Application Integration  

Increasingly, organizations and application developers are finding that joining the analytical power of business intelligence with operational power of financial, HR, supply chain, and other applications creates significant synergy in helping users translate insights into decisions and operational efficiencies.

The MicroStrategy platform offers the industry’s most robust development environment for integration of features, functionality, and intelligence into any application on multiple platforms, including UNIX based systems. Through the Developer Library containing the sample code, documentation, reference guides and step-by-step tutorial, our Software Developer Kit (SDK)™ enables an application developer to customize reporting and proactive information delivery and integrate intelligence into their existing applications or processes.

Requirements

A platform needs to satisfy three key requirements: flexibility, openness, and use of standards. Flexibility in architecture allows the platform to be tailored to the interface, scalability, and reporting needs of an environment. Openness ensures that the power of the platform can be exploited through well defined and accessible interfaces. Adherence to standards ensures that the platform can be integrated into necessary web, email, operational systems and operating systems that customers want and need to use with their existing applications.
 

Easy Extensibility of Functionality: The MicroStrategy platform provides a sophisticated plug-and-play architecture that allows you to add new functionality to the platform. With it you can plug in a new analytic function if desired. Or you can plug in a new input source module into the Narrowcast Server™ to proactively deliver a new kind of content.

True Open Platform: The MicroStrategy platform exposes all functionality available through a comprehensive Software Development Kit (SDK). Our entire SDK, which includes over 4,000 API calls, allows developers to control even the most granular internal operations of the server, such as adding threads and engines.

Support for multiple operating systems: the MicroStrategy platform's SDK offers both COM-based and Java-based APIs that support multiple operating systems, web application servers and web servers including IBM® AIX®, Sun™ Solaris™, and Windows® 2000/NT, IBM Websphere®, Apache/Tomcat, Iplanet™ and IIS.

Standards-based Architecture: The MicroStrategy platform embraces standards that are open and easy to develop against. MicroStrategy uses standards such as XML, Java, COM, MDX and Web services to ensure that the presentation of business intelligence is fully and easily customizable.

Support for other Business Intelligence tool interfaces: Our support of MDX and ODBO allow products such as Cognos® PowerPlay®, Microsoft® Excel and Brio software to access the more powerful MicroStrategy Intelligence Server™.

Easy Portal and Web Services Integration: MicroStrategy SDK's Portal Integration Kit™ includes pre-built sample gadgets for embedding the MicroStrategy platform analysis into a Plumtree® portal. Sample code that's provided also serves as a starting point for quickly embedding the MicroStrategy platform into other portals. The Web Services Development Kit™ provides sample code enabling MicroStrategy functionality to be accessed as standard Web Services.

Development Tools: Included with the MicroStrategy solution is a fully functional website with both ASP and JSP versions that demonstrate MicroStrategy platform functionality available through the APIs. The Developer Library, which contains extensive documentation and reference guides, sample code and utilities, helps to explain the usage and workflow of API function calls.