OEM
Program
Overview
MicroStrategy, Inc.
info@microstrategy.com
02
(888) 537-8135
Table of Contents
1 INTRODUCTION
1
2 AVAILABLE RESOURCES
2
3 OEM PARTNER BENEFITS
4
4 PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE
7
5 EDUCATION OFFERINGS
11
6 TECHNICAL SUPPORT
16
7 MARKETING OFFERINGS
17
8 THE MICROSTRATEGY BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE PLATFORM
19
9 MICROSTRATEGY DIFFERENTIATORS
30
03
1 Introduction
Welcome! We are pleased that you have chosen to work with MicroStrategy as
the embedded business intelligence (BI) platform for your own customer application.
If you have received this OEM Program guide, you have either recently completed the
contractual obligations and are the newest member of the MicroStrategy OEM Partner
ecosystem or you have expressed a sincere interest to engage with MicroStrategy as the
potential embedded BI platform for your solution.
This guide discusses the core tenets of the MicroStrategy OEM Program. It is designed
to provide you with various ways to accelerate the development and deployment of
your MicroStrategy-based solution. This document includes a breakdown of available
resources, OEM Partner benefits, professional services offerings, education offerings, and
ways we can supplement your marketing efforts to get your solution into your prospects’
and customers’ hands as quickly as possible.
MicroStrategy values our partners’ feedback and insights so we can better enable you
to drive your business. We constantly strive to provide you with assistance related to our
products, technical support, education, professional services, and the OEM Program in
general. Please share your thoughts with us and let us know if there is anything we can
do to strengthen our partnership.
We look forward to a very prosperous partnership!
1
2 Available Resources
As a MicroStrategy OEM Partner, the following resources will be made available to ensure
your success with MicroStrategy development initiatives.
2.1 Dedicated Account Team
MicroStrategy has dedicated an Account Manager and Sales Engineer to work with your
team. If you have any questions about any aspect of our partnership, please reach out to
your account team as they can point you in the right direction.
2.2 World-Class Technical Support
MicroStrategy provides its partners with phone-based technical support during business
hours. Developers can access their cases and all information about these cases via
https://resource.microstrategy.com/Support/. MicroStrategy Support can escalate cases
to Advanced Product Support as required, as well as log enhancement requests for
technology to review for a future release. Support Engineers also have access to webbased meeting technology to help troubleshoot your issues.
2.3 Customer Forum
MicroStrategy has set up bulletin-board style forums for asking questions of other partners and customers (https://resource.microstrategy.com/forum/). These forums are broken
down by product and general issue to help you find similar questions that have been
posted previously.
2.4 Product Manuals
All product manuals are available in electronic format on any machine with MicroStrategy software installed by visiting Start->Programs->MicroStrategy->Product Manuals. The
manuals include Project Design, Basic and Advanced Report Development, Report Services
Guide, System Administration, and others.
2.5 Knowledge Base
The Knowledge Base contains thousands of technical notes to help you resolve issues you
might have during the installation and implementation of MicroStrategy. The Knowledge
Base is available at https://resource.microstrategy.com/Support/.
2
2.6 Developer Library
If you own a license to the MicroStrategy SDK, you can either install the developer library
on your local machine or access it through our online MicroStrategy Developer Zone. This
library contains valuable technical information and sample code to customize, extend, and
integrate the MicroStrategy-based OEM solution to 3rd party software. Simply send an
email to support@microstrategy.com with the name and email address of the developers
who need access and an account will be set up for them.
2.7 Competitive Intelligence
MicroStrategy can provide access to competitive intelligence to help your sales teams differentiate your offerings as they market your solutions. This can take the form of sharable
documents, general documentation of MicroStrategy strengths, or training of your sales
team on how to combat specific competitors.
3
3 OEM Partner Benefits
MicroStrategy Offers an Integrated Platform for Faster Time-to-Market
Many of MicroStrategy’s OEM Partners go to market first with a dashboard offering
built on MicroStrategy. However, they quickly add ad-hoc reporting, OLAP analysis,
proactive notification and/or advanced analytics as additional products. It is very often
the case that OEM Partners can charge for these additional features while investing
little additional development effort due to the integrated nature of the MicroStrategy
platform. Based on research and surveys conducted within our OEM partner community,
on average, OEM partners have reported a license revenue increase of 20-30% by
incorporating business intelligence and analytics capabilities into their product offerings.
3.1
OEM Development Package
MicroStrategy offers a comprehensive Development Package to empower its OEM
Partners’ development and support teams with the tools and resources that facilitate
efficient product development. Key elements of the Development Package include:
3.1.1
Developer License
As part of the OEM Development Package, OEM partners receive five Developer licenses
– one license contains the entire MicroStrategy BI product suite including administrative
tools and the remaining four licenses contain the developer product suite.
