BI Scorecard Blog

MicroStrategy Analytics – Free and Easy

By Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

MicroStrategy has established its reputation as one of the most innovative BI heavyweights – early to adopt mobile, in-memory, and cloud. The product is known for enterprise scale, but also was known for its complexity to implement. In truth, it's not so much that the product itself was harder to implement than comparable BI platforms, but rather, that it required a clean data model, with conformed dimensions. Customers who didn't have an enterprise data warehouse usually sought alternatives from more flexible BI platforms or newer visual data discovery vendors.

With MicroStrategy's latest release, the vendor has gone a long way to improving the ease of use and has now set its sights on engaging even the every-day decision maker, with free versions of MicroStrategy Desktop and MicroStrategy Express. MicroStrategy Desktop is a new product aimed at the individual BI user based on its Visual Insight product, competing most directly with the likes of Tableau. Users can import data (modeled or not) and immediately create interactive visualizations and dashboards. Dashboards can be emailed as a PDF to other users.

Although MicroStrategy has branded this new product as "Desktop," it shouldn't be confused with the earlier and original Desktop interface of MicroStrategy. This version installs locally and creates an internal website on the local desktop, so users still work through a web-based browser to create content, the same interface that MicroStrategy Express and Enterprise users access. This approach makes for a more consistent user interface across the product line and a transition path to a larger deployment. However, compared to other BI products that are truly desktop-based, the start-up process is slower.

MicroStrategy Express – the cloud version of the product -- has more robust capabilities than Desktop that also include highly formatted reports, report scheduling, and file sharing. The vendor has announced that it will make MicroStrategy Express free for the first year, with no future commitment or cap on the number of users. The main limitation here is that data has to be loaded to the cloud, whereas the fee-based MicroStrategy Cloud enables data to be left on premise.

In addition to an overall face lift, all versions of the product now support data blending, in which users can mash together data from multiple data sources. Data can come from a flat file, spreadsheet, dozens of relational databases, Hadoop and Hive, or existing MicroStrategy reports. In the past, the inability for users to blend or mash their own data sources together has been one of MicroStrategy's biggest limitations, and a strength of competitors Tableau, QlikTech, and TIBCO Spotfire. This improvement boosts MicroStrategy's flexibility for individual report authors. Meanwhile, more scalable and centrally controlled data federation at the server level continues to be supported through MicroStrategy's Multi Source option.

In making these two versions of the product free, MicroStrategy is clearly trying to seed the market and get customers to take a second look at the new MicroStrategy. The vendor has tried this seeding approach once before with Reporting Suite that met with mixed success, mainly because that version was harder to deploy and lacked dashboards. With the ease of use and flexibility addressed in the latest release, the vendor's seeding strategy could provide a big boost in its competitive position. MicroStrategy's moves are one more proof point that visual data discovery is one of the hottest segments of the BI market.

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MicroStrategy Delivers on Mobile, Cloud, and Social

Last week at MicroStrategy's annual user conference in Las Vegas, CEO and co-founder Michael Saylor kicked off the keynote with his vision of how mobile and social are changing not just BI, but the world.

Saylor described improvements to MicroStrategy's core BI platform as a "toolset for application developers to build compelling apps that are beautiful, agile, mobile, and fast." Mobile has been a part of MicroStrategy's focus for a number of years, and this vendor has been steadfast in its strategy to build native apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. The native app approach differs from many other BI vendors who are betting on HTML5. For now, the native app approach seems to give users the best experience. In its latest release, MicroStrategy has continued to refine the online and offline performance with smart caching, newly incorporating video and PDFs inside dashboard apps, and usage tracking of BI activities on the device. While Transaction Services was announced in 2011, this was the first conference I saw more widespread usage of this mobile write-back capability. Dallas Fort Worth Airport for example, is using MicroStrategy Mobile with Transaction Services to capture survey data on customer satisfaction. Interestingly, Dallas Fort Worth was recently ranked in the top for business travelers (my hub, Newark, not surprisingly, ranked near the bottom.). Also, in the mobile space MicroStrategy stated its plans to pursue the mobile app development market, intending to leverage its ability to develop mobile apps without code. IDC estimates the segment will surpass $35B by 2014. Gartner currently positions Antenna and SAP (Sybase Unwired and Syclo) as leaders in this segment with Adobe, Kony, and many others as visionaries.

