MicroStrategy vs. Information Builders. A Comparison White Paper by MicroStrategy

Transcription

1 MicroStrategy vs. Information Builders A Comparison White Paper by MicroStrategy

2 This White Paper reflects the views, opinions and conclusions of MicroStrategy Incorporated ( MicroStrategy ) and other contributors to this White Paper. This White Paper is provided as is and without express or limited warranty of any kind by either MicroStrategy or anyone who has been involved in the creation, production or distribution of this White Paper (collectively, Contributors ), including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. Neither MicroStrategy nor Contributors makes any warranty, express or implied, concerning the accuracy, correctness, completeness or adequacy of any information that is provided in this White Paper. The entire risk with respect to the use of, or reliance on, this White Paper is with you. Should this White Paper prove inaccurate or erroneous (in whole or in part), you (and not MicroStrategy or Contributors) assume the entire risk for all costs related to the use of this White Paper. 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All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. Specifications subject to change without notice. MicroStrategy is not responsible for errors or omissions. MicroStrategy makes no warranties or commitments concerning the availability of future products or versions that may be planned or under development. Patent Information This product is patented. One or more of the following patents may apply to the product sold herein: U.S. Patent Nos. 6,154,766, 6,173,310, 6,260,050, 6,263,051, 6,269,393, 6,279,033, 6,567,796, 6,587,547, 6,606,596, 6,658,093, 6,658,432, 6,662,195, 6,671,715, 6,691,100, 6,694,316, 6,697,808, 6,704,723, 6,741,980, 6,765,997, 6,768,788, 6,772,137, 6,788,768, 6,798,867, 6,801,910, 6,820,073, 6,829,334, 6,836,537, 6,850,603, 6,859,798, 6,873,693, 6,885,734, 6,940,953, 6,964,012, 6,977,992, 6,996,568, 6,996,569, 7,003,512, 7,010,518, 7,016,480, 7,020,251, 7,039,165, 7,082,422, 7,113,993, 7,127,403, 7,174,349, 7,181,417, 7,194,457, 7,197,461, 7,228,303, 7,260,577, 7,266,181, 7,272,212, 7,302,639, 7,324,942, 7,330,847, 7,340,040, 7,356,758, 7,356,840, 7,415,438, 7,428,302, 7,430,562, 7,440,898, 7,486,780, 7,509,671, 7,516,181, 7,559,048, 7,574,376, 7,617,201, 7,725,811, 7,801,967, 7,836,178, 7,861,161, 7,861,253 and 7,881,443. Other patent applications are pending. 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3 MicroStrategy vs. Information Builders I. Executive Summary... 2 II. Comparison of MicroStrategy 9 and WebFocus on the Key BI Capabilities Delivering More BI with Less IT Effort - MicroStrategy Delivers the Lowest TCO All User Needs through a Single Platform Self-Service Through a Fast and Intuitive User Experience High Performance at Any Scale Quick to Implement and Deploy, Easy to Maintain and Administer Highly Interactive and Flexible Mobile Intelligence Deep Insight through Superior Analytics Flexible Technology for Departmental to Enterprise BI III. MicroStrategy A Market Proven, Industrial-Strength Technology *Note: This document is a competitive analysis of MicroStrategy 9 Release 3.2 and Information Builders WebFocus v8, the latest version of each application at the time of this analysis. From this point on, MicroStrategy 9 Release 3.2 will generally be referred to as simply MicroStrategy or MicroStrategy 9. Information Builders WebFocus 8 will be interchangeably referred to as WebFocus 8, WebFocus 8, and WebFocus.

