White Papers

Gartner Core Research Note: MicroStrategy Gives Business Users Visual Insight (pdf - 817KB)
A Gartner RAS Core Research Note by Rita Sallam, featuring key findings, recommendations, and analysis.

Cindi Howson/B-Eye Network Research: Ease of Use and Interface Appeal in Business Intelligence Tools (pdf - 700KB)
A B-Eye Network research report by Cindi Howson, based on recent user survey results.

Information Everywhere: The Convergence of Mobile Technology and Mobile Intelligence (pdf - 346KB)
The mobile Internet is dramatically lowering the impedance to information, offering 24/7 access to business people and consumers. This white paper explores the latest trends in Smartphone usage and the rapid development of mobile intelligence applications for these devices.

MicroStrategy DashboardApps White Paper (pdf - 3484KB)
This white paper provides an overview of MicroStrategy DashboardApps, which offer targeted, interactive displays that make information-rich dashboards as easy to consume as a traditional, static operational report.

Summary Results from the BI Survey 10 (pdf - 722KB)
The BI Survey is the most comprehensive independent survey of the on-line analytical processing and business intelligence market.

The Value of 64-bit Business Intelligence (pdf - 2000KB)
This white paper illustrates the top 5 reasons why MicroStrategy customers are moving to 64-bit.

Capitalizing on Change: Turning Disruption into Opportunity (pdf - 1120KB)
The world is in the midst of unprecedented change, with multiple technology disruptions transforming the way business is conducted. This whitepaper will help guide your organization’s critical next steps.

MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Solutions for Retail (pdf - 877KB)
This brochure demonstrates the capabilities and benefits of MicroStrategy for the retail industry and provides graphical displays of dashboards and reports on the iPhone and iPad.

Secure Business Intelligence on Apple Mobile Devices (pdf - 728KB)
This paper explores the security capabilities of MicroStrategy Mobile on Apple’s iPhone and iPad mobile devices. Mobile security is outlined across (1) Mobile Device Security, (2) Multi-tier Architecture and Data Transmission Security, and (3) User Authorization. Use this document as a reference for implementing Mobile Business Intelligence apps safely and securely.

Enterprise Cloud Security Framework (pdf - 1662KB)
Learn more about MicroStrategy’s stringent security controls and safeguards.

Harnessing the Power of Facebook Data: MicroStrategy Gateway for Facebook (pdf - 250KB)
A whitepaper on why companies must embrace social media, and how your organization can do so with MicroStrategy Gateway for Facebook.

Mobile Business Intelligence Market Survey (pdf - 1500KB)
DAS Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study – October 2011. According to the survey data, MicroStrategy ranks #1 overall among vendors offering Mobile BI, based on 25 criteria platform and feature capabilities.

One Out of the Many: Using Social Intelligence for 1:1 Marketing (pdf - 78KB)
In this piece, Roland Fiege, Senior Director of Social Media Marketing at MicroStrategy, explains how organizations can “market to an audience of one” using Social Intelligence.

Reducing the Total Cost of Ownership of Business Intelligence (pdf - 207KB)
The business value of a business intelligence application is often hard to measure, given that value will continue to evolve and grow over the application’s lifetime. In contrast, the investment costs – also referred to as Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) – often represent a more objective and quantifiable estimate. This paper focuses on how organizations can measure and lower TCO, thereby increasing the Return on Investment (ROI) for their business intelligence applications.

Aberdeen Group Benchmark Report: Business Intelligence in Retail: Bringing Cohesion to a Fragmented Enterprise (pdf - 772KB)
This paper details how retail businesses can utilize business intelligence to harness the power of massive customer and transaction data warehouses into a set of manageable performance metrics.

An Architecture for Software-as-a Service (SaaS) BI (pdf - 5300KB)
A Review of the MicroStrategy Platform Architecture for Hosted Reporting, Analysis and Monitoring Applications

Business Intelligence and Banking: Major Applications of Business Intelligence Software in the Banking Industry (pdf - 194KB)
The banking industry is becoming increasingly competitive and facing ever-changing regulatory requirements, making it more and more challenging for banks to keep up with the changes—and with the competition. Read how MicroStrategy’s unified architecture offers banks far-reaching opportunities for ever-expanding business intelligence.

Business Intelligence and Communications: Major Applications of Business Intelligence Software in the Communications Industry (pdf - 204KB)
Communications companies can use Business Intelligence in many ways, creating smart business solutions across the myriad challenges in the communications industry. This White Paper details how MicroStrategy’s business intelligence solutions are equipping communications providers with the right tools to recognize new revenue streams, streamline operations, and deliver value-added customer experiences.

Business Intelligence and Financial Services: Major Applications of Business Intelligence Software in the Financial Services Industry (pdf - 195KB)
With a vast range of customers and customer needs, changing regulations, and growing fraud threats, financial services companies need information management solutions that will allow them to make smart decisions. Read how MicroStrategy’s Business Intelligence platform supports financial services companies by simultaneously accessing immense amounts of information, enabling analysis from many sources at once and providing the most thorough and integrated reporting.

