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.
The table below outlines the 12 overarching and important criteria by which all modern BI technologies need to be assessed.
| 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
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Information Delivery & Proactive Notification: The ability to distribute timely, personalized alerts to thousands of users.
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"For the fifth consecutive year, customers have rated MicroStrategy well in helping achieve business goals and in attaining business benefits as measured across a spectrum of important revenue-generating and cost-saving criteria. The fact that MicroStrategy customers have the largest and some of the more successful BI applications, as measured by the business benefit criteria we evaluated, confirms MicroStrategy's high functionality and suitability for highly scalable Web deployments — key drivers in delivering tangible business value."
Nigel Pendse, author of The OLAP Survey 6
Analyst Research:
From the Business Intelligence Platform Capability Matrix
Gartner 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.
MicroStrategy UK & Ireland
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