3.1.2
Sales and Demonstration License
MicroStrategy provides its OEM Partners with a license key that allows unlimited product usage for the purposes of selling or demonstrating your MicroStrategy-based solution. This key
can be installed on a central demonstration server or locally on individual end-user machines.
3.1.3
Support License
MicroStrategy provides its OEM Partners with a license key that enables your support team
to provide support of your solution to your customers.
3.1.4
Education Passes
As part of the OEM development package, MicroStrategy offers two education passes
to its OEM Partners – one for the main support contact and the second one for back-up
support. These education passes allow the named users to attend an unlimited number
of online classes, virtual distance learning classes, and obtain certifications anywhere,
anytime, for one annual fee.
4
3.1.5
OEM On-Boarding Program
MicroStrategy offers development assistance and guidance in the form of consulting hours
to support OEM Partners’ product development efforts that facilitate a faster-time-to-market.
More details about this program can be found in Section 4 – Product Development Assistance.
3.2
Access to Beta Software
MicroStrategy provides access to future versions of our technology as soon as the software
enters a Beta phase. MicroStrategy will also provide support to its OEM Partners during Beta
testing. For more information, please visit http://www.microstrategy.com/software/beta.
3.3
Discounted Prices for Enterprise Business Intelligence Functionality
MicroStrategy provides its OEM Partners with deep pricing discounts. Our intent is to
enable you to augment your product offering with an enterprise-class business intelligence
offering, while also allowing you to sell your solution, inclusive of MicroStrategy licenses,
at a price point where you are able to make healthy profit margins.
3.4
Ability to Adopt MicroStrategy Documentation
MicroStrategy provides PDF versions of all of its product manuals. OEM Partners are
encouraged to leverage material from this
documentation to help create documentation
for their own applications to share with their
end customers.
3.5 OEM Newsletter
MicroStrategy publishes a quarterly newsletter to
its OEM Partners to provide them with the latest
information about MicroStrategy, best practices,
and a Partner Spotlight highlighting a successful
OEM Partner implementation. These newsletters
can be very helpful in sharing ideas that make your
MicroStrategy-based solution stronger.
5
3.6
User Conferences
Every year, MicroStrategy hosts its worldwide user conferences in North America and
Europe. MicroStrategy partners are encouraged to attend and sponsor these user conferences and leverage the insightful content shared on our product and service capabilities.
There are special partner-dedicated sessions to give partners an opportunity to showcase
their MicroStrategy-based product or solution offerings, highlight customer successes, or
have joint customers present their implementation successes. In addition, MicroStrategy
invests in its partner user conferences to showcase its joint BI solutions and demonstrate
the value and strength of the partnership.
6
4 Product Development
Assistance
MicroStrategy understands that a pressing goal of every new OEM Partner is to get their product to market.
MicroStrategy offers full, end-to-end BI consulting services to support this goal - giving you the option of
enhancing your team with our experts or even outsourcing your BI development or hosting. In addition, our
OEM Onboarding Program is a specialized approach designed to provide you with the right expertise at the
right time during the course of your initial product development. Whichever approach you choose, the use
of MicroStrategy Consulting will ensure better quality, lower risk, and more cost effective product roll-out.
4.1
OEM Onboarding Program
The MicroStrategy OEM Onboarding Program is a development assistance approach that provides support in
the following three areas:
• Project start up – MicroStrategy will help you scope and plan your business intelligence project as well as
kick-start your development.
• White labeling – Experts in MicroStrategy integration will help embed our cutting edge business
intelligence technology into your product.
• Project mentoring – Weekly advisory calls with your MicroStrategy Consultant ensures you stay on track
and achieve your objectives.
The precise duration of the program depends on your development requirements, but a typical
Onboarding would involve approximately 200 hours of consulting assistance utilized over a three month
period. The following diagram is a high-level schedule for this program:
INITIATE
PLAN
DESIGN and DEVELOP
DEPLOY
Project
mobilization
Planning
and analysis
Advisory Workshop
Customization
integration
Prepare for
deployment
Check-in
2 Weeks
Project kick-off
Advisory workshop
2 Weeks
Project Closure
Time frame based upon desired deliverables
7
The key to the success of this program is that MicroStrategy experts help you with the initial
product configuration and development planning. Then those same experts provide design
guidance through to initial deployment.
4.2
Blended Development Teams and the Global Delivery Center
In addition to the mentoring approach of the OEM Onboarding, MicroStrategy can also
take a more active role in your product development in order to fast-track your go-tomarket strategy. MicroStrategy Consulting offers a blended approach of on-site and
off-site consultants who collaborate effectively with your internal teams to rapidly expand
your BI product lines. All MicroStrategy Global Delivery Center (GDC) consultants are
MicroStrategy employees, MicroStrategy Certified Engineers, and adhere to the same
delivery methodology as our on-site consultants.
