MicroStrategy Overview
MicroStrategy is an enterprise business intelligence (BI) application software vendor that provides a comprehensive platform designed to help organizations make data-driven decisions and optimize their business processes.
What MicroStrategy Does
MicroStrategy’s flagship platform is built to enable businesses to connect to various data sources, analyze data, and present insights through interactive and intuitive tools. The platform is geared towards both business users and BI professionals, allowing them to perform tasks such as data discovery, data wrangling, data visualization, and advanced big data analytics.
Key Features and Functionality
Data Connectivity and Integration
MicroStrategy can connect to a wide range of data sources, including relational databases, flat files, big data sources, social media platforms, and cloud systems. This connectivity allows for the blending of data from various sources to provide a unified view of business data.
Data Discovery and Wrangling
The platform features robust data discovery capabilities, enabling users to find and analyze data from multiple sources. It also includes extensive data wrangling tools, which help in transforming and modifying data with automatic recommendations and history scripts that remember data transformations.
Data Visualization and Reporting
MicroStrategy offers advanced data visualization tools, including interactive dashboards, scorecards, ad hoc queries, automated report distribution, and highly formatted reports. Users can build transaction-enabled analytics apps that optimize operations and boost productivity using code-free development tools.
Analytical Capabilities
The platform includes a wide range of native analytical capabilities, such as over 300 OLAP, mathematical, financial, and data mining functions. This allows users to create business metrics, top-level KPIs, and advanced statistical analyses. Additionally, it supports the integration of third-party data mining and modeling tools.
Relational Online Analytical Processing (ROLAP) Architecture
Unlike traditional multidimensional online analytical processing (MOLAP) architectures, MicroStrategy’s ROLAP architecture allows users to “drill anywhere” in the entire relational database, down to the transactional level of detail. This enables the use of a virtual multidimensional cube structure to express complex relational databases, making it easier for business users to understand and navigate through the data.
AI and Automation
MicroStrategy incorporates AI capabilities through its Auto Answers and Bots, which can answer complex, multi-faceted questions and provide natural language summaries of dashboard pages. The AI learns from user feedback and adapts to individual user preferences, enhancing the accuracy and personalization of responses.
Integration and Customization
The platform supports integration with third-party analytics tools like Tableau and Power BI, as well as Microsoft Office. It also provides a software developer kit (SDK) and APIs to customize applications and integrate them with other systems. Users can leverage Python scripts to update records in external systems like Salesforce and ServiceNow.
Deployment and Accessibility
MicroStrategy can be deployed on-premises with Windows or Linux servers or as a service in the AWS or Microsoft Azure clouds. Users can access MicroStrategy applications and services via the web, Windows, Mac, and mobile devices, ensuring broad accessibility.
Security and Administration
The platform includes robust security capabilities, such as authentication and authorization, internationalization, and gateway setup. It also offers advanced administration features, including monitoring and management tools, statistics data collection, and automated workflows and testing scripts.
Conclusion
In summary, MicroStrategy is a powerful BI platform that offers a wide range of features and functionalities to help organizations analyze, visualize, and act on their data, making it an essential tool for data-driven decision-making and business optimization.