4 I. Executive Summary In the business intelligence (BI) marketplace, MicroStrategy competes vigorously with vendors such as Information Builders. At first glance, it would seem that companies can use either MicroStrategy 9 or WebFocus 8 to support their reporting and analysis needs. However, throughout the implementation and maintenance of BI applications, companies are realizing significant differences in the BI capabilities between MicroStrategy and the less robust and less integrated BI technologies, such as WebFocus. MicroStrategy s organically grown architecture delivers superior performance, scalability, usability, efficiency, and reliability; all of which impact the total cost of ownership, user adoption, and ultimately the success of the BI project. As user and business requirements have become more complex, IT budgets nonetheless have come under increasing pressure. Organizations need to deliver BI solutions in light of expanding user requirements, increasing amounts of data, and differing data sources with a minimal amount of IT resources. Nonorganic BI architectures, like WebFocus, require higher amounts of IT effort because of the basic nature of integrating disparate BI technologies which leads to redundant and repetitive administration and the constant development of one-off workarounds. In contrast, organically-developed BI architectures like MicroStrategy require the minimum amount of IT effort needed to deploy and maintain BI applications and can empower business people to create their own reports without reliance on IT personnel. MicroStrategy 9 offers business users a redefined user interface for a fast and intuitive user experience where they can access consistent information through secure Web, Microsoft Office, and mobile device interfaces. MicroStrategy s advanced analytical capabilities, such as predictive analytics and new inmemory analysis provide users with fast and deep insight. With MicroStrategy s scalable architecture and a single metadata, users can seamlessly navigate from scorecards and dashboards to reports and analysis without being required to open and close multiple BI tools and navigate dissimilar interfaces. MicroStrategy 9 is advanced technology that allows companies to support all types of BI applications with a single technology. MicroStrategy 9 builds on MicroStrategy s unique strengths at the high-end of BI to extend the boundaries of performance, scalability, and efficiency of enterprise BI. At the same time, MicroStrategy 9 brings quick-to-deploy BI technology easily within reach of smaller departmental BI initiatives through features such as multisource data access, in-memory ROLAP, and Visual Insight. Just as importantly, MicroStrategy 9 provides a smooth migration path for islands of departmental BI to merge into a cohesive and consistent enterprise-wide framework. With MicroStrategy 9, even as departmental BI applications are consolidated into the enterprise-wide framework, the departments can continue to retain significant autonomy and nimbleness that they enjoyed previously. For nearly 20 years, MicroStrategy customers have gained an edge over their competitors with fast, agile analysis using MicroStrategy s sophisticated technology. Companies and industry analysts widely recognize MicroStrategy for its administration-friendly architecture, robust security, self-service zerofootprint Web interface, innovative mobile application platform, and proven user and data scalability. This document discusses in detail the key differences between MicroStrategy 9 and Information Builders WebFocus 8. 2

5 II. Comparison of MicroStrategy 9 and WebFocus 8 on the Key BI Capabilities Business intelligence has the power to provide performance feedback and visibility to all people in an organization, thus enabling businesses to make better decisions every day. However, not all BI technologies deliver on this promise, falling short on a number of key capabilities demanded of enterprise BI applications. A complete and efficient BI platform must provide organizations with the following key capabilities: Key BI Capabilities 1. Delivering More BI with Less IT Effort... pg.5 MicroStrategy technology requires far fewer IT personnel for a given amount of BI users because its reusable metadata is easier to maintain requiring less redundancy, because end users have more self-service capabilities that offload work from the IT staff, and because it provides a comprehensive suite of administrative tools requiring less IT administrators. WebFocus provides very limited metadata reusability so report developers have to spend more time redundantly creating report objects, resulting in a higher TCO. WebFocus end users have limited self-service capabilities and are heavily dependent on IT, requiring more IT administrators and a greater degree of hard coding. There are no out-of-the-box tracking and auditing tools that allow WebFocus administrators to centrally monitor and manage BI applications, thus requiring more administrators per number of end users. 2. All User Needs through a Single Platform... pg.9 MicroStrategy users can access any style of BI via a unified and home grown BI platform. MicroStrategy users get a single version of the truth through interactive Web, Microsoft Office, and mobile device interfaces. In WebFocus, most metadata information is dispersed in numerous proprietary files (based on functionality) that are difficult to maintain. Accordingly, different styles of BI require different user interfaces. Developers are forced to use many different interfaces to build different types of reports that can lead to multiple versions of the truth. 3. Self-Service Through a Fast and Intuitive Web Interface... pg.14 To enhance usability, the MicroStrategy Web interface adopts many familiar paradigms including, ribbon toolbars, accordion controls, control-click multi-select capability, and context-sensitive right-click actions. MicroStrategy s next-generation of advanced self-service functionality is designed to provide more control to business users. The MicroStrategy advanced self-service interface provides incredible speed-of-interactivity, stunning visualizations, drag-and-drop manipulations, and instant results thus allowing business users to rapidly go from data to decisions. WebFocus continues to force users to use FOCUS scripting. Though basic report formatting can be conducted with various tools, more complex formatting and layout requirements typically require the report developer to write FOCUS code. WebFocus does not provide the full extent of self-service that MicroStrategy does and WebFocus users more often require IT assistance for report development. 4. High Performance at Any Scale...pg.17 MicroStrategy s high performance at any scale is possible given its In-memory ROLAP architecture, which leverages the database for much of its processing. Data joins and analytic calculations are processed in the database whenever possible. MicroStrategy s unique multi-pass approach provides the flexibility to answer any analytical question in the most optimal manner. WebFocus OLAP technology is much less efficient than MicroStrategy s combination of ROLAP with a 64-bit operating system. The WebFocus OLAP engine does not provide the ability to run multi-pass SQL or leverage in-memory temporary tables and therefore forces many calculations to be 3

