Overview of MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy is a leading enterprise business intelligence (BI) application software vendor, designed to help organizations make data-driven decisions and optimize their business processes. Here’s a comprehensive overview of what MicroStrategy does and its key features.
What MicroStrategy Does
MicroStrategy is a powerful BI platform that enables users to access, analyze, and optimize data from a wide range of sources. It is tailored for business users, BI professionals, and data scientists to perform tasks such as data discovery, data wrangling, data visualization, and advanced big data analytics. The platform is designed to be user-friendly and intuitive, allowing end users to build transaction-enabled analytics applications without the need for extensive coding.
Key Features and Functionality
Data Discovery
MicroStrategy allows users to connect to any data source, including relational databases, flat files, big data sources, social media platforms, and cloud systems. This feature enables the blending of data from various sources to generate insightful reports.
Data Wrangling
The platform includes extensive data wrangling and parsing capabilities, which help in transforming raw data into useful information. This feature provides automatic recommendations for business users and leverages full data wrangling capabilities for data scientists. It also includes history scripts that remember data transformations and can be reapplied to any analysis.
Data Visualization and Reporting
MicroStrategy offers interactive dashboards, scorecards, ad hoc queries, automated report distribution, and highly formatted reports. These tools enable users to create and distribute reports that provide insights into past, present, and future business trends. The platform supports real-time data monitoring and can be accessed via web, Windows, Mac, and mobile devices.
Advanced Analytics
The platform includes a wide range of native analytical capabilities, such as data mining and predictive analysis. Users can easily incorporate third-party data mining and modeling tools to build predictive reports. MicroStrategy also features a library of over 300 OLAP, mathematical, financial, and data mining functions, which are useful for creating business metrics, KPIs, and conducting advanced statistical analyses.
Embedded Intelligence
MicroStrategy’s HyperIntelligence and Embedded Intelligence tools allow for the integration of BI capabilities into everyday applications. HyperIntelligence, for example, provides real-time insights everywhere, enhancing user productivity and decision-making.
Integration and Customization
The platform offers a software developer kit (SDK) and APIs that allow users to customize applications and integrate MicroStrategy functionality with other tools, including Tableau, Power BI, and Microsoft Office. This integration enables seamless interaction with various third-party analytics tools.
Deployment Options
MicroStrategy can be deployed on-premises using Windows or Linux servers or as a cloud service on AWS or Microsoft Azure. This flexibility allows organizations to choose the deployment method that best fits their infrastructure and needs.
Architecture
MicroStrategy uses a Relational Online Analytical Processing (ROLAP) architecture, which allows users to drill down to detailed transactional levels within relational databases. The platform also includes dynamic MDX and SQL engines, as well as a freeform SQL engine, to access and unify data from various sources.
In summary, MicroStrategy is a robust BI platform that offers a comprehensive suite of tools for data discovery, wrangling, visualization, and advanced analytics. Its ability to integrate with various data sources, third-party tools, and its user-friendly interface make it a powerful solution for organizations seeking to enhance their data-driven decision-making capabilities.