This year’s MicroStrategy World conference in Orlando delivered a plethora of insights into the company’s BI & analytics offering. As a BARC analyst, I had the privilege to engage in numerous enlightening interactions with vendor personnel, customers and partners. Here are my top takeaways from the event, with a focus on product-oriented insights.
Jurassic Sparks: Battles MicroStrategy Fights
Despite being tagged as a “BI dinosaur“ at times, MicroStrategy continues to exhibit functional excellence and modernization in the industry. The company’s ongoing battles range from competing against self-service BI vendors like Tableau, Qlik, and Microsoft with Power BI to grappling with potent cloud vendors such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google GCP. Additionally, MicroStrategy is working hard to satisfy customers that migrate from Documents to Dossiers. Shrinking functional gaps between these two facilitate transitions, and migrations become opportunities to rethink and adjust BI & analytics delivery to fit present requirements.
Breaking Free: MicroStrategy Embraces Openness
MicroStrategy has now fully embraced openness, leveraging the infrastructure of all major cloud vendors, opening up APIs for Python and embedding, and unlocking the semantic graph for other BI tools. The company aims to deliver highly customized content on all devices, embedded in business applications, and connect to a wide variety of sources. MicroStrategy is also open to supporting and combining governed and model-based creation for standardized content alongside ad hoc content creation without upfront modeling to compete with self-service BI vendors.
Innovators‘ Playground: Key Innovation Areas
Generative AI is at the forefront of MicroStrategy’s innovation, with exciting developments like large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT integration. Additionally, the company is focusing on better content reusability, streamlined content creation (e.g., new canvas mode in Dossiers), and other ways to facilitate the process for business users. While constantly innovating they improve most where it matters most to their customers.
The One and Only?: Rebranding to MicroStrategy ONE
MicroStrategy’s rebranding to MicroStrategy ONE showcases the company’s ongoing modernization and its sound, home-grown architecture that serves as the basis for future innovation. The rebranding also highlights the company’s containerization efforts to make the tool fit for a multi-cloud world. MicroStrategy should capitalize on the momentum generated by the rebranding to reinvigorate its community by bringing in new talent and fresh ideas and demonstrating that it may have been in the market a long time but is far from being obsolete or legacy.
Sharing is Caring: The Openness of Experts
What made this event genuinely stand out was the openness of all the experts who generously shared their experiences, both good and bad. A big thank you goes out to all the amazing people who made MicroStrategy World 2023 a truly great event!