The following diagram shows the typical communication flow between the on-site and offsite team members:
Onshore team sends
requirements to the
offshore team
Schema developer creates
objects; passes objects to
report developers. Reports
developers create reports
DAILY UPDATES VIA
PROGRESS REPORTS
AND WEB MEETING
CLYCLE BEGINS
AGAIN
Onshore team
provides validation
Onshore team performs
requirements gathering
FINAL VALIDATION
AND HANDOFF
Onshore team
provides validation
Offshore team
tests reports
8
PRESENTATION VIA
WEB MEETING
At the GDC, centers of expertise cultivate end-to-end technical competencies to support a
variety of product development requirements. Centers of expertise include:
• Dashboards
ºº Dashboard and document development - including metadata modifications or server
tuning as necessary
ºº Advanced visualizations using the MicroStrategy widgets library
• Customization and SDK
ºº Integration with portals such as WebLogic, WebSphere, SharePoint, and custom
Flex portals
ºº Support and documented best practices for multi-tenant configurations and
software-as-a-service
ºº Integration with established enterprise security models and other third party products
such as GIS applications
ºº Customization of standard MicroStrategy functionality
ºº Development of new widgets for advanced visualizations
ºº Modification of applications “look and feel” to enrich the BI interface
ºº Development of custom applications
• Data Warehousing and ETL
ºº Definition of data modeling solutions to improve MicroStrategy BI analysis
ºº Warehouse schema design for performance optimization
ºº Experience with all leading ETL technologies
• Upgrades, Migrations, and Conversions
ºº Upgrades between different versions and releases of MicroStrategy
ºº Migrations of MicroStrategy applications between various operating systems
ºº Conversion from other BI platforms to MicroStrategy
ºº Familiarity with competitive BI Applications
ºº Direct connection to MicroStrategy Product Management for detailed knowledge of
product release modifications
• General BI
ºº Report and document design and development
ºº Predictive analytics and data mining
9
ºº UAT support
ºº Platform administration (user and security management)
ºº Solution hosting
• Mobile Intelligence
ºº BI application development and implementation for mobile platforms such as the
iPhone®, iPad®, AndroidTM, and BlackBerry®
ºº Shaping of solutions and final offerings in cooperation with MicroStrategy’s
technology and product management departments
ºº Access to new MicroStrategy applications prior to their general availability (GA) launch
ºº Capacity in terms of people and hardware: certified mobile experts and various
mobile devices to facilitate development
• Managed Services
ºº Privilege and security administration
ºº Application maintenance
ºº Application change management
ºº Server and version upgrades
ºº Solution hosting (including MicroStrategy Cloud)
10
5 Education Offerings
With our comprehensive curriculum and highly-skilled education consultants,
MicroStrategy Education Services supplies the right skills at the right time to the right
audience. During the past year alone, more than 10,000 customers and partners from
over 800 different organizations have benefited from MicroStrategy instruction.
• Training on full life-cycle business intelligence solution development, implementation
and usage
• A variety of classes – from data modeling and advanced querying to environment
configuration and administration
• Goal-oriented, comprehensive education solutions based on your specific education needs
• More than nine years of experience in course development and business
intelligence instruction
• A global team of education consultants who have logged thousands of hours of
training and courseware development
5.1
Developer Education
MicroStrategy offers both instructor-led and online education. Instructor-led courses are offered at over 50 locations worldwide, as well as through “distance learning” – live instructorled training delivered via web meeting tools. For a complete list of our courses and class
schedules, please visit http://www.microstrategy.com/training-events/education/courses/.
5.1.1
Education Passes
MicroStrategy’s Perennial Education Pass (PEP) program offers our OEM Partners the
utmost flexibility in educating each developer. The PEP Program allows you to train
identified individuals through an unlimited number of MicroStrategy courses under one
payment structure.
By offering an element of flexibility into our education services, MicroStrategy enables
OEM Partners to properly educate key personnel and to ensure those individuals’ skills
remain up-to-date. The PEP Program is the most cost-effective training solution available
to an individual. For more information, please visit http://www.microstrategy.com/
Education/PEP/.
11
5.1.2
Recommended Courses for OEM Partners
MicroStrategy’s instructor-led training and certification programs address the full lifecycle
of business intelligence development, implementation, and use. We help technical and
end users alike understand how to raise their productivity, improve the depth of their
analyses, and use technical creatively to address business challenges.
