and fear sharing anything. MicroStrategy Cloud will be using virtualization, with multiple companies on the same hardware, but each in their own virtual environment.

For any SaaS solution, the question continues to be: what’s the cost/benefit analysis? Is SaaS more expensive over time than if the solution were deployed on-premise?  MicroStrategy presented a cost/benefit analysis for 200 users over 5 years(see graphic, reprinted with permission), with over $1 Million in savings. The product was released only last month, so it’s too early to tell what the real-world case studies will show.  

I will be curious to see what the uptake is, and also, where: will it be small to midsized businesses who lack IT resources, or will it be in departments in enterprise companies who are looking for faster deployment options?

What is your level of interest in cloud BI? Take the 10-minute survey here.

 Regards,

Cindi Howson, Bi Scorecard

MicroStrategy Briefing Room: Mobile BI & Visual Discovery

Mobile BI and visualization are two of the hottest topics in BI today. But is it just hype or substantive innovations with business value? These were the themes around last week’s briefing webinar with MicroStrategy.

MicroStrategy has long supported mobile devices as an interface to its BI platform. However, its emphasis on mobile BI has increased dramatically in recent years. As Matt Ipri, Director at MicroStratgy, explained, it’s in part due to improvements in devices as well as the greater reach. Industry experts and Apple themselves serious underestimated the demand for the iPad. 1 million iPads sold in the first 30 days, double the adoption pace of the popular iPhone (May 3, 2010 company press release). Mobile devices have a much larger installed base than regular computer users, thus increasing the potential BI user base.

The iPad and tablets in general have a larger screen size that smartphones, making dashboards on tablets more useable. As I’ve written in other blogs, a battle is raging in mobile BI over the best approach: device-based apps or browser-based apps. The battle reminds me of the heated discussions over which was better VHS or Betamax in the 1980s (Beta was considered better but VHS won); or more recently Blu Ray or HD DVDs (still being waged). The argument for apps is better performance and end-user experience. The argument for browser-based is broad support for all devices and no redesign or build of existing BI reports.

MicroStrategy advocates the device-based app approach, and at this point in the market maturity, I agree that it gives a better user experience. Currently, the vendor supports iPhone, iPad, and BlackBerry smartphones natively (not the PlayBook), with support for Android devices in the works.

While mobile BI extends the reach of BI to traveling executives and field workers, visual discovery helps business users explore the hidden patterns in their data. MicroStrategy released Visual Insight in March this year. Unlike competitive visual discovery tools, this one uses a web-based authoring interface and is integrated with the rest of the BI platform. Data accessed either via the business meta data layer (architect) or personal spreadsheets can be visualized. The matrix chart (others refer to this as a trellis or small multiple) is easy to create. A shortcoming of the product, though, is that the visualization is not optimized based on the data accessed; the author has to first choose the visualization in contrast to leading competitor Tableau (BI Scorecard subscribers can access some preliminary scores on MicroStrategy Visual Insight in the detailed advanced visualization scorecard here.).

With IBM Cognos also touting a new visual discovery tool in its labs and Microsoft making noise about Crescent, this raises the question about why visual exploration is so hot and is it all just hype.  With the wild success of vendors such as QlikTech and Tableau, with growth 2010 revenues growing at 45% to 105% (according to 10Ks and IDC estimates), respectively, BI platform vendors see opportunity. They also see more nimble competitors making inroads in their customer base by selling to departments and lines of business. It remains to be seen, though, how much the new tools bring appeal and pretty charts to boring BI interfaces. Or do they speed the time to insight over dense pages of numbers. The other secret to these smaller vendors’ success is their ease of deployment and rapid time to value.  As BI platform vendors enter this market, the question will be how much customers want enterprise scale and integration versus ease to deploy. Can any vendor or product provide both?

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

 

 

MicroStrategy Revs Up Mobile, Cloud, and Visualization

Last week's MicroStrategy World was one of this vendor's largest conferences ever, with some bold announcements from a vendor that continues to innovate at a rapid pace.

CEO Michael Saylor noted the biggest things in technology that are generating excitement and Wall Street investments: mobile, the cloud, and social. From a business intelligence perspective, MicroStrategy has been ahead of the curve for mobile BI, supporting a larger range of devices natively and with advanced functionality such as interactivity, location awareness, and device-based caching.