Business Intelligence and Government: Major Applications of Business Intelligence at Federal, State, and Local Levels of Government (pdf - 284KB)
Federal, state, and local government agencies face many operational challenges at all levels. With strict budget and performance goals and reporting requirements, as well as diverse and demanding constituencies, government agencies need information management solutions that allow them to make better decisions, keep tight tabs on their operations, and control information security. This White Paper details how MicroStrategy can outfit government agencies with the software to maximize their information gathering and make the best use of the data to improve operational strategies by optimizing their budgets, increasing staff productivity, and effectively allocating resources.

Business Intelligence and Healthcare: Major Applications of Business Intelligence Software in the Healthcare Industry (pdf - 438KB)
Skyrocketing healthcare costs and increased competition make it essential for today's healthcare providers to employ information technology solutions that improve productivity and support innovative strategies. This paper details how physicians, hospitals, and payers can leverage MicroStrategy’s BI platform for reporting, analyzing, and monitoring vast amounts of data, improving patient care and healthcare providers’ access to information.

Business Intelligence and Insurance: Major Applications of Business Intelligence Software in the Insurance Industry (pdf - 275KB)
This White Paper explores how MicroStrategy’s unified information architecture allows insurance companies to easily integrate and cross-reference vast amounts of information from multiple sources, identify relationships within the information, and learn how different factors affect each other and the company’s bottom line.

Business Intelligence and Manufacturing: Major Applications of Business Intelligence Software in the Manufacturing Industry (pdf - 237KB)
Faced with intensifying global competition, manufacturing companies need information management solutions that allow them to make better business decisions. This paper details how MicroStrategy can offer the manufacturing industry the business intelligence software to report on, analyze, and monitor the vast networks of data through a business intelligence architecture that helps companies reduce costs, increase revenue, and maximize the value of information.

Business Intelligence and Pharmaceuticals: Major Applications of Business Intelligence Software in the Pharmaceuticals Industry (pdf - 230KB)
Working to keep up with an expanding drug market, pharmaceutical companies need information management solutions that allow them to make better business decisions. Learn how the MicroStrategy platform supports the pharmaceuticals industry by facilitating reporting, analyzing, and monitoring of vast amounts of data through a business intelligence architecture that helps companies reduce costs, increase revenue, and maximize the value of information.

Business Intelligence and Retail: Major Applications of Business Intelligence Software in the Retail Industry (pdf - 743KB)
Attracting today’s product-savvy consumer means being prepared to react to the ever-changing retail landscape. This paper discusses how MicroStrategy helps leading retailers to improve performance by allowing access to multiple sources of data to perform sales analyses, track financial performance and staff productivity, and segment customers to better deliver tailored products, services, and special offers.

Business Intelligence as a Driver for Business Transformation (pdf - 257KB)
This white paper demonstrates some of the powerful benefits to be achieved using BI to transform business. Using the real-life example of Intel Corporation's Global Procurement Reporting (GPR) project, the paper illustrates how a Business Intelligence-driven methodology can be very effective in implementing business transformation programs within an enterprise framework. By recognizing Business Intelligence as a transformative inflection point, Intel's GPR initiative became a major contributor to the $300M business value realized to date in the company's e-Procurement program. The article suggests that by formalizing the design approach utilized by GPR and adopting it throughout the enterprise, transformation programs will dramatically increase their chances for attaining pre-defined business value.

Critical Success Factors Deploying Pervasive BI, a joint white paper from Informatica, Teradata, and MicroStrategy (pdf - 538KB)
This joint white paper from Informatica, Teradata, and MicroStrategy details best practices and approaches for pervasive business intelligence and data integration for operational excellence.

Data Mining with MicroStrategy (pdf - 2395KB)
This white paper provides an overview of using the MicroStrategy BI Platform to distribute data mining and predictive analytics to the masses.

Deriving Business Insight from Multiple Data Sources Using MicroStrategy BI Platform and IBM® WebSphere® Information Integration Federation (PDF - 792KB)
This paper provides an overview of IBM’s WebSphere Information Integrator™, and step-by-step details of the configuration used for running with the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform™. It addresses the need for companies to maintain enormous amounts of data, in some cases terabytes of data, over a variety of RDBMS platforms, and presents a solution uniquely suited for deploying a common data warehouse across multiple data sources. It also includes results from associated standard DB-certification tests that were conducted to obtain a thorough evaluation of the compatibility between IBM’s WebSphere Information Integrator and MicroStrategy’s Business Intelligence Platform.

Evolving from Departmental Islands of BI to a Cohesive Enterprise BI Environment (pdf - 2021KB)
This white paper explores how MicroStrategy technology supports the BI consolidation process to facilitate a seamless migration from departmental to enterprise BI.

