vs. Microsoft

MicroStrategy 9

• Homegrown Single Platform: MicroStrategy’s single code base offers the advanced advantage of reusable business logic across the entire platform. For example, MicroStrategy’s dashboards can be made from existing reports and objects, speeding development and ensuring consistency of report logic across reports and dashboards.
• Single Server and Centralized Administration: MicroStrategy’s single BI server provides efficient, centralized administration for the IT administrator. A single server with fewer moving parts and processes translates into less downtime.

Microsoft

• Multiple Platforms and Metadata Repositories: Microsoft lacks a common metadata and has not announced plans to address this deficiency. Lack of a common metadata across the platform shows a hallmark of an immature BI product and increases IT efforts, therefore increasing Total Cost of Ownership.
• Multiple Servers: Microsoft requires administrators to install and administer several different servers. Multiple, overlapping products contain overlapping functionality, which increases administrative complexity.

MicroStrategy 9

• Single Reusable Metadata Repository: MicroStrategy’s object-oriented metadata defines your enterprise’s business layer in a single repository. Metadata objects can be nested as building blocks to create more complex objects. If a metadata object changes, every other metadata object dependent on it automatically changes.
• Dynamic SQL Engine: MicroStrategy assembles all metadata objects necessary for a report such as set qualifications, dimensional calculations, and custom groupings, and dynamically builds the report SQL at run-time without requiring manual SQL coding.

Microsoft

• Report Designers Cannot Reuse Logic Across Reports: In Microsoft Reporting Services, report designers still cannot save and reuse newly created metrics, filters or prompts outside the definition of the report. There is generally a lot of metadata or business logic built within the report definition that users would like to reuse across other reports as building blocks to create more advanced report objects.
• Lack of Dependency Checking: A lack of object dependency checking means that changes to metadata objects can cause unanticipated issues in existing reports, resulting in report failures and downtime.

MicroStrategy 9

• Single Point of Monitoring and Administration: MicroStrategy provides a single centralized console for real-time user and system management and an out-of-the box BI environment monitoring application.
• Robust Life Cycle Management: MicroStrategy Object Manager facilitates metadata life cycle management, automatic dependency checking, and project management.
• Automated Integrity Checking: Automated process that verifies the consistency of reports. This tool detects, compares, and presents discrepancies in data values, SQL, and graph display are highlighted.

Microsoft

• Limited Monitoring and Administration: Microsoft provides very limited out-of-the-box dashboards, reports and KPIs to perform impact analysis, auditing and tuning of the BI application.
• Incomplete Life Cycle Management: Microsoft offers limited auditing capabilities and tools to aid on usage and metadata management.
• Insufficient In-Memory Optimization Tools: Microsoft does not provide a cube advisor tool that would recommend In-memory ROLAP cubes to reduce database processing and response time for BI applications.

MicroStrategy 9

• Centralized and Pervasive Security: MicroStrategy provides centralized security administration across the entire platform.
• Automatic Levels of Functionality and Data Access: Reusable user profiles and privileges automatically ensure users only access the appropriate information and functionality down to the data cell level.
• Unified Single Sign-On Integration: MicroStrategy provides an automatic single-point of integration for the whole platform with existing security authentication infrastructure such as LDAP, NT, Windows Active Directory, IBM Tivoli, SiteMinder, and database security.

MicroStrategy 9

• Native Support for Multilingual Deployments: MicroStrategy automatically translates the report descriptions, user interface, metadata objects, error messages, and data into local languages without any IT design or maintenance effort.
• Integrated Translation Interfaces and Wizards: Translation wizards and interfaces make it easy for end users to input or import translation strings into the metadata. Translations can be performed incrementally; fallback language settings allow for partially translated metadata.

MicroStrategy 9

• Single Development Environment: MicroStrategy’s single Web interface, single server and single code base provide a unified development environment for the whole platform. No need to learn multiple SDKs.
• Eclipse IDE-Ready Web Customization Editor: The MicroStrategy Web Customization Editor integrates into the Eclipse IDE. Developers easily perform MicroStrategy Web customization and migration tasks by eliminating the need to manually modify configuration files.