MicroStrategy is kicking it up a notch (several, really) with Transaction Services. A new product, Transaction Services allows a BI user to act on information directly from a mobile device (or Web), whether for approvals, or to modify data for forecasting, for example. It's an out-of-the-box-solution that lets administrators map transaction processes and data to information in the MicroStrategy business meta data. So, for example, a supply chain manager may be viewing his inventory on an iPad, and click a re-order button that writes back to the transaction system. The demo was impressive. The closest capability I have seen is Oracle's Actionable Intelligence in the recently-released 11g.

MicroStrategy also announced Cloud Intelligence, in which the vendor will support its infrastructure and software in the cloud, using a combination of its own data center and Amazon's cloud. The move into the cloud is intended to help lines of business and small- and midsize-businesses more quickly deploy MicroStrategy's BI solution, but also to provide elasticity when demand spikes in enterprise deployments.

 VP of Products Mark LaRow added visual exploration demonstrated to the list of new capabilities on day two of the conference. While Visual Explorer may not be on par with other advanced visualization products, I was surprised this new product got so little attention. The positioning of the solution was also rather weak, being described as an interface "between "Ad Hoc and OLAP." This makes me think that MicroStrategy doesn't quite get the impact of visual discovery tools. On the positive side, the product is included in the Report Services license for customers on maintenance.

On the customer front, I found LinkedIn's session fascinating in how they analyze data and what they are finding out. For example, "analytics" as a type of new job was one of the fastest growing job types since 2000. So if you are reading this blog, it confirms what you probably already knew: everyone in BI is busy, BI experts are in high demand, and it's a great area to specialize in!

Starbucks and Société Générale impressed me with the scalability and fast response times of their deployments, despite their use of complex dashboards accessed by thousands of users concurrently. Coca Cola and Guess certainly took the geekiness out of BI entirely with mobile dashboards that are beautiful.

One long-time MicroStrategy customer commented that things are moving too fast -- faster than what the customer base can absorb. As I tweeted away, feeling frenetic and longing for the times when a reflective article was more valued than an off-the-cuff tweet, I had to agree. It made me think of a remark I have used in the last year: that the recession was about the survival of the smartest.  With some of the recent innovations, how much are we also moving to a survival of the fastest? There is sometimes value in first-mover advantage. They key is in figuring out which ones provide your company the most benefit.

As many of you probably know, last week's conference ended in the midst of yet another whopper of a snow storm in the Northeast. So yes, indeed, I was one of those stuck for a couple days and bounced between flights. I'd say I'm so happy to be office-bound this week, but with more snow and ice forecast in New Jersey, I'm not so sure!  Any events in Florida ... that last a month?

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard 

 

 

MicroStrategy Launches Mobile in New York

MicroStrategy officially launched MicroStrategy Mobile in New York yesterday.

It might seem odd that it’s a major launch, given that the vendor has had a mobile solution for three years now. What’s different about this, though, is that they are the first major BI platform vendor to market with native support for both iPhone and iPads and broad, interactive BI content. (To be precise, Oracle released an iPhone app last year, but with limited content- more is due in 11g shortly;  SAP shipped an iPhone app for SAP BusinessObjects Explorer last month; QlikView supports iPhone and iPad; Actuate BIRT supports both).

When MicroStrategy first briefed me on their product, they shared some customer survey data about how the iPhone and iPad were becoming more important to corporate customers than the BlackBerry. I didn’t believe them, in part because mobile BI has historically gotten such a low rating in my Cool BI classes but also because of market share reports that still show RIM leading by a wide margin. However, that was before the iPad was released, bringing greater screen realestate and defining a new market segment. Indeed, the talk and interest at this event was iPhone/iPad oriented. One long-time customer who has been using MicroStrategy on BlackBerry for years expects that device to be phased out as employees upgrade their smartphones. He noted that particularly in Asia, the iPhone was preferred (clearly AT&T’s exclusive contract in the U.S. affects such market penetration here).

VHA and Novation is an early adopter of the new MicroStrategy Mobile for iPhone with its PriceLynx app. The web version of the app has allowed hospitals to save millions of dollars by better understanding supply prices and costs. Extending the app to the iPhone only took a few days, said Guillermo Ramas, VP of Product Development at Novation, mainly to optimize the rendering on a smaller screen. The same BI content in MicroStrategy Web is rendered and interactive on the iPhone. Ramas said deploying on mobile will now be a standard part of their product development process.

