My Account | Contact Us   888.537.8135  

MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Software

MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform: Competitive Comparisons

Business intelligence has the power to provide performance feedback and visibility to all people in an organization, enabling businesses to make thousands of better decisions every day. However, not all BI technologies deliver on this promise, falling short on a number of key requirements demanded of enterprise BI applications.

Key Differentiators

Each of the Quick Tours and White Papers here provide further side-by-side evaluations of MicroStrategy and other reporting vendors along these 12 requirements.
MicroStrategy vs.
Business Objects
MicroStrategy vs.
Cognos
MicroStrategy vs. Hyperion
MicroStrategy vs. Information Builders
View Quick Tour
MicroStrategy vs.
SAS

The table below outlines the 12 overarching and important criteria by which all modern BI technologies need to be assessed.

12 Key Differentiators

Unified BI Architecture: An architecture which provides all BI reporting styles through a single interface, a single metadata, a single code base, and a single server process.

Industrial Strength Multi-level Security: An infrastructure that provides an environment where both data and data access are tightly controlled and easily monitored.

Microsoft Office Integration: Providing BI capabilities directly from the full range of Microsoft Office products.

Market-Proven Scalability & Performance: An architecture which delivers consistently high performance as the system grows by user population, data size, or number of applications.

Personalization: A feature that enables a single report to serve thousands of users who have different reporting needs.

Heterogenous Data Access: Allowing a single document to pull data from a number of different data sources transparently to the end user.

Reusable and Rich Metadata Layer: An object-oriented metadata that maps reusable business entities and rules to underlying data structures.

Centralized Administration: The consolidation of all system management and monitoring capabilities at a single point of administration.

Robust Enterprise Reporting: The ability to produce the complete range of report styles via a single design interface.

Interactive WYSIWYG Web Interface: An interface which provides desktop-like functionality in a zero-footprint client.

Flexible & Powerful OLAP Analysis: The capability that lets users slice and dice data across any dimension seamlessly

Information Delivery & Proactive Notification: The ability to distribute timely, personalized alerts to thousands of users.

MicroStrategy's vendor comparisons along with these 12 key differentiators can also be applied to other Business Intelligence vendors, including QlikView and Microsoft Analysis Services, Reporting Services, ProClarity, and PerformancePoint. If you like more comparative information on these and other vendors, please contact us.

Comparison of MicroStrategy 8 with Business Objects XI Release 2, Cognos 8.2, Hyperion System 9 BI+, Information Builders WebFocus 7, and SAS 9. All company and product names are the property of their respective owners. Information based on publicly available information as of 1/12/07.

Analyst Quote:

The BI Survey 7

"Since the inception of this Survey, MicroStrategy sites have had the highest rates for Web deployment. Unique among major BI products, the complete MicroStrategy product line was designed from the ground up for large scale Web deployments, rather than being converted from older desktop or client/server architectures as other vendors have chosen to do. This provides an advantage for its customers, who report on far more data, to more users, and who are much more likely to be Web connected than those using other products."
Nigel Pendse, author of The BI Survey 7

Analyst Research:

From the Business Intelligence Platform Capability Matrix
GartnerGartner has evaluated MicroStrategy. Gartner recently released its BI Platform Capability Matrix which outlines the technical details of the 12 BI platform capabilities, as defined by Gartner, and evaluates the leading BI platform products based on those technical capabilities. The matrix serves as a high-level guide to understanding the technical capabilities of each vendor’s shipping products. The matrix should primarily be used as an architectural guide to what should be included in a comprehensive and well-balanced BI platform.

MicroStrategy received a “Strong Positive” (Gartner’s highest rating possible) in the following areas: Reports, Dashboards, Ad Hoc Query, Infrastructure, Metadata.

» More Analyst Quotes and Reports