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MicroStrategy, a global leader in business intelligence technology, provides integrated reporting, analysis, and monitoring software that helps leading organizations make better business decisions every day.
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Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) helps business people make more informed decisions by providing them timely, data-driven answers to their business questions. BI analyzes data stored in data warehouses, operational databases, and/or ERP systems (i.e. SAP®, Oracle, JD Edwards, Peoplesoft) and transforms it into attractive and easy to understand dashboards and reports. BI delivers the insight needed to make strategic planning decisions, improve operational efficiencies, and optimize business processes.

The MicroStrategy Difference

MicroStrategy is committed to helping business users, IT professionals, and executives make better business decisions every day. Specifically designed to support the most demanding BI applications, only the MicroStrategy BI Platform is capable of meeting all the modern requirements for enterprise business intelligence:

• Deliver Enterprise Scalability with High Performance
• Minimize the "Time-to-Value" (Reducing the BI Backlog)
• Deliver All 5 Styles of BI from a Single Architecture
• Require fewest IT resources - Lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
• Provide Distributed Governance with Full Centralized Control

Deliver Enterprise Scalability with High Performance

Organizations are storing ever-increasing amounts of data, as well as creating and sharing more applications with more and more business users. The challenge for enterprise BI is not only to scale to support these dramatic increases in user populations, BI applications, and terabytes of information but to do so while ensuring high performance at minimal additional costs.

MicroStrategy is built to meet the challenge of data explosion, application expansion, and user population growth. Only the MicroStrategy BI platform is industry proven to deliver enterprise scalability with high performance — the only true industrial-strength BI platform.

Learn more about Scalability in The BI Survey 7 Results Summary »

Minimize the “Time-to-Value” (Reducing the BI Backlog)

CIOs are under intense pressure to realize value from their BI investments — the quicker the better. They are faced with the dilemma of producing more reports while maintaining their service level agreements with the business. Of course, the business requirements are constantly changing. The BI backlog of requests and burden on the IT staff are overwhelming.

The MicroStrategy Platform is designed for rapid BI application development whether departmental or enterprise-wide. MicroStrategy accomplishes this through its unparalleled self-service capabilities. Business users can build their own reports in a drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) user interface. This yields a dual benefit: business people get their reports quicker and exactly how they want them, and IT has more time to focus on higher value architecting and optimization efforts. Rather than bottlenecking BI report development in a single IT team, report development occurs concurrently across the entire enterprise. To accelerate BI deployments even more, MicroStrategy’s Corporate Performance Management starter kits provide key BI application modules to let business users start reporting, analyzing, and monitoring right away.

Learn more in the Business Intelligence as a Driver for Business Transformation white paper »

Deliver All 5 Styles of BI from a Single Architecture

There is a fundamental shortcoming in most BI tools today: They cannot support the full range of BI functionality within a single architecture. This results in excessive costs, excessive delays and excessive user dissatisfaction.

MicroStrategy is the only BI architecture capable of delivering all of the functionality requirements within a single architecture:

• Scorecards and Dashboards
• Enterprise Reporting
• OLAP Analysis
• Advanced and Predictive Analysis
• Alerts and Proactive Notification

Learn more in the 5 Styles of Business Intelligence white paper »

Require Fewest IT Resources - Lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Businesses today are demanding more and more out of the same amount of IT budget. TCO is dominated by recurring costs and not by one-time purchase costs.

MicroStrategy’s platform delivers efficient and cost effective BI, achieving economies of scale. MicroStrategy’s centralized server, metadata, and administration architecture has been designed specifically to minimize the number of personnel needed to maintain and grow BI applications.

Learn more in the Reducing the Total Cost of Ownership of Business Intelligence white paper »

Provide Distributed Governance with Full Centralized Control

Most BI applications are developed and administered centrally, usually by an IT department comprised of BI specialists. This model works for basic applications, but begins to fail as BI requirements inevitably expand. Enterprise BI requires that governance of the BI application is distributed between the business departments and IT. In a distributed governance model, the business builds their reports and self-administers while IT centrally manages, administers, and optimizes the BI systems.  For this model to succeed, BI applications must employ a “shared services” architecture — services such as security, administration, and metadata (report and analysis objects) development.

MicroStrategy is uniquely suited to implement a distributed governance model. MicroStrategy’s security architecture allows the BI platform to be “departmentalized” — for secure financial reporting, HR reporting, sales reporting, marketing reporting, or supply chain analysis — for all functions within the organization. MicroStrategy’s administration provides global visibility for IT while allowing departments to administer their own users and applications across the enterprise. MicroStrategy’s metadata enables joint development for IT and other departments while enforcing corporate best practices and change management policies.

Learn more about administration and security from MicroStrategy »