Listed below are some of the more relevant courses for our OEM Partners. For a complete
list of available courses and their syllabi, please visit http://www.microstrategy.com/
training-events/education/courses/
Project
Lead
Project
Architect
Desktop
Developer
ü
ü
Desktop: Reporting Essentials
Architect: Project Design
Essentials
Desktop: Advanced Reporting
Report Services: Document
Essentials
Report Services: Dynamic
Dashboards
Implementing MicroStrategy:
Development and Deployment
Mobile for Apple® iPad™ and
iPhone®
Web for Professional
Mobile
Developer
SDK
Developer
ü
ü
ü
ü
ü
ü
ü
ü
ü
ü
ü
Web for Reporters and Analysts
Engine Essentials
ü
Architect: Advanced Project
Design
Advanced Data Warehousing
ü
ü
Data Mining Services Essentials
ü
ü
Freeform SQL Essentials
Web SDK: Customization
Essentials
Visualization SDK Essentials
5.2
Web
Report
Developer
ü
ü
Sales Training & Demo Scripts
MicroStrategy makes available, at no additional cost to its partners, an entire library of
presentation and demonstration material. This material can be used as-is or modified to fit
your specific message.
12
MicroStrategy will work with you to train your sales and sales engineering teams on
positioning business intelligence, a demo script that shows the most exciting capabilities
with MicroStrategy, and applicable competitive intelligence.
5.3
End User Education
In order to ensure the success of your application, it is essential that end users establish
a level of comfort with the application and the functionality it provides. Even the best
solution will fail if the end user community does not accept it or understand how to use
it. Providing courseware that is relevant to your application and your client’s business will
increase student retention and comprehension of the material.
Three main components make up our approach to enabling you to get to market with
professional, tailored documentation for your customers.
Customized Content
Your end users require documentation that is tailored to what they use everyday.
MicroStrategy works with you to modify our courseware to reflect your customized
application using reports that are relevant to your customer’s business. The course
templates are modularized allowing for easy modification to the content with reports
and data relevant to your customer’s end users. The courseware can be modified to have
screen shots, business examples, exercises and text that reflect your customer’s business
and reporting needs. We have found that end users benefit greatly using documentation
that contains a significant amount of business content. In the absence of familiar business
examples, end users are often inadequately prepared to use the application and at times
do not understand the reports provided.
Customized courseware offers the following benefits:
• Increases relevance of the material to students
• Optimizes student retention
• Creates a more participatory learning environment
• Serves as accurate reference material on the application
• Combines data training (the ‘what’) with functional training (the ‘how’)
By leveraging our expertise in the development of custom courseware, you will be able to
deliver a program tailored to your specific MicroStrategy-based applications, thus enabling
your customers to relate general tool proficiency to their specific business applications.
13
By using our course templates as the foundation to your training documentation, you will
have the ability to deploy tailored courseware in a fraction of the time it would take if you
were starting from scratch.
5.3.1
MicroStrategy Training For Your Customers
MicroStrategy has created the following three components to enable you to go to market
with professional, tailored documentation for your customers.
Courseware Licensing
MicroStrategy licenses the customized courseware to you to use when training your
customers. You retain this documentation in electronic form for ongoing modifications,
maintenance, and course delivery.
Courseware Customization
MicroStrategy works with you to create courseware that is customized to your application. Customization includes modifying the text, screen shots, business examples, and
exercises within the courseware based on the functionality and reports you deploy to
your customers.
Train-the-Trainer
A Train-the-Trainer Program ensures that the quality and integrity of instruction remains
high as MicroStrategy transfers the customized material to you for use when training
your customers. As part of the Train-the-Trainer Program, a MicroStrategy Education
Consultant reviews the teaching script and demonstrations with your trainers to ensure
they are properly prepared to deliver the class on their own.
5.3.2
Online Courseware Offerings
MicroStrategy Web Online Training offers a flexible, self-paced learning environment
about MicroStrategy Web. Users log in to an online course that has been tailored to
your project and learn how to fully leverage the features of MicroStrategy Web from
almost anywhere. Your business users learn at their own pace during convenient times,
minimizing the impact on day-to-day productivity. In addition to the convenience Web
Online Training provides, its ability to seamlessly integrate into your existing Learning
Management System (LMS) is highly cost-effective. MicroStrategy Web Online Training
is designed using state-of-the-art authoring tools, enabling you to “create once, publish
anywhere”. Integration is quick and the online content lasts longer because of its universal
compatibility, resulting in a better return on your educational investment.
14
There are two components to the pricing of the MicroStrategy Web Online Training.
The first component is to have MicroStrategy customize the content pages and the
simulations to reflect your application. The degree of customization drives the number of
customization days. The second component is a courseware licensing fee which enables
you to host the custom online course in-house to train a defined number of end users
either within one customer or across multiple customers.
There are two versions of the MicroStrategy Web Online Training solution. One course is 8
hours in duration (Web Report Analysis) and the other is 16 hours in duration (Web Report
Design). Each online course is broken down into topic areas with simulations (interactivity)
and quizzes to reinforce learning.