As an indication of MicroStrategy’s belief that the iPad and mobile BI is revolutionary, the company is equipping its sales force with iPads, replacing Windows-based notebooks. To encourage existing and new customers to try MicroStrategy Mobile, the company is offering a free 25-user version.

The greater utility of smartphones, along with more robust mobile BI apps, means mobile BI will have as profound an  impact on the BI market as the Internet initially had on business intelligence.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

Record Attendance at MicroStrategy Conference

There was record attendance at MicroStrategy’s annual conference in Las Vegas this week, with over 1500 customers and partners attending.  While a conference in Las Vegas may have the perception of extravagance, in reality, the hotel and flight were the cheapest I can recall.

As is this vendor’s tradition, the general session kicked off with a rock impersonator, this year, Gwen Stefani. The performance wasn’t particularly memorable, in contrast to last year’s Tina Turner (“we’re simply the best…”) or to the both daring and amusing Kinks’ Lola in 2008 (“BI bake off…”).  (Truly, if there were a YouTube clip of this rendition, I know BI teams around the world would be playing it at their selection kick offs.)

CEO Mike Saylor declared in his keynote, “We are on the verge of a new era that will result in a new class of applications that will change the way we think about our business.” That era is driven largely by mobile. Yes, mobile. Not a new headline, and yet, Saylor probably made what is the most compelling articulation of why mobile may revolutionize the BI industry.

In part, it is the sheer explosion of smartphones, particularly the Apple iPhone. The number of smartphones is more than twice the number of desktops, suggesting a doubling in size of the potential BI market.

Mobile BI has made headlines for awhile now, but it seems to have met with a degree of ambivalence. As Doug Henschen wrote in 2008, 73% of companies have little to no interest. In the cool BI course I teach, mobile BI didn’t make anyone’s top three list of investments (see here), nor did it make my top 2010 trends list (it was a short list). Given that Saylor didn’t even mention some of the other industry buzzes (cloud computing, social networking), I had to wonder if he’s missing something or if it is indeed, the simple-yet-obvious innovations we initially tend to overlook. As one Cool BI course attendee pointed out to me, mobile BI got not votes in my class, and yet, ironically, it was mobile technology that allowed for the voting and presentation of results.

Saylor pointed out how Web-based BI tethers you to a desktop, whereas mobile BI lets a decision maker access information from anywhere, and more easily throughout the day. The time window for information access increases with mobile BI.

He elaborated that it is the additional utility, reach, and experience an iPhone can bring to BI. With a built in GPS, smartphones know where you are so they can, for example, automatically give sales for customers in the area (a capability IBM Cognos first offered in its Go! Mobile in 8.4).  Built-in cameras allow for immediate product pictures and more.

To scale to that many users, though, a solution has to be fast. MicroStrategy touted its in-memory solution last year in MicroStrategy 9. With MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 (available as of last week), the vendor has improved its cache load times, query processing times, and memory consumption. VP of Marketing Mark LaRow claimed that cubes consume 70% less memory in the latest release, making an already scalable solution more so.

While many in the electronics industry were speculating about a new tablet PC from Apple this week, LaRow slipped in that MicroStrategy runs on Amazon Kindle DX. Surprizing to me was that his mention was an afterthought more than a headline. True, the Kindle market is smaller than the smartphone market, and more a consumer product than business product, but nonetheless, if I were trying to track latest customer sales numbers, I’d rather see it on the larger Kindle screen. In an industry that likes to brag about firsts, it is also the first I’ve heard any BI vendor mention Kindle support.

So I wonder if I had stayed one more day, if they would have snuck in a mention of the Apple Ipad too.

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

IBM to Acquire SPSS ... and Announces New Analytics System

Yesterday IBM announced its intent to acquire the advanced analytics vendor SPSS for $1.2 billion.

The acquisition fills what had been a void in IBM’s business intelligence capabilities and is a further expansion of its Information on Demand portfolio, with $10 billion in acquisitions over the past several years.

Predictive analytics has been a hot topic for years but one in which there seems to be little consensus on how to bring it from the back room to the front lines.  It’s clear that building good predictive models requires a high degree of expertise and is not something that will become main stream any time soon.  However, incorporating the results of those models into every day decisions that even the most novice of information users can consume and act upon has become the holy grail. So what does that mean – store everything in the database? Execute at run time and surface in a report?

