What is MicroStrategy?

MicroStrategy is a business intelligence tool that is widely used for deriving valuable insights from data in the form of visually insightful reports, graphs and charts. MicroStrategy can connect to any type of data including big data, flat files, social media data and so on. MicroStrategy offers an intuitive way to create and modify business intelligence reports and dashboards using the MicroStrategy Desktop.

Why is MicroStrategyso widely used?

MicroStrategy is a powerful business intelligence tool that helps organizations to stay on top of the data and convert it into valuable business insights. Some of the reasons that makes MicroStrategy such a widespread tool are as follows:

• It can easily connect with existing enterprise apps and systems
• It is completely scalable, reusable and offers centralized administration
• It offers a complete BI ecosystem thus eliminating need for other tools
• It is extremely user-friendly thus removing the need for IT support
• It leverages direct database access and in-memory processing offering high-speed response
• It offers unmatched mobile analytics features thus putting the power at your fingertips.

Features of MicroStrategy

Data Discovery MicroStrategy has an excellent data discovery feature. Data discovery is a part of business intelligence process wherein you connect to data from disparate sources and data in the form of data silos and so on. MicroStrategy can help you connect to data which is in formats like big data, flat files and so on. When the data discovery is done the right way it paves the way for data drilling and so on in a seamless manner.

Data Wrangling Data wrangling is the process of cleaning and transforming data in a format that is easily deployed for extracting business insights out of it. MicroStrategy has excellent features for cleansing, structuring and enriching data in order to aid the process of business intelligence reporting.

Data Mining and Predictive Analysis You can deploy a wider range of data mining and data modeling tools along with MicroStrategy to augment its native analytical capabilities. Anybody can use these data mining features like report designers, business users and analysts. You can then build predictive analytics reports on top of it and distribute it to any device.

Library of Analytics Functions MicroStrategy offers a comprehensive library that has a great set of data mining, mathematical and financial functionalities which helps to understand the connection between data, gauge performance metrics and statistical analysis reports.

Extensible Visualization Library When it comes to visualization MicroStrategy has a great set of tools. You can use hundreds of open source tools for visualizing the data along with the built-in tools. You can also deploy the visualization builder, or you can also create a new visualization from scratch.

Real-time Dashboards MicroStrategy also lets you work with real-time data through the deployment of real-time dashboards. This will help businesses stay on top of the business by monitoring information in real-time. You can also get scheduled updates thus ensuring that you get the latest data.

Embedded BI You can also benefit from embedded business intelligence thanks to MicroStrategy out of the box tools that can be seamlessly embedded into other tools and platforms like SharePoint, WebSphere, NetWeaver and so on. MicroStrategy offers a simple integration kit that includes sample coding and documentation.

Applications of MicroStrategy

There are a huge number of industries that are using MicroStrategy. Some of the most important applications of MicroStrategy are as below:

• Predictive analytics in the banking and insurance domain
• Customer feedback reports through social media analysis
• Providing an omni-channel experience using various customer touchpoints
• New products launch using various market and customer data
• Converting big data into reports and then filtering down business insights