6 performed in the middle-tier server. This does not leverage the database to the fullest extent possible, and results in unnecessary network and hardware resource utilization. 5. Quick to Implement and Deploy, Easy to Maintain and Administer...pg.21 MicroStrategy provides organizations a platform that is quick to implement and deploy as well as easy to maintain and administer. MicroStrategy s single code base offers the unique advantage of reusable business logic across the entire platform. MicroStrategy s single BI server provides efficient, centralized administration for IT and fewer moving parts which translate into less downtime. Gartner s survey customers rated Information Builders product difficult to implement, migrate, and use. WebFocus lacks a common reusable metadata layer that is shared across documents. This creates a maintenance challenge as developers are typically forced to continually and manually synchronize metric, calculation, and filter definitions across documents. 6. Highly Interactive and Flexible Mobile Intelligence... pg.24 MicroStrategy Mobile extends BI capabilities on mobile devices well beyond traditional grid and graph reports and provides exceptional flexibility for creating purpose-built, workflow-driven mobile applications. MicroStrategy Mobile apps are built using a metadata driven, point-and-click development paradigm, fully utilizing the MicroStrategy BI platform infrastructure, security, and reusable metadata components. As a result, mobile applications are faster and easier to create, easier to maintain, and provide the administration efficiencies needed to deploy to hundreds of thousands of users while providing the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. WebFocus does not fully leverage the device-specific capabilities for the iphone or ipad because the WebFocus Mobile solution uses a thin-client (pure browser-based) architecture. Creating and deploying rich Mobile BI applications using WebFocus requires extensive development efforts. 7. Deep Insight through Superior Analytics... pg.29 The MicroStrategy BI platform provides an extensive set of data manipulation and analytic options to allow the user to delve deeply into a report to identify and discover important trends and patterns in the data. MicroStrategy users can drill anywhere in the entire data warehouse for boundary-free investigative analysis. MicroStrategy report designers and analysts can view and embed predictive analytics in reports and then distribute them to all relevant decision makers and stakeholders. WebFocus does not have automatic drill anywhere capabilities and drilling across hierarchies or reports requires IT hard coding for each report. 8. Flexible Technology for Departmental to Enterprise BI...pg.32 MicroStrategy s metadata reusability and life cycle management tools, such as MicroStrategy Object Manager enable departments to incrementally migrate their business logic into a consolidated enterprise BI environment. WebFocus does not have a tool equivalent to Object Manager to aid in consolidating and reconciling disparate departmental BI applications into an enterprise-wide BI. The following section of the white paper provides a side-by-side detailed evaluation of MicroStrategy 9 and Information Builders WebFocus along the key BI capabilities discussed above. 4

7 1. Delivering More BI with Less IT Effort - MicroStrategy Delivers the Lowest TCO With IT budgets under increasing scrutiny and business requirements becoming more complex, today s organizations need to critically examine BI costs. The costs of BI extend beyond the initial acquisition. An IDC study, Demonstrating Business Value: Selling to Your C-Level Executives, concludes, Because the single largest factor affecting TCO is staffing cost, IT initiatives that can reduce IT labor costs are likely to find greater acceptance among financial decision makers, and initiatives that enable IT consolidation or automation can significantly reduce TCO across the IT infrastructure. Figure 1 shows that over three years, IT staffing constitutes between 60 and 71% of BI Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Three-Year Total Cost of Ownership is Dominated by IT Personnel Costs Three-Year Total Cost of Ownership Breakdown Server Hardware (7%) IT Staff Training (8%) Outsourced Costs (3%) Software (7%) Downtime User Productivity (15%) Staffing (60%) Source: IDC Figure 1: Staffing Costs Consume a Majority of Three-Year Software Lifecycle Costs Three-year total cost of ownership for BI systems is dominated by costs related to IT personnel: IT personnel costs account for 71% of total costs = Staffing (60%) + Outsourcing Costs (3%) + Staff Training (8%). Customers and leading industry analysts alike recognize MicroStrategy s ability to deliver BI to more users and a great amount of data with fewer IT staff than other BI vendors. Many MicroStrategy customers have expanded their BI deployments while saving millions of dollars a year in staffing costs by switching from non-microstrategy BI tools to MicroStrategy s efficient and scalable self-service BI platform. To save costs and ensure successful BI solutions, decision makers must evaluate the key BI capabilities that reduce IT efforts and make the BI platform easier to implement, deploy, maintain, and administer. 1 IDC. Demonstrating Business Value: Selling to Your C-Level Executives. Three Year Server TCO. Based on more than 300 interviews conducted across numerous platforms, presented in composite form. 5

