Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is one of the best-known vendors in the BI & analytics market worldwide. In 2003, MicroStrategy first released its fully integrated platform providing formatted reports, dashboards and interactive data discovery capabilities in a unified product using the same infrastructure and a consistent interface.
MicroStrategy pursues the vision of providing “Intelligence Everywhere” by developing a platform that powers AI to fulfill all customer needs and is capable of serving all types of users. Its flagship platform MicroStrategy ONE is based on a tightly integrated architecture that was built from the ground up without acquisitions. It offers functionality for dashboards, reporting, AI and analysis and can be used to implement various use cases such as operational, embedded and mobile analytics. Together with its library of statistical and advanced analytics functions, the vendor offers comprehensive capabilities to fulfill additional analytics requirements.
The suite offers various clients, which connect to an enterprise Semantic Graph (semantic layer) to deliver common and governed business logic across multiple data sources with strong calculation and caching features. Business users can use the enterprise Semantic Graph, typically created by technically savvy users, or create their own data models (data sets). For additional governance, data sets can be combined with the enterprise Semantic Graph or certified as officially provided governed and trusted sources. MicroStrategy has adopted an open approach by allowing third-party tools such as Tableau, Qlik, Power BI, Jupyter and RStudio to access its Semantic Graph.
MicroStrategy offers 200+ connectors to data sources, as well as native support for cloud databases and data lakes. Besides direct connectivity to source systems, the product offers an integrated in-memory engine to ensure fast query performance on large data sets. MicroStrategy supports hybrid and multi-cloud scenarios and can be deployed on premises or in the cloud (managed or customer-owned, for instance, on AWS, Azure or GCP).
MicroStrategy has always taken market trends seriously. The vendor provides a no-code development framework to build native mobile apps. Offline capabilities and write-back data entry for transactions and operational use cases are available too. The vendor offers a modernized dashboard interface to analyze, present and visualize data. Dashboards are interactive applications that organize visualizations or reports in a familiar book-oriented chapter-and-page format giving them a logical flow.
To extend the adoption of analytics by business users, MicroStrategy introduced ‘HyperIntelligence’ to surface contextual information to users directly in web applications, on mobile devices and in selected productivity applications with zero clicks. This allows businesses to inject real-time, contextual insights and recommendations into users’ browser-based or mobile workflows – bringing analytics closer to their work. Embedding analytics in business applications, in cooperation with service providers and often targeting distinct industries, is becoming increasingly important to vendors and offers further opportunities to differentiate their offerings.
In the area of AI, MicroStrategy has also introduced some helpful features. The AI offering uses the umbrella ‘Auto’ and is composed of multiple tools. In 2023, MicroStrategy launched ‘Auto SQL’, ‘Auto Dashboard’ and ‘Auto Answers’, which are targeted at different user types to support them in their daily work. Most recently, ‘Auto Bot’ enables customers to create, customize and deploy their own chatbots. ‘Auto’ uses multiple interpretation layers and benefits from the strong Semantic Graph and LLMs. These bots can be deployed on their own, on mobile, embedded into any application, and from HyperCards. With the latter, it is therefore possible to provide HyperIntelligence users with AI-based features.
