20110423

Visual Insight from Microstrategy

Microstrategy is a famous and BI-dedicated company, operating for 22+ years, recently released Visual Insight (as part of the release of Microstrategy 9.2 this week) and joint the DV race. A couple of years ago, I advised to some local company in terms of choosing Data Visualization Partner and final 3 choices were Qlikview, Spotfire and Microstrategy. Microstrategy was most competitive pricing-wise, but their Data Visualization functionality was not ready yet. They are ready now, see it here (from webcast this week):







Visual Insight as part of Microstrategy 9.2 targets so called "self-service BI", and transition (they acknowledged that) from "old BI" (tabular reports: published static and OLAP reports) to "new BI" (Data Visualization and Dashboards), from Desktop to Mobile Clients (that is a forward looking statement for sure), from Physical to Cloud.

Microstrategy is claiming that Visual Insight allows to visualize Data in 30 minutes (that is good to know, but DV Leaders already have it for a while, welcome to the club!) compare with 30 days for the same process with "traditional BI":



(I am saying this for 6 years now and on this blog since inception of it; does it mean that old BI is useless now and too pricey? Microstrategy presenters saying that answer is yes! and I want to thank Microstrategy for the validation of my 6-years old conclusion). For full set of Microstrategy 9.2 slides click here.

Microstrategy 9.2 has a full BI product portfolio, fast in-memory Data Engine, free mobile and tablet clients, has even Free Reporting Suite . Microstrategy (like Qliktech, Tableau and Visokio) is completely focused on Business Intelligence and Data Visualization functionality unlike its giant competitors like SAP, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft.

Update 9/27/11. MIcrostrategy released free Cloud Personal edition, based on Visual Insight, see it for yourself here:
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1 comment:

  1. Marco Russo23/4/11 23:02

    Visual Insight is pretty interesting, but I have to say that the comparisono 1 month - 30 minutes is unfair. The initial assumption for uploading data in 5 minutes is probably that data is already shaped in a very plain format (single table or a few tables with simple relationships). Reality is that when you don't have this situation and you need to relate data coming from several sources, you need to do some data manipulation and this requires a lot of time. Then the big difference here becomes the will to create a process that is reproducible or it is sufficient to run the conversion once. The former case is the one that usually involves a "Traditional BI" approach, including the related costs.
    I still haven't seen an effective way to reduce such a cost.
    That said, Visual Insights looks pretty well in this demo!

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