8 MicroStrategy Ranked #1 for Administration Efficiency MicroStrategy Ranked #1 for Administration Efficiency arplan 1.18 Bissantz 0.39 Board 1.02 Cubeware 0.55 IBM Cognos Analysis N/A IBM Cognos Reporting 1.72 IBM Cognos TM1 Information Builders Infor PM Jedox PALO N/A N/A N/A N/A Microsoft SSAS 0.59 Microsoft SSRS N/A MicroStrategy 2.40 MIK 1.96 Oracle BIEE Oracle Hyperion Pentaho N/A N/A N/A QlikTech 0.71 SAP BO Webl 2.16 SAP BO Deskl SAP BW/ BEx Suite SAS TARGIT N/A N/A Source: The BI Survey 9 (2010) This chart provides a KPI score for the deployed seats per administrator head. The KPI is calculated so that higher administration costs lead to a lower KPI and vice versa. Figure 2: MicroStrategy Technology is Recognized for its Ability to Support Many More Users for Each IT Administrator MicroStrategy technology requires far fewer IT personnel for a given amount of BI users because its metadata is inherently easier to maintain requiring less redundancy, because end users have more self-service capabilities that offload work from IT staff, and because MicroStrategy provides a comprehensive set of administrative tools requiring fewer IT administrators. We evaluated several leading BI products and, using a total cost of ownership model, determined that MicroStrategy had the best combination of ease-of-use, time-to-market, successful retail implementations, and robust analytical capabilities. IT Senior Coordinator of Purchasing, Private Label and Reporting, Whole Foods Market The following table lists out key capabilities in which the MicroStrategy 9 platform helps organizations reduce costs when designing, deploying, administering and maintaining BI applications. 6

9 KEY COST REDUCING CAPABILITY MICROSTRATEGY 9 INFORMATION BUILDERS WEB FOCUS 8 Dynamic Report Personalization MicroStrategy has very robust Prompting engine. End users can dynamically author reports at run time by selecting attributes, metrics, metric levels, templates, filters, and even hierarchies. This greatly reduces report design dependency on IT and the number of reports for IT to maintain. The WebFocus platform provides the ability to create reports in which users are prompted to pick data fields to place on a report. However, richer prompt types like hierarchy prompts and level prompts are not supported by WebFocus, limiting the range of ad hoc reports that developers can create for end users. WebFocus InfoAssist has the ability to create new computed fields from preexisting data fields. WebFocus InfoAssist does not provide report consumers the ability to create and add derived elements (i.e. row groupings) to a report on-the-fly. Automatic Multi-source Drill Anywhere Business users can automatically drill anywhere to any data source without IT hard coding. NO No automatic drill anywhere and drilling across hierarchies requires IT hard coding for each report. Minimizing Design Effort Formatting over the Web Easy What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) formatting allows business users to format reports at runtime without IT support. Drilling down is available but not automatically when a new report is created, as reports created in the WebFocus platform must be explicitly OLAP-enabled. Multi-selecting and drilling on multiple items is not available in the WebFocus platform. Basic pixel perfect reports can be built in WebFocus using graphical layout tools such as InfoAssist, PowerPainter, or Report Assistant. More complex formatting and layout requirements typically require the report developer to write FOCUS code. One Repository of Reusable Business Logic Report developers can reuse all existing business logic across the entire platform rather than spending time recreating business logic. NO There is no one single repository of reusable business logic, resulting in a higher TCO. Visual Analysis for Rapid Decision Making MicroStrategy Visual Insight allows business users to intuitively visualize, filter, and drill into their data. The drag-anddrop, WYSIWYG interface allows business users to make data driven decision quickly and without any IT involvement. WebFocus Visual Discovery is an inmemory analytics solution with data visualization capabilities, however the visual design process in Visual Discovery module (an OEM from Advizor Solutions) is not as intuitive and automatic as in MicroStrategy Visual Insight. 7

10 Minimizing Deployment Effort KEY COST REDUCING CAPABILITY Easy to Customize and Upgrade Automated Deployment MICROSTRATEGY 9 INFORMATION BUILDERS WEB FOCUS 8 Upgradable plug-ins instantly customize to corporate look and feel without coding effort. Customizations are managed in a central location and can be upgraded with minimal IT effort. WebFocus is more difficult to implement, migrate, and use. The components of the WebFocus platform generally are able to communicate without specific development effort to tie the components together. However, for moderately complex applications, the WebFocus architecture is largely dependent on writing FOCUS code to develop the BI application and reference different files and components of the WebFocus infrastructure. Automated life cycle management tool WebFocus does not offer a synchronizes objects across development, comprehensive tool like MicroStrategy test, and production environments thus Object Manager for automated life cycle greatly reducing manual work associated management and consolidation and with BI deployments. reconciliation of disparate departmental BI applications. Data Import from the Web Interfact MicroStrategy Data Import functionality is for business users and provides the ability to easily import data from local files or relational databases and quickly convert them into dashboards or visualizations without any IT involvement. There are no file size constraints. The Upload Data File utility allows you to import data from a local file and access it through any of the WebFocus reporting tools, including Report Painter, HTML RA, HTML GA, HTML Layout Painter. Single Server A centralized server dramatically reduces administrative effort and complexity. Minimizing Administration Effort Single Point of Administration Out-of-the-Box System-wide Monitoring Administrators need to create users and security settings once and these settings apply to the entire MicroStrategy platform without requiring duplicate IT efforts. Prebuilt system performance dashboards allow the administrator to immediately analyze system usage data down to the details and to easily optimize resources. Automatically logs object change history without requiring IT staff efforts, easing auditing process. WebFocus provides a single point of administration. NO There is no Out-of-the-Box System-wide Monitoring. Automated Scripting Control Reduces repetitive and time consuming administrative tasks through automated command line scripts. WebFocus does not provide a comprehensive command line administrative tool for high volume tasks, making administration across BI applications more time consuming. 8