Web Report Analysis Online
Web Report Design Online
Number of Topics
14
27
Number of Simulations
11
24
Number of Quizzes
24
25
15
6 Technical Support
MicroStrategy understands that your technical support needs are unique and may evolve
over time. From your first Pixel Perfect report to the latest software upgrade, our engineers
stand prepared to assist you. We are delighted to offer five distinct technical support
plans, one of which is sure to address your business requirements. MicroStrategy Technical
Support provides unmatched service to our worldwide customers and partners through
commitment to customer satisfaction and dedication to personalized support.
The chart below summarizes the services available through each of our technical
support plans:
Services
Elite
Dedicated
Managed
Extended
Standard
Regular On-Site Review Meetings
ü
Prioritize Bug Requests
ü
Priority Involvement in Beta Programs
ü
Prioritized Product
Enhancement Requests
ü
Dedicated Support Engineer
ü
ü
Environment Replication
ü
ü
Weekly Status Report
ü
ü
Critical Issue Notification
ü
ü
Assigned Case Manager
ü
ü
ü
Recurring Project Status
Conference Calls
ü
ü
ü
24x7x365 Critical Tech Support
ü
option
option
ü
option
Weekend Assistance
ü
New Software Releases and Updates
option
option
ü
option
Multi-channel Communication
ü
ü
ü
ü
ü
ü
ü
ü
ü
ü
Customer-Designed Support Liason
4
3
3
3
2
Knowledge Base Access
ü
ü
ü
ü
ü
Multi-Continent Support
option
option
option
option
option
Additional Support Liasons
option
option
option
option
option
MicroStrategy Technical Support ensures the success of your investment in our technology.
We provide unmatched service to our worldwide customers and partners through
commitment to customer satisfaction and dedication to personalized support. To find out
more about MicroStrategy Technical Support visit us at www.microstrategy.com/support.
16
7 Marketing Offerings
In an effort to help our partners increase sales of their MicroStrategy-based application,
MicroStrategy provides marketing support in the following ways.
7.1
MicroStrategy Partner Website
MicroStrategy provides visibility for every OEM partner on the MicroStrategy corporate
website: http://www.microstrategy.com/Partners/Directory/#oem. In addition, OEM
partners’ solutions can be showcased in the website’s Solutions Gallery for additional
awareness building and visibility. This site is intended not only for visitors to our site but
also to our internal sales teams who are looking for ways to introduce MicroStrategy
into their accounts.
7.2
Marketing Collateral
MicroStrategy makes available to all OEM Partners its collateral to use in the marketing
of your solution. This collateral includes product brochures, sample dashboard output,
demonstration screenshots, and other similar documents. Marketing collateral can be
accessed via the MicroStrategy Partner Portal.
17
7.3
Press Releases and Public Relations
MicroStrategy’s Public Relations Team is available to work with your team to draft and issue press
releases announcing our partnership, promoting your MicroStrategy-based product or promoting
a successful customer implementation of MicroStrategy-based product or service offering.
7.4
Live and Recorded Webinars
MicroStrategy can help promote joint webinars designed to publicize your MicroStrategybased offering. These webinars can then be archived and made available on-demand on
our website, as well as yours, for future playback.
7.5
Conference Presentations and Trade Show Support
MicroStrategy can provide resources at trade shows or conferences to help promote
your offering to your customer and prospect base. MicroStrategy will frequently speak at
conferences regarding business intelligence trends which could also include the promotion
of your solution.
18
8 The MicroStrategy Business
Intelligence Platform
For All BI Applications from Workgroup to Enterprise
Companies today are challenged with escalating demands for more business intelligence
(BI) across all levels of their enterprise. They need a strategy that supports enterprisewide, departmental, and workgroup BI initiatives. Such a strategy must nimbly respond
to individual group and department BI requirements while delivering mission critical BI
for the enterprise.
MicroStrategy 9, our most feature-rich release in nearly a decade, offers new products
and major platform enhancements that help customers and partners support the rapidly
changing business needs of workgroup and departmental BI applications. MicroStrategy 9
also extends the performance, scalability, and efficiency of larger enterprise BI applications.
And MicroStrategy 9 provides a seamless path to migrate workgroup and department BI
applications into an integrated an enterprise BI application architecture.
MicroStrategy Technology Breakthroughs
• Multi-source ROLAP enables enterprise-wide data coverage, seamless data analysis
across multiple, disparate sources, and a gradual evolution from workgroup to
enterprise BI.
• Powerful in-memory technology leverages the capabilities of 64-bit to allow fast,
simple deployment of BI applications at any scale.
• Faster, more user-friendly Web interface with a wide range of innovative
performance and self-service features, allowing companies to accomplish more with
fewer resources.
• Easier, more personalized dynamic dashboard creation and analysis,
provides an unprecedented amount of freedom and insight at-a-glance, without
programming.