Visual Insight, part of the 9.3 release in September, also took center stage. It's one of the best visual data discovery products I've seen from BI platform vendors, with significant improvements since its debut in 2011. It's not yet on par, particularly in terms of flexibility and formatting, as tools from specialty vendors such as Tableau, QlikTech, and TIBCO Spotfire, but it has some compelling differentiators (BI Scorecard subscribers can access a product review and side-by-side comparisons here). First, any MicroStrategy customer who owns Report Services (which is the majority), gets Visual Insight for free (in contrast to SAP and IBM who charge premiums for their visual data discovery products and Oracle that also requires the Exalytics appliance). Further, all the existing MicroStrategy grid reports can readily be converted to a Visual Insight document in a single click.

MicroStrategy Cloud, now in its second year as well, showed good momentum. Customer Four Seasons touted the cloud platform as providing a simpler deployment, particularly important for independently owned and remote hotels that lack large IT departments. Customer Huntington Bank described how they are using the direct connect feature of MicroStrategy Cloud in which they can leave their data on-premise in a number of relational databases. MicroStrategy Cloud now counts 30,000 users in 100 countries and 2 PB of data.

There was a strong push for some of the new tools including Wisdom, Alert, and Usher that takes MicroStrategy out of its core area of business intelligence into social and market segmentation, targeted promotions, and identity management. Saylor described some of the uses or Wisdom as "hyper research and an idea whose time has come." His vision is valid to an extent but for the majority of attendees, they are still trying to exploit the potential of the data they own and control, let alone what originates in the social sphere.

In this regard, MicroStrategy glossed over its big data story, in my opinion. They have a number of the components, including integration with Hadoop, forthcoming Impala, and newly announced support for SAP HANA. However, the company's positioning and strategy could have been better articulated in the general sessions. I suspect part of the missed opportunity to emphasize capabilities in this area was due to recent changes in leadership and re-organization, with a newly appointed President, Paul Zolfaghar and CTO, Peng Xiao. While the MicroStrategy product line is solid, its execution in 2012 did not keep pace with the growth of the overall BI market. Part of the challenges may be execution and global economy related, but I suspect it's also tougher waters in SAP and Oracle accounts on the one end of the spectrum, with QlikTech and Tableau challenging them on the other end.

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

MicroStrategy Launches Next Release, Boosting Visual, Cloud, and Social BI

At its annual European conference in Amsterdam last week,
MicroStrategy launched version 9.3 plus two new products in the BI space.

Visual Insight, originally released in 9.2 last summer, is MicroStrategy’s solution for visual data discovery, a hot segment with solutions from fast-growing vendors Tableau and QlikView as well as innovations from BI platform vendors (IBM Cognos Insight, Microsoft Power View, SAS Visual Analytics Explorer, SAP Visual Intelligence). The first release of Visual Insight brought easy-to-create visualizations against modeled and unmodeled data sets, all via a web interface. Users could readily share visualizations via the iPad or Facebook. Lacking, though, was the ability to enrich the data with calculations or to readily assemble the visualizations into a business-authored dashboard. MicroStrategy 9.3, due to become generally available this quarter, significantly improves upon this, now allowing business users to display multiple data sources in a dashboard-style report.  Over 300 functions are also newly accessible, but emphasizing ease-of-use, the most important functions such as rank and time series analysis are readily accessible via quick menus. Several new chart types as well as a visual recommendation engine are also new in 9.3. (How important is visual discovery vs. dashboards to you: tell us here.)

While the improved visual data discovery capabilities got me most excited, 9.3 brings a host of other enhancements in big data, search, advanced analytics with support for open source R models, and administration. Data scalability with MicroStrategy’s ROLAP engine and tightly integrated in-memory cubes has long-been a differentiator, but in 9.3, the vendor also adds support for Hadoop and Hive. While discussed conceptually, I remain skeptical on the practical performance of the Hive query approach and have yet to talk to any beta customers.  A more practical approach is loading some of the Hadoop data into the in-memory cube with the new Hadoop connector.