11 Minimizing Maintenance Effort KEY COST REDUCING CAPABILITY Automated Report and Data Integrity Checking Highly Reusable Business Metadata Scalable In-Memory ROLAP Architecture Automatic Change Management MICROSTRATEGY 9 INFORMATION BUILDERS WEB FOCUS 8 MicroStrategy administrators can uncover inconsistencies or errors before business users see them while reducing 98% of manual regression testing efforts. IT staff have to maintain only one business metadata object in one place, and this one definition is reused across the entire platform to reduce IT maintenance efforts. MicroStrategy customers can instantly leverage multiple types of data assets with a powerful in memory technology. MicroStrategy s unified platform and object-oriented development method ensure that a change is propagated to all related objects, ensuring one version of the truth with minimal IT maintenance effort. Administrators have limited ability to automate report and data integrity checking tasks. NO WebFocus provides limited metadata reusability. This forces report developers to spend more time redundantly creating report objects and results in a higher TCO. Information Builders product lacks a scalable In-memory ROLAP technology to provide an instant reporting database across multiple data sources. Information Builders only provides support for dynamic sourcing capabilities that leverage Inmemory ROLAP cubes. WebFocus does not use multi-pass SQL and in-memory temporary tables thus missing opportunities to improve scalability and performance. WebFocus does not provide out-of-thebox tracking and change auditing in the metadata. MicroStrategy s change journaling feature allows users to document and track changes to metadata objects. 2. All User Needs through a Single Platform The ideal architecture for business intelligence is the one that provides organizations with a single and cohesive model of the business that can be automatically displayed through any user interface. MicroStrategy users have the option to access a single version of the truth through interactive Web, Microsoft Office, and mobile device interfaces. MicroStrategy 9 includes a newly re-engineered Web user interface that is designed to be faster, more powerful, and more personalized than ever before. The MicroStrategy 9 Web architecture boasts a wide range of performance-enhancing changes that make the user interface interactive and instantly responsive to user requests. 9

12 Five Styles of Business Intelligence Through a Single Platform Scorecards & Dashboards Opera4onal Dashboards Dynamic Scorecards Metrics Management Enterprise Repor4ng Page perfect Opera4onal Repor4ng Pixel perfect Business Repor4ng Print perfect Statements & Invoices OLAP Analysis & Visual Explora4on Visual Explora4on Slice & Dice Inves4ga4ve Analysis Root Cause Determina4on Data Mining & Predic4ve Analysis Ad Hoc Analysis Predic4ve Analysis Data Mining Mobile Apps & Aler4ng Mobile Applica4ons Massive Informa4on Distribu4on ipad, iphone, BlackBerry, Excep4on based Alerts Figure 3: Users Can Seamlessly Traverse All Styles of BI from a Unified Platform and a Single Interface MicroStrategy s long history and devotion to producing world-class business intelligence technology provided us with extreme confidence that we are making the right decision for our casino partners. MicroStrategy s interactive dashboards with advanced data visualizations will allow our clients to view complex data in an easily understood and graphically appealing manner to improve decision-making. In addition, we look forward to implementing MicroStrategy s Mobile BI on the BlackBerry, iphone, and ipad, which will give our customers far greater flexibility in business intelligence than is currently available today. President, Aristocrat Technologies. 10

13 KEY BI REQUIREMENTS MICROSTRATEGY 9 INFORMATION BUILDERS WEBFOCUS 8 Dynamic Enterprise Dashboards Dashboards integrated with industrial-strength BI platform Fast WYSIWYG Pixel Perfect design Single design environment Automatically drill anywhere in any data source from the dashboard Native parallel Flash and DHTML visualizations Multiple layers of analysis Multi-layout dashboards Automatic multi-panel filtering Dashboard templates reduce design time Dashboard output caching in HTML, PDF, Excel, and Flash for instantaneous response Actionable dashboards Dashboards are created using reports and objects from MicroStrategy s single metadata. Intelligence Server provides its sophisticated processing, security, caching, and analytical capabilities. Users design dashboards from MicroStrategy s single Web interface using already familiar design paradigm. Dashboards are created in a Pixel Perfect, zero-footprint Web interface, WYSIWYG and freeform layout. MicroStrategy dashboards provide high interactivity via selector controls that allow users to dynamically apply filters to all dashboard components and to synchronize data across multiple analytical layers of information. Users can automatically drill throughout the full depth and breadth of the data warehouse to obtain more detailed information or view related information. MicroStrategy dashboards provide multipanel and multi-tab layers for various views of data. Multiple dashboards can also be assembled into a single dashboard book. MicroStrategy 9 dashboard templates provide reusable starting points with sophisticated formatting that can make any business user a dashboard designer. Pre-calculated dashboards are cached for instant viewing in HTML, PDF, Excel, and Flash. MicroStrategy provides the ability to implement, and embed transactional capabilities into the dashboards. Using MicroStrategy Dashboards, business users can not only monitor key business metrics, but also initiate appropriate actions from within the dashboard. Basic enterprise reports can be built in WebFocus using graphical layout tools such as InfoAssist, PowerPainter, or Report Assistant. More complex formatting and layout requirements typically require the report developer to write FOCUS code. WebFocus InfoAssist gives users basic capabilities to layout grids and graphs on reports. However, custom development is typically required to provide interactivity common in dashboards, such as selectors and panels. Custom development is also typically required to provide complex layout logic. 11