• High-volume automated distribution of reports, dashboards, and business
performance alerts via e-mail, file, and print with very low IT administrative overhead.
• New enterprise reporting features enabling the easy production of even the most
complex and demanding enterprise reports, invoices, and customer statements.
• Enhanced, high-performance SQL Engine delivers even faster performance at scale
for any workgroup, department, or organization.
• MicroStrategy Mobile, a BI application development and implementation platform for
mobile devices such as the iPhone®, iPad™, Android™, and BlackBerry®.
19
MicroStrategy Intelligence Server™ is the architectural foundation of the MicroStrategy
platform. As the central contact point to the metadata, Intelligence Server dynamically
assembles the metadata objects to create optimized, multi-pass SQL queries for every
major relational database, HiveQL queries for Hadoop distributions, and MDX queries
for multidimensional data sources. Intelligence Server retrieves the data, performs any
additional analytical calculations not available in the databases, formats the report, and
delivers the reports to business users via MicroStrategy Mobile, Web, Office, Desktop, or
Distribution Services.
Intelligence Server is a highly scalable, parallel-processing, self-tuning analytic server.
Intelligence Server manages high performance interactions accessing terabytes of data by
tens of thousands of users using in-memory Intelligent Cubes, caching, load balancing,
resource prioritization, and connection pooling. It accesses and joins data from multiple
data sources, such as data warehouses, operational databases, multi-dimensional (cube)
databases, and even Web services and flat files. Intelligence Server also manages users,
system security, data security, and user functionality access. A clustering option is available
with Intelligence Server that increases scalability, and provides fault tolerance with
automatic failover.
8.1
Intelligence Server Extensions
MicroStrategy Report Services™ is a plug-n-play extension to Intelligence Server providing
pixel-perfect, print-perfect, and page-perfect app, dashboard, visual analysis, and report
design and distribution through MicroStrategy Mobile, Web, Office, Desktop, and Distribution
Services. Report Services delivers the most exacting report formatting for any of the following:
• Mobile Applications – highly interactive apps that deliver business intelligence,
transactions, and multimedia content to the mobile workforce
• Dashboards and Scorecards – highly visual, interactive, pixel-perfect displays that
provide “at-a-glance” view of the enterprise using gauges, dials, KPIs, and visualizations
• Visual Insight – visual exploration of data with a large library of interchangeable
visualizations and speed-of-thought filtering to help you spot outliers and anomalies in
your data quickly
20
• Enterprise Reports – classic production reporting requiring print-perfect layout with
data organized and aggregated into hierarchies or bands of increasing finer detail
• Invoices and Statements – page-perfect layouts designed for billing applications and
statutory reporting
• Business Reports – any report format, usually combining graphs, detail data, and often
explanatory text, used to describe business performance
Report Services reports, dashboards, scorecards, analyses, invoices, statements, and
business reports have fully interactive analytical, WYSIWYG design, and transactional
capabilities over a zero-footprint Web browser and on Mobile devices.
Services™
MicroStrategy OLAP Services™ is a plug-n-play extension to Intelligence Server that adds
in-memory data functionality to the standard ROLAP functionality of the MicroStrategy BI
platform. OLAP Services creates and manages Intelligent Cubes, a multi-dimensional-cache
structure that speeds up access to the data your users use most. OLAP Services exposes
the report objects (metrics and attributes) in the Intelligent Cube so that analysts can
manipulate report objects, create derived metrics, group rows, and modify filter criteria.
One frequent user action is to drill down into the data. With OLAP Services, the Intelligent
Cubes can contain attributes commonly requested via drilling. This greatly enhances
the report performance because OLAP Services can return results without querying the
data warehouse. OLAP Services allows seamless drill through to the data warehouse to
investigate the full breadth and depth of the corporate data assets. Ad-hoc reports and
drilling dynamically use Intelligent Cubes wherever possible, maneuvering between inmemory cubes and the data warehouse to retrieve the information requested.
MicroStrategy Distribution Services™ is a plug-and-play add-on to Intelligence Server that
proactively distributes personalized reports and alerts. In contrast to MicroStrategy Web’s
interactive BI environment, Distribution Services delivers interactive Flash dashboards and
static reports via email, folders, or printers. Often, the largest number of users simply
needs to receive this type of corporate content. Those reports, however, must be sent
automatically based on one or more of the following:
• A time schedule such as every Monday morning at 8 a.m.
21
• An event such as a completed database load
• A trigger such as business metric tracking outside an acceptable range
Serving these large user communities, Distribution Services can deliver many thousands of
messages per hour. Because it is critical these users receive this information without having
to request it, Distribution Services automatically sends those reports to a variety of devices,
including email, file servers, and networked printers. Business users can also subscribe to
receive Distribution Services’ proactive notification and alerts from the MicroStrategy Web
interface.