Not surprisingly, SAS has made the most inroads here by both pushing analytics into the database for faster execution and based on larger data volumes, but also, surfacing the results in standard reports in its BI platform.  Of leading BI vendors, Microsoft and MicroStrategy also have good solutions that surface results in either Excel 2007 or a MicroStrategy report, respectively.  (see the BI Scorecard Summary report for more information.)

Interestingly, SAP BusinessObjects began shipping an OEMd version of SPSS last spring. The SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Workbench allows the BusinessObjects universe to act as a data source to Clementine modelers. It will be interesting to see if this agreement remains in place following the acquisition’s close. The challenge of course is that beyond SAS and SPSS, the predictive analytics space is predominantly smaller players.  

Amidst this announcement, IBM says it was purely coincidental timing that many press and analysts were at their R&D offices attending a briefing on their new “Smart Analytics System” (due out in September) and “Smart Analytics Optimizer” (due out in Q4). The Smart Analytics System is more than an appliance, including the hardware, software, and services optimized for a particular BI deployment, or as IBM calls it “analytic workload”, whether predictive or not. IBM guarantees a 50% lower cost of ownership versus the current approach of buying and deploying components a la carte. A lower cost of ownership and faster deployment time is of course appealing. However, it seemed odd to me that the first versions of the systems only include Cognos as an option, not a standard component. Same applies to ETL capabilities. In this regard, while the vision is enticing, I can’t help but remain skeptical customers will continue to have the degree of flexibility they currently have. 

Or has the market gotten to the point that time to value and lower cost of ownership trump flexibility and the desire to mix and match components?

Regards,

Cindi Howson

 

 

 

 

 

Free MicroStrategy 9 ... Can You Believe It?

When MicroStrategy first floated the idea of a free version of their software several months ago, my gut reaction was not positive. I kept looking for the catch. I also was imagining the inevitable competitive FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) that ensues in a cut throat market place. “The product is so weak, so hard, so niche, they have to give it away.”

So far, I can’t find the catch. Given the product capabilities, migration path, and support, it seems like a deal too good to be true.

Other vendors have touted their products as “free” and have experienced mixed degrees of success. Oracle has sometimes included Discoverer and Reports (now referred to as the standard edition) for free with the RDBMS; the newest OBI Enterprise Edition, however, is not free and is notably more robust.  Microsoft BI is often considered  “free”, assuming you’ve bought SQL Server and SharePoint.  I would counter, then, that those products are low-priced but not free.  Clearly, Microsoft has had a successful seeding strategy that explains the rapid adoption of Analysis Services (for OLAP) and Reporting Services (for production reporting).  Open source BI is also “free”, but lacks support and maintenance, unless you pay.  It’s also not yet clear that they compare in capabilities to commercial software.  (Look for some upcoming evaluations this year where we hope to answer that question.)

The free version of MicroStrategy, called Reporting Suite, is for up to 100 users and includes online support and training. Some of the more attractive products like the dashboards and the new in-memory option are not included for all users in this starter bundle.  But the appealing aspect to this deal is that it provides customers with an easy entrée into BI, without that entrée being a total throw away. If customers later want to add dashboards or multi-source, for example, they don’t have to start over or migrate to a new product as is often the case with many departmental BI tools.

BI licensing is only one part of BI’s total cost of ownership (TCO). While it is usually the smallest piece in TCO, it is an out- of- pocket expense that companies would like to minimize in the economic downturn.  MicroStrategy’s Reporting Suite saves that expense.

A valid concern with this deal is that MicroStrategy will make up for the “free” by overcharging later, when customers are hooked and want to add options. Indeed, MicroStrategy has alienated customers in the past with its aggressive, sometimes inflexible, pricing tactics. But over the last 2-3 years, the company seems to have recognized those tactics back fired and has modified its pricing accordingly. The BI landscape is also significantly different from that of 3 years ago;  the vendor knows it has to be more creative about even getting invited to a BI selection when usually one of the big 4 vendors already has a relationship.

This latest move seems like an attractive option for both departments and smaller businesses with limited BI budgets. For companies that know their BI deployment will evolve into something bigger, I recommend continuing to follow a BI selection process (see this  report for a methodology). As part of that process, compare the full range of capabilities and the total cost for your requirements, regardless if you start out with a free version.

So with this deal, it seems good as well as true.  But of course, let me know if you find whatever catch I’m overlooking!

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

The Answer to Pervasive BI: The Fed?