14 KEY BI REQUIREMENTS MICROSTRATEGY 9 INFORMATION BUILDERS WEBFOCUS 8 Rapid Comprehension of Data Through Advanced Visualizations Out-of-the-box library of advanced visualizations Automatic drilling from visualizations Easy to create and deploy customized widgets Flexible properties support different types of data comparisons Extensible library of visualizations and widgets created by 3rd parties Customizable advanced visualizations and widgets Robust Enterprise Reporting Pixel Perfect absolute positioning OLAP-enabled grids and graphs Horizontal and vertical display of data Desktop publishing formatting Advanced Export to Excel, Word, PowerPoint, or PDF High quality printing Templates for rapid design MicroStrategy 9 provides an out-of-thebox library of advanced visualizations and widgets that enhance the understanding of complex data and highlight patterns and trends. MicroStrategy provides a library of advanced visualizations, including Bullet Graphs, Micro Charts, Interactive Heat Maps, Interactive Bubble Charts, Grid of Graphs, Bubbles Grid, RSS, Fish Eye, Media, Cloud, Time Slider, and Stack Area Charts. All visualizations have drilling capabilities and enable users to select data elements that filter out other areas of the dashboard. Each MicroStrategy widget has flexible capabilities and properties that enable users to immediately identify or further investigate trends or anomalies in the data. For example, the Heat Map widget incorporates OLAP technology that enables users to filter data based on numeric values. MicroStrategy customers can extend the advanced visualizations library by importing 3rd party visualizations. Advanced dashboard designers can edit or create their own visualizations or widgets. The widgets are built using the power of Adobe Flash and are part of MicroStrategy s single platform. MicroStrategy offers comprehensive report styles for banded reports. These documents are highly interactive, providing in-place OLAP analysis through pivoting, drilling, and Excel-like formatting toolbars. Highly formatted documents are built using common desktop publishing paradigms such as rulers and Pixel Perfect positioning, all in a zero-footprint Web. MicroStrategy s export to PDF capabilities support advanced PDF features such as table of contents and watermarks. Export to Excel supports export of multiple document layouts to multiple Excel worksheets. Print-perfect reports can be printed exactly as-seen to any network printer. MicroStrategy documents can be printed horizontally or vertically. Users can dynamically change the page layout, apply fit-to-page functionality, and customize headers and footers for any report. MicroStrategy provides out-of-the-box templates and the ability to create custom templates in order to decrease design time. These templates can be saved and shared across multiple projects. WebFocus' much more limited visualization capabilities hamper its ability to provide the impactful presentation of important trends and the identification of outliers in large volumes of data. No automatic drilling from visualizations. WebFocus offers significantly less reporting functionality and flexibility. Basic enterprise reports can be built in WebFocususing graphical layout tools such as InfoAssist, PowerPainter, or Report Assistant. More complex formatting and layout requirements typically require the report developer to write FOCUS code. 12

15 KEY BI REQUIREMENTS MICROSTRATEGY 9 INFORMATION BUILDERS WEBFOCUS 8 Information Delivery and Proactive Notification Ability to self-subscribe and subscribe others to report deliveries Alerting and thresholds Wide range of output types: Web, , print, fax, wireless, and file server Report bursting Portal integration, with support for portal servers including: Microsoft SharePoint, SAP NetWeaver Portal, Oracle WebLogic, and WebSphere Flexible and Powerful OLAP Interactivity Drill anywhere fosters investigative analysis Derived elements and derived metrics for on-the-fly calculations and groupings View filters for quick data filtering On the fly creation of derived elements, custom groups, subtotals, etc. Built-in financial and statistical functions Users can subscribe themselves and other users to personalized reports and alerts. Report deliveries can be triggered by dynamic events, exception thresholds, or time schedules. Personalized content can be delivered via portal, print, , wireless, or file servers. MicroStrategy s platform leverages highly scalable technology that slices a single report and dynamically bursts personalized information to the right users. Reusing a single report across hundreds of users saves processing resources. Portal integration is available out-of-thebox, with support for portal servers such as Microsoft SharePoint, SAP NetWeaver Portal, Oracle WebLogic, and WebSphere. Portlet-to-portlet communication is also available out-of-the-box, making it easier to inject BI into a portal. The MicroStrategy BI platform provides an extensive set of data manipulation options to allow the user to delve deeply into a report to identify and discover important trends and patterns in the data. Users can drill anywhere in the entire data warehouse for boundary-free investigative analysis. New derived metrics, derived attribute element groups, filters, and subtotals can be created on-the-fly using existing metrics and attributes in the report. This functionality makes it possible for users to perform new calculations, custom groupings, and filtering directly on the report at the speed of thought. MicroStrategy s analytical engine provides hundreds of built-in financial, statistical, and mathematical functions. Information Builders product supports basic capabilities for information delivery and notification. Drilling down is available but not automatically when a new report is created, as reports created in the WebFocus platform must be explicitly OLAP-enabled. Multi-selecting and drilling on multiple items is not possible in the WebFocus platform. 13