The proactive notifications and alerts Distribution Services sends include the precise report
formatting for the desired output device. The report can also include multiple attachments
including:
• Interactive dashboards in Flash format
• Enterprise documents or scorecards in PDF format
• MicroStrategy reports in Microsoft Excel workbooks
• Large datasets in CSV format
• Zip files containing any of the above
MicroStrategy Transactions Services™ is a plug-in extension to Intelligence Server that
provides write-back capabilities from Report Services documents. The predominant use is
in Mobile BI Apps, and it also works from Web-based DHTML documents. It writes-back
to ERP and other operational systems via Web services using XQuery; and to databases via
freeform SQL.
MicroStrategy Transaction Services provides users the flexibility of designing their own
freeform Transaction reports and hand-picking the data to perform each transaction.
MicroStrategy Transaction Services allows users to perform any of the following three
actions: update data, insert new information, or delete existing records.
MicroStrategy MultiSource Option™ is a plug-and-play add-on to Intelligence Server that
allows users to seamlessly report, analyze, and monitor corporate data across multiple
data sources through a single multi-dimensional view of the business. It extends the
22
unparalleled scalability, analytical depth, and query
performance of MicroStrategy’s award-winning ROLAP
technology to heterogeneous data source environments.
Users and report developers can look at all relevant
information as if they were looking at a single database.
MicroStrategy MultiSource Option employs a Multisource Relational (ROLAP) architecture that pushes
calculations and all data joins down to the database
Multi-dimensional
Business Model
utilizing the power of the database management
system. This push-down design eliminates the need for
Multi-source Engine
vast hardware resources on the BI middle tier servers.
ROLAP SQL Engine
Business users can seamlessly report, analyze, and
monitor data across multiple sources. Companies can
get BI applications up and running in almost no time
with minimum data engineering.
8.2
User Interfaces
MicroStrategy Web™ provides a powerful and user-friendly environment for interactive
analysis through any Web browser. Suitable for all levels of user sophistication from
beginner to advanced, MicroStrategy Web contains report and dashboard viewing,
formatting, exporting, pivoting, sorting, drilling, and ad hoc querying to WYSIWYG design
and creation. Using advanced Web technology including xHTML, CSS, AJAX, Flash, and
JavaScript, MicroStrategy Web delivers a highly interactive user experience spanning the
full range of MicroStrategy functionality.
MicroStrategy Web accomplishes all of its functionality through a cookie-less, zerofootprint Web client without using ActiveX® or Java Applets resident in or downloaded to
the Web browser. Thus, MicroStrategy Web works seamlessly through all standard Web
firewalls making deployment straightforward and minimizing administration overhead.
MicroStrategy Web provides the Web interface using Active Server Pages (ASP) running
Microsoft Internet Information Service (IIS) and using Java Server Pages (JSP) on either
32-bit or 64-bit processor computers running any supported application servers on any
operating system.
23
MicroStrategy Web supports all enterprise users across all 5 styles of Business Intelligence:
Scorecards and
Dashboards
Enterprise
Reporting
OLAP
Analysis
Adv. & Predictive
Analysis
Alerts &
Proactive
Notification
MicroStrategy Desktop™ is an advanced development and analysis interface for creating
BI applications intended primarily for analysts, power users, and application developers.
Desktop builds the metadata objects used for designing reports, scorecards, and
dashboards. It employs editors and wizards to speed-up application development without
the need for coding. Together with MicroStrategy Architect, they are the key development
tools required for create BI applications.
Desktop is an equally powerful BI interface for the most advanced analysts who aggressively
investigate the data to uncover valuable insight. Desktop provides a full range of analytical
functionality for reporting, data mining and predictive analysis, statistical analysis, financial
analysis, mathematical analysis, set analysis, and time series analysis. Desktop offers the rich
Windows interface and power of a thick-client, workstation environment.
MicroStrategy Office™ delivers MicroStrategy reporting and analysis to Microsoft Excel,
PowerPoint, and Word using Web services. This is ideal for business users who want
to use Microsoft Office for their BI interface. Excel, PowerPoint, and Word become live
repositories of MicroStrategy scorecards, reports, and charts, all of which are continually
linked back to Intelligence Server ensuring 100% data consistency across the enterprise.
Additionally, MicroStrategy Office offers outstanding offline analysis capabilities. Microsoft
Office is the most natural place for business users to format, sort, and analyze data
disconnected from a network. Once back online, MicroStrategy Office refreshes the
files with the latest data with just one mouse click while preserving the analytical and
formatting work.
24
MicroStrategy Mobile™ puts business reports, KPIs, documents, and dashboards in the
hands of your employees and customers. MicroStrategy Mobile lets decision makers
run an organization wherever they are and view business data on the iPad, iPhone, and
Android smartphones and tablets in multitouch tables, graphs, charts, visualizations,
maps, documents, and dynamic dashboards. It securely connects to a MicroStrategy
Mobile Server which manages the transmission of interactive reports, documents, and
dashboards to the Mobile client applications.