“Mainstream BI”, “pervasive BI” and “BI for for the masses”  have been the rallying cry for BI vendors for nearly a decade now.  Some thought Microsoft could do it with an Excel interface. Others think Google will be part of the answer.  I am looking to the Fed.

No, it’s not that I am on the bandwagon for the stimulus being the answer to all the world’s woes. However, when President Obama first mentioned a website (recovery.gov) as a way of ensuring full disclosure for stimulus spending, I got as excited as anyone can amid this economic crisis.

My vision for recovery.gov is that it will showcase the best of BI. It will be engaging, simple, and insightful. I’m hoping for a Google-like interface where I can start with a search request such as “education spending in NJ”.  An appealing chart (rather than a dense page of numbers) will show me how the money has been spent. It will give me the necessary context, relative to other states, and to prior years. And of course I can drill down to my individual county.

My envisioned recovery.gov will not only provide the monitoring capabilities, but also facilitate insight to action by giving me contact details for whom to appeal to when I think the spending looks unfair, wasteful, or just plain wrong.

Am I visioning too much? Maybe. But I hope the best BI tool vendors and consultancies are aggressively vying for this opportunity. Many eyes will be on recovery.gov, and I can well imagine the marketing bang a “Powered by BI Vendor X” could bring if this site and application are well designed. Of course, if it’s boring, static, and a flop, then the Fed will be in the same situation as many organizations struggling with BI adoption.

Back to the present: I head to Las Vegas this weekend for TDWI’s Winter Conference. The “BI Bake Off” course I facilitate includes Microsoft, SAP BusinessObjects, and MicroStrategy in this round. I expect to get glimpses of some of their latest versions as well as chance to pose the tough questions, “how much of recent downsizing is in the BI business? ... What does Microsoft's change of strategy on performance management mean to BI and to other vendors? ...” The upside to this down economy is that my airfare is an all time low of only $250, 1/3 of the normal price. With travel costs so low, I hope you are taking the opportunity to fulfill your New Year’s resolutions of “investing in you!”

Regards,

Cindi Howson

MicroStrategy's Breakthroughs in Release 9

Just over 1000 MicroStrategy customers convened in Las Vegas lastweek for its annual user conference. Given how travel budgets have been slashed in recent months, I was surprised to see that attendance is only slightly lower than last year’s. No doubt high attendance was driven in part by interest in the company’s introduction of MicroStrategy 9.

The general session kicked off with a Tina Turner look alike singing “we’re simply the best.” VP of Products Mark Larow described MicroStrategy 9 as the biggest release since version 7, perhaps the biggest release ever, packing in over 8000 enhancements. The most noteworthy are multi source ROLAP and in-memory.

Multi-source ROLAP allows MicroStrategy customers to access data in any relational database – whether SQL Server, Teradata, DB2 – transparently. In the past, a project (the business meta data layer) was constrained to a single data source. So this is big news for existing customers. From a competitive viewpoint, other vendors have had this capability for awhile, and it’s one reason why MicroStrategy would lose deals to them. Even though some competitors have had this capability, only time (as in my further testing and production customer references) will tell if MicroStrategy’s approach is better, as they claim. The key differences are in ease of implementation and performance because joins are pushed down to the data source versus being performed on the BI midtier as competitors do.

The in-memory ROLAP is a breakthrough and clear differentiator. While there are some in-memory solutions on the market, they lack the seamless navigation for users and the enterprise architecture MicroStrategy has. With MicroStrategy 9, a user can be drilling in-memory and then seamlessly drill into the relational details; an administrator does not have to manually define mappings that can be broken. An intuitive Cube Advisor also makes recommendations for what data and queries should be a cube to offload database queries, all based on analyzing usage statistics. Despite my enthusiasm for this new capability, some customers were confused about its value and the difference with the product’s current caching approach.

CEO Mike Saylor described MicroStrategy 9, saying ““I’m convinced this is the best BI product created by anyone in the marketplace …ever.” For my fact-based opinion, you’d have to read the BIScorecard product summary here. But I would counter that the best product doesn’t always win. For a recent example, take a look at Blue Ray vs HD DVD ... or betamax vs VHS if you were around then!

 In that regard, while MicroStrategy is both profitable and total revenues are growing, license revenues are not. This is in contrast to competitors’ growth. This shows that what also matters is the degree to which competitors are BI incumbents, have account control through other products (ERP or database), or have greater mindshare. Whether MicroStrategy “gets” and addresses these issues will make for an interesting 2009!

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, Founder, BIScorecard