16 KEY BI REQUIREMENTS MICROSTRATEGY 9 INFORMATION BUILDERS WEBFOCUS 8 Seamless Microsoft Office Integration All Office products supported (Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook) Leverage all BI reports and reporting objects Full new report creation Ability to save logic created in Excel back to enterprise metadata Persistent and interchangeable formatting across Office and Web Server based configuration for client settings, user, host, and IP address settings MicroStrategy delivers the complete reporting and analysis environment to Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook users. MicroStrategy Office applications are linked to MicroStrategy security and administration, ensuring 100% data consistency across the enterprise. Users are able to access existing reports or create new ones from within Microsoft Office applications. Changes made through Microsoft Office are immediately reflected across MicroStrategy Office and Web interfaces and can be saved to the enterprise business logic metadata layer. Microsoft Office formatting changes are preserved after automatic data updates. The Web administrator can set client side settings and security. Users can change their passwords through the familiar Microsoft Office interface. WebFocus delivers the reporting and analysis environment to Microsoft Excel but it can only export reports and charts to PowerPoint, and Word. 3. self-service through a fast and intuitive USER EXPERIENCE MicroStrategy 9 provides capabilities for business personnel to create their own ad hoc report designs easily from their Web browser. Using drag-and-drop actions through the MicroStrategy 9 Web interface, any business person can assemble virtually any report by adding attributes and metrics to a simple report template without the need to know any technical details about the data or the underlying databases. With MicroStrategy 9, business users also have the ability to interactively build analysis with dozens of visualization options. To enhance usability, the MicroStrategy 9 Web user interface adopts many familiar Microsoft paradigms, including ribbon toolbars, accordion controls, control-click multi-select capability, and context-sensitive right-click actions. 14

17 MicroStrategy Provides End Users with a Fast and Intuitive User Experience Add/Remove Add/Remove Attributes A*ributes Metrics Easily filter Filter data Many Views Drop Zones for multidimensional mulcdimensional analysis Visually analyze Analyze Data data or use OLAP enabled Grids grids Figure 4: Design and Format a MicroStrategy Report Using a Fast and Intuitive User Interface MicroStrategy s next-generation of advanced self-service functionality is designed to provide more control to business users. Business users can easily import their personal or corporate data directly from the MicroStrategy Web interface and quickly convert the raw data into insightful visual analyses, reports, or dashboards. The MicroStrategy Visual Insight interface provides incredible speed-of-interactivity, stunning visualizations, drag-and-drop manipulations, and instant results thus allowing business users to rapidly go from data to decisions.. We were impressed with MicroStrategy s self-service architecture, ease-of-use, highly visual dashboards, and mobile reporting that allows us to put the analytics and reporting in the hands of the business user. MicroStrategy s history in the business intelligence sphere also gave us confidence that we had chosen the right technology IT Specialist at Silverstar Casinos partner. 15

