MicroStrategy Desktop Goes Free

By -
It's been a long, bumpy road to maturity for MicroStrategy 10, but it’s finally here and its desktop version is now free. It's a tool meant for data newbies and professionals alike and is a great way for people to get in touch quickly with their data. MicroStrategy Desktop is a great self-service and discovery tool, that allows its users to integrate, prepare/wrangle and gain insight of their popular data sources. It allows people to either use it as a standalone client or connect to existing projects on the enterprise platform, for easier data exchange and dashboard sharing.

I have to admit that it's fun to work with the latest version and discover the new capabilities. I did mention above that is a self-service and data discovery tool, but, being a techie guy, I also use it as a data profiling tool, due to its integrated wrangling tool that lets me prepare the data first before getting to analyze it. With over 70 connectors, which is a great toolbox to have, you can connect to any source you can think of, making it reliant for many. And it's free!

Some people say that version 10 is an evolution rather than a revolution, but it came a long way and things have improved a lot, in an attempt to keep up with Tableau and win back some of its market share, especially on the price range. Let's not forget, that the big chunk of the company's revenue comes from the enterprise analytics platform and this free version of desktop is a good strategy to attract people towards their analytics tools and increase its popularity. This does come with a risk, but if MicroStrategy plays this well, there's a chance they might come back to the leaders section of Garner's magic quadrant.


"By making MicroStrategy Desktop free, we aim to make business intelligence and the skills to draw value from self-service analytics and data discovery more accessible to companies and individuals, We recognize that education and support play a critical role in making our customers and partners successful, and have launched the Jump Start program, which makes free training and education available to individuals interested in using MicroStrategy Desktop". Michael Saylor, MicroStrategy's CEO.


Get MicroStrategy Desktop free here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The count distinct adventure - Part I

By -
Image
I've been working with several reporting and data analysis tools for a while now. Started with SSAS cubes, then Business Objects came along, later, MicroStrategy (MSTR) joined the team and then Tableau. They all have their own ways of managing count distinct (CD), but they yet have more in common. Manage simply means yielding the good results every time a user interacts with that CD measure. Us, the BI tech guys, we have a goal to facilitate easy data analysis to the users, especially that most of them work in non-IT domains and have different skill levels. Throughout time, CDs have proved to be a difficult thing to manage and if it wasn't the ease of implementation, it was the performance impact we soon discovered. It's been known that the difficulty lies in the nature of this non-additive measure. Basically, we cannot sum it as a standard revenue measure, but you always have to re-calculate it when the level of the aggregation changes. Have to admit that I like a goo...
Read more

The surrogate key strikes back

By -
If you ever participated in building a data warehouse or worked around data warehouses, you've probably came across the surrogate key (SK) notion. If you’re not familiar, then take a look at this article on the Kimball's group website. Surrogate keys are very common in data warehouses and they bring a lot of functionality, from design to performance enhancements. Now, one of the surrogate key's drawbacks is the difficulty to keep it in synch between all environments. As each environment can be linked to a different version of the source (e.g. UAT, live environments etc.), surrogate keys can get off for the same natural key and this can also have an effect in MicroStrategy. When building attributes you have to define its forms. The ID form should contain a unique key describing the attribute in order to provide correct joining, aggregation and attribute member list when applying filters. Indeed the surrogate key doesn’t have any business meaning, so this form w...
Read more

The count distinct adventure - Part II

By -
During the first part of the topic we introduced the challenge of count distinct and 2 solutions to address them, along with their advantages and disadvantages. The list of solutions continues in this final section and these, presented below, are also the solutions that we use across our projects where CDs are required. Solution 3 - Count Distinct derived metrics This functionality is probably the most known by the users and mostly used, as it offers flexibility and the necessary control without the intervention of the IT teams. Creating =derived metrics in reports, Vis and documents is a walk In the park, using the context menus. With the deployment of V10, things got even more flexible adding support for conditional derived metrics (IF and CASE) by using attributes directly. As you probably remember, or still use today, up until V10, building conditional derived metrics was a hustle, as only metrics could be used with IF and CASE statements. You would first create a MAX(<...
Read more