Likewise, enterprise-grade administrative tools have also been long-standing capabilities, but in this release, the vendor introduces System Manager, an optional interface that enables administrative tasks to be grouped and established as work flows with interdependencies. The work flows can also be based on third party events such as starting an Amazon Instance. MicroStrategy cited case studies of companies that could save 1000s of man hours per year in manual administration. System Manager is expected to be priced  separately (a difference from Visual Insight which is included in the Report Services license). While it’s reasonable that MicroStrategy charges extra for new capabilities that are above and beyond what’s generally available in BI platforms, too many a la carte options risk further
confusing an industry in which BI pricing and packaging is already a challenge for customers to decipher (see BI Scorecard’s pricing and packaging matrix).

Cloud meanwhile has gained acceptance in CRM, human capital management, and payroll, but has been slower to be adopted in the BI world. In day two of the MicroStrategy keynote, Gartner analyst Andreas Bitterer predicted that Cloud BI will account for just 3% of total BI revenues by 2013. Last year, MicroStrategy released its first foray into cloud, offering both cloud personal a free version of the product based primarily on Visual Insight, and Cloud Enterprise (rebranded MicroStrategy Cloud Platform), mainly a platform as a service (PaaS) solution. Now in beta, MicroStrategy announced Cloud Express as SaaS, which combines visual data discovery, dashboards, mobile BI, reporting, bursted reports, and enterprise security, without the need to first fully model a data
warehouse. In fact, Fabrice Martin, VP of Cloud Express, included a keynote demo in which every attendee received a personalized, bursted report of their country’s World Cup performance, setting a new bar for key note demos. With Cloud Express, data can be imported from flat files, spreadsheets,
SalesForce.com, or SQL data sources. The vendor is clearly trying to ride the cloud wave both for enterprise customers, but also for departments looking for fast deployment times, an area in which competitors QlikTech and Tableau have been encroaching.  

Customer Tapjoy, a mobile advertising company, offered a compelling testimonial of the value of cloud. While the company has only a hundred or so internal employees, there are thousands of clients and advertisers who want access to Tapjoy’s data. Deploying BI to the cloud, then, is ideal for extranet capabilities. Richard Yan, Director of Business Development & Strategy at Tapjoy, said they went from a four day proof-of-concept to live in two weeks time with “beautiful mobile interfaces and powerful self- service capabilities.” While this is a perfect example of the value of Cloud BI, less clear to me is whether cloud is always an ideal substitute for fast deployment. It certainly addresses software deployment challenges, but does little for rapid data modeling for data better left on premise.

MicroStrategy Mobile continued to get top billing, both as CEO Saylor released a new book The Mobile Wave and has the vendor refined its use cases for mobile, emphasizing executives, retail, and sales force. New abilities to mirror a dashboard on an iPad or iPhone to an AppleTV will no doubt revolutionize some board rooms (or at the very least, some executive offices).

Lastly, MicroStrategy released Wisdom Professional, an evolution of the product first released last year. Wisdom Professional allows marketers and CRM users to explore Facebook demographic and interest data based on 12 million users who have opted in. It’s an interesting product that has generated some mainstream media coverage. While I am enthused that MicroStrategy is innovating in social analytics, I confess I’m in the Facebook skeptics camp, somewhat like General Motors. (Don’t send me a friend request unless I’ve known you for at least 20 years. Try me on LinkedIn or Twitter instead.) Facebook is undoubtedly an important force shaping social behavior, consumers, and BI tools, but just how to use it for business, whether for advertising or segmentation, remains to be seen. Call me a laggard. With my Blackberry still limping along, I won’t argue the charge. But even so, when I talk to the younger generation whose lives are rooted in Facebook, they lie on their pages about age, relationships, interests. They advise each other never to ‘Like’ a page, lest you get spammed later, and they are oh-so-astute as to which marketers make the ‘Liking’ worth the invasion. They may hold privacy in low regard, but what’s personal versus professional is a line they
don’t like marketers crossing. Knowing the customer and “stalking on Facebook” is a fine line savvy business users should carefully consider.

Bottom line: MicroStrategy is a company continuing to improve on an already solid product and innovating in multiple areas.

Reminder: Take the 2012 Successful BI survey to rate your BI vendor, benchmark adoption, and success with modules.

 Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

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 competition 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