18 KEY BI REQUIREMENTS MICROSTRATEGY 9 INFORMATION BUILDERS WEBFOCUS 8 User-Friendly Interface Drag-and-drop actions One-click access Familiar Microsoft paradigms Tree view navigation Ribbon toolbars and menus Accordion controls Personalized interface User collaboration capabilities Context-sensitive online help Sophisticated formatting for final report presentation Self-Service Web Interface Fully interactive interface with controls for data formatting, manipulation, and analysis Real-time changes without a publishing process Creation of report objects, such as prompts and filters, over the Web What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) design and editing of any report type over the Web Zero-footprint Web interface from any browser The MicroStrategy Web interface leverages many familiar, user-friendly paradigms, including folder-tree navigation, ribbon toolbars, accordion controls, control-click multi-select capabilities, and context-sensitive rightclick actions. MicroStrategy 9 enables collaboration via comments that can be added to reports to provide instructions to other users and to share information. Every report can maintain and display a set of notes with details on who left the note and when. MicroStrategy provides users comprehensive, context-sensitive help throughout the interface. MicroStrategy Web allows users to format reports and save custom format styles. These include row-level headers, row-level values, column-level headers, column-level values, metric headers, metric values, subtotal headers, subtotal values, custom groups, consolidation, and reports. MicroStrategy puts wide-ranging control in the hands of business users, minimizing the need for IT personnel to perform the same functions. Business users are able to rapidly create, manipulate, format, and analyze any report themselves, all through a single Web interface. Report objects such as prompts, filters, derived metrics, thresholds, and totals can also be created over the Web. Individual columns and rows on a grid can be selected quickly and users can easily format, drill, pivot, and perform other tasks on-the-fly. Changes are available right away without any need to publish or export information to other environments. Business users create highly formatted reports using any metadata object using a zero-footprint, WYSIWYG design paradigm that drastically shortens report development time. MicroStrategy Web is zero-footprint, and does not rely on Java or ActiveX. As a result, report designers and business users can use any browser to design and interact with reports. Gartner s survey customers rated Information Builders WebFocus as being more difficult to implement, migrate and use. WebFocus end users, with consumer and recipient roles, get a dynamic view of reports only in WebFocus Info Assist. WebFocus tools provide limited pixel-level positioning of report objects over the report layout. More complex formatting and layout requirements typically require the report developer to write FOCUS code. 16

19 KEY BI REQUIREMENTS MICROSTRATEGY 9 INFORMATION BUILDERS WEBFOCUS 8 Advanced Self-Service Functionality Data Import Visual Insight Instant Response to User Actions Extreme AJAX Web interface High degree of client-side processing while maintaining a zero-footprint Web client The Data Import and Visual Insight functionality is designed to give more control to business users. Business users can convert raw data into decisions in minutes and without assistance from the IT department. Using Data Import functionality, business users can easily import personal or corporate data from local files, Excel files, or relational databases through the MicroStrategy Web interface. The imported data can be easily converted into interactive reports or dashboards without any IT assistance. MicroStrategy Visual Insight allows business users to visually identify patterns, trends, and anomalies in data. Business users can intuitively query, visualize, filter, and drill into their data. A drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG interface enables business users to visualize the changes as they are made. MicroStrategy Visual Insight provides incredible speed-of-interactivity, detailed visualizations, and instant query results, thus allowing business users to rapidly go from data to decisions. The MicroStrategy Web architecture adheres to an Extreme AJAX model, shifting processing from the Web server to the Web browser for any browser type. By spreading the processing workload, the user is given a much more responsive and interactive Web experience while still preserving a true zero-footprint Web interface. WebFocus does support local file imports, and allows you to import data from a text file and access it through any of the WebFocus reporting tools, including Report Painter, HTML RA, HTML GA, HTML Layout Painter, but there are significant constraints on the file formats WebFocus supports. WebFocus supports only two file formats: Excel files and delimited text files. The visual design process in Visual Discovery module (an OEM from Advizor Solutions) is not as intuitive and automatic as in MicroStrategy Visual Insight. WebFocus report consumers get dynamic reports, but report development and usage isn t as smooth as in MicroStrategy. Report and dashboard development can be more complicated, which is why more complex functionality requires coding in the WebFocus script. 17

20 KEY BI REQUIREMENTS MICROSTRATEGY 9 INFORMATION BUILDERS WEBFOCUS 8 Dynamic Report Personalization Comprehensive parameter and question prompting (column, filter, search based, value, hierarchical) Personal answers saved for reuse across different reports Security profiles personalize report content for individual users In MicroStrategy, a single report can span hundreds of possible data combinations tailored to different user needs. MicroStrategy prompts provide report input parameters that control most aspects of a report, and give the user significant ad hoc reporting capabilities. Prompts enable the personalization of reports from a single report definition, reducing the number of objects stored in the metadata repository. Advanced report parameters, like object (column) and hierarchy prompts, allow users to select the business attributes and KPIs to include in the report at run-time. MicroStrategy Web displays prompt values and report contents that are permitted by the user's security profile. For example, when running a prompted report, dashboard, or document, the user can only select prompt answers that he has permission to see. In a similar way, when running a report, only the metrics and attributes that the user has permission to see will be displayed to the user. WebFocus allows users to select attributes and metrics, but does not have other prompt types like hierarchy prompts, and level prompts. 4. High Performance at Any Scale MicroStrategy technology has long been the performance leader at high user counts and data scale. MicroStrategy 9 continues and extends that leadership with adaptive caching technology called In-memory ROLAP and SQL generation optimizations that can deliver the highest query performance, even when accessing hundreds of terabytes of data. In-memory ROLAP takes advantage of the huge addressable memory space now available on 64- bit computers to provide high performance middle-tier databases that can respond directly to data requests from reports, dashboards, and OLAP analyses. We look forward to using MicroStrategy 9 In-memory ROLAP technology to help us improve our user experience with faster response times and to take unnecessary pressure off our Teradata system. Manager of BI Architecture, ebay 18