Improve Corporate Performance by Providing Decision Makers with Better Information: MicroStrategy for Oracle E-Business Suite, Powered by Noetix (pdf - 697KB)
This white paper provides an overview of using NoetixViews® with the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform for Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). It examines how NoetixViews is instrumental in quickly and simply retrieving meaningful information from Oracle E-Business Suite. By reviewing Oracle EBS features such as flexfields, organizations, lists of values, security, translation, and more, the paper illustrates the simplicity, flexibility, and functionality of using MicroStrategy with NoetixViews to achieve powerful results.

MicroStrategy Business Intelligence: Solutions for Maximizing Policyholder Profitability (pdf - 808KB)
While market conditions may erode investment gains and prevent insurers from realizing record earnings, smart use of business intelligence solutions provides an opportunity to improve underwriting profits and operational results in the short term. This paper aims to achieve two objectives – highlight the typical problems that restrict insurers from achieving an in-depth view of policyholder data, and establish how MicroStrategy business intelligence solutions will help them develop a better understanding of the customer, and provide actionable insight to generate new revenues.

MicroStrategy Reporting Suite Quick Start Guide (pdf - 1600KB)
Follow step-by-step instructions to get your free reporting application up and running today!

MicroStrategy Universal Edition: Delivering Increased Business Intelligence Capacity Through MicroStrategy Universal Edition (pdf - 895KB)
This White Paper explores the promise and benefits of 64-bit Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy Universal Edition. Learn about the limitations of a 32-bit BI architecture and how to migrate to 64-bit MicroStrategy Universal.

State of the Business Intelligence Market, 2008 – 2009 (pdf - 170KB)
Recent acquisitions in the BI market have re-ignited the debate on the most fundamental issue in enterprise software today – whether it is better for companies to have their software supplied by a few conglomerate vendors or by a range of independent vendors. This MicroStrategy white paper focuses on the contrasting dynamics of open system vs. closed system solutions and also addresses the new set of issues for customers to consider as they evaluate their BI options in light of the acquisitions of Business Objects, Cognos, and Hyperion by SAP, IBM, and Oracle, respectively.

TDWI Best Practices Report: Beyond Reporting: Delivering Insights with Next-Generation Analytics (pdf - 1800KB)
Wayne Eckerson presents his research findings on the adoption and usage of analytical tools.

TDWI Best Practices Report: BI on a Limited Budget: Strategies for Doing More with Less (pdf - 1000KB)
This research report by Wayne Eckerson is based on an extensice BI user survey and evaluates hardware, software, organizational, project management, and vendor strategies for extending BI budget dollars.

TDWI Best Practices Report: Business Intelligence Solutions for SAP (pdf - 1271KB)
Phillip Russom presents his research findings on the complexities of business intelligence (BI) solutions for SAP software, the myriad BI tool options for current SAP users, and examples of successful solutions combining SAP and non-SAP products.

TDWI Best Practices Report: Deploying Dashboards and Scorecards (pdf - 2513KB)
This TDWI Best Practices Report by Wayne Eckerson is based on a survey of more than 600 corporate IT professionals, business consultants, and business users. The paper outlines current trends found in dashboard and scorecard deployments, as well as best practices for achieving operational success with dashboard and scorecard projects.

TDWI Best Practices Report: Pervasive Business Intelligence: Techniques and Technologies to Deploy BI on an Enterprise Scale (pdf - 2434KB)
This TDWI Best Practices Report will help you to understand system dynamics driving BI initiatives and the variables that affect leverage points of usability and project management. Find out how BI teams can focus their efforts to ensure widespread deployment of BI solutions.

TDWI Best Practices Report: Predictive Analytics: Extending the Value of Your Data Warehousing Investment (pdf - 1670KB)
Wayne Eckerson explores best practices and pitfalls of implementing a predictive analytics capability.

TDWI Best Practices Report: Strategies for Managing Spreadmarts: Migrating to a Managed BI Environment (pdf - 1254KB)
According to TDWI Research, more than 90% of all organizations have spreadmarts -- shadow data systems that are usually built on spreadsheets and exist outside of approved, IT-managed corporate data repositories. This paper provides practical solutions for bringing spreadmarts into a managed business intelligence environment that stores data and logic centrally in a uniform, consistent fashion and allows individuals to access this data using their tools of choice.

TDWI Best Practices Report: Transforming Finance: How CFOs can use Business Intelligence to Turn Finance from Bookkeepers into Strategic Advisors (pdf - 2476KB)
Forward-thinking finance departments have figured out how to transform themselves from back-office bookkeepers to strategic advisors. They have learned to partner with the IT department—more specifically, the business intelligence (BI) team—whose job is to manage information and deliver a single version of corporate truth. In so doing, they have liberated themselves from manual data collection and report production processes so they can engage in more value-added activities. Learn more in this report from Wayne Eckerson.

TDWI Checklist Report: Eight Ways to Successfully Implement Self-Service BI (pdf - 765KB)
To make self-service BI a reality requires discipline and foresight. This report outlines several techniques that can help your organization successfully implement self-service BI.