MicroStrategy’s platform for mobile apps enables organizations to build a wide variety of
essential mobile apps:
• Business intelligence – view corporate data through interactive, visual dashboards
• Transactions – enact data-driven decisions from BI data, or input information for
surveys and operational systems
• Multimedia content – distribute presentations, brochures, and videos to employees,
customers, and partners
8.3
Development and Admin Tools
MicroStrategy Architect™ is a rapid development tool that creates the metadata objects
that map the physical structure of a database to a logical, object-oriented model of
the business. Architect employs a graphical interface and editors to link the enterprise’s
business model to the physical database tables and columns.
The abstraction of the physical database into a logical business model makes subsequent
report design using Desktop extremely fast and intuitive. The logical business model
abstraction also provides a layer of isolation between the physical database and the reporting
applications allowing each to change independently of the other as they evolve over time.
Moreover, the object-oriented nature of the metadata repository allows all changes in the
logical model to propagate immediately and transparently to all dependent objects.
The abstraction of physical models to logical models allows MicroStrategy-based analytical
applications to be ported across different data warehouse platforms. This has profound
benefits to analytic application developers who want their applications to be easily
connected to any existing data warehouse.
25
MicroStrategy Architect also includes five starter BI applications or analytic modules
designed to dramatically speed up the development and deployment of customized BI
applications. The modules are a result of MicroStrategy’s 20+ years of BI experience, and
represent horizontal applications common to most every industry:
• Financial Reporting Analysis
• Human Resources Analysis
• Sales Force Analysis
• Customer Analysis
• Sales and Distribution Analysis
Each module includes a data model, an extensive library of foundation metrics, attributes,
and hierarchies, and many business reports. Each module can quickly be linked to existing
data warehouses to rapidly produce a working BI application. The application analytics can
be easily adapted and extended to the unique needs of each enterprise. This application
portability is unprecedented in the BI industry, and is only available for applications built
on the MicroStrategy platform.
MicroStrategy Object Manager™ is a change management tool that manages the
application development lifecycle by assessing the impact of changes to the application,
and migrating these changes across development, testing, and production environments.
In short, MicroStrategy Object Manager makes change management accurate, fast and
efficient. MicroStrategy Object Manager includes the following components:
• Graphical Interface – enables administrators to interactively and visually move objects
between applications using a drag-and-drop or copy/paste from the source supplication
into the destination application.
• Update Packages – extract changes into a standalone file (.mmp extension) outside of
the MicroStrategy metadata. This file contains all the information about the objects
allowing migration without a live connection to the source application.
Project Merge – merges two separate BI applications by copying all objects from the
source. Project Merge is useful when synchronizing or consolidate two applications.
26
MicroStrategy Command Manager™ enables script-based administration and
maintenance of objects, security, and system configuration for large user communities
using textual commands. These commands can be compiled into script files and run from
a graphical interface, through a command line editor, or directly from the command line.
The script files can be scheduled through operating system utilities or integrated into 3rdparty Systems Management Software, automating repetitive maintenance tasks.
MicroStrategy Command Manager is designed to minimize operational costs by
automating BI administration. Scripted, tested, and automated task execution minimizes
administrative effort. Tasks commonly used together can be combined via Java
programming to create procedures. Procedures save time by automating processes that
require multiple complicated steps for completion.
MicroStrategy Enterprise Manager™ enables analysis of resource utilization, project
performance, user statistics, and trends to facilitate performance tuning and resource
planning of a MicroStrategy business intelligence implementation. Enterprise Manager
is a packaged data warehouse containing historical analysis of MicroStrategy operating
statistics, a data-load process that transforms the operating statistics to the data
warehouse, and a MicroStrategy project built on top of the data warehouse.
With Enterprise Manager, administrators are more informed and can easily maintain
application speed by eliminating unused reports, reduce downtime by identifying
capacity or performance issues before they occur, and analyze historic usage patterns
to plan for future application growth. Enterprise Manager enables report developers to
better understand user adoption trends, identify patterns, and review project success.
Project managers are equipped to plan for resources, analyze trends in project growth,
and quantify and improve project ROI. Areas of analysis are grouped into four primary
reporting areas:
• User Analysis
• Project Analysis
• Operational Analysis
• Performance Analysis
27
MicroStrategy Integrity Manager™ automates the detection of inconsistencies and errors so
that business users can rely 100% on the accuracy of their information. It compares each
dashboard or report, comparing its data, SQL, graph, Excel, PDF output and execution times.
This saves the time needed to manually generate and compare report output. This also
eliminates potential human errors when manually comparing hundreds of thousands of cells
of data, or hundreds of lines of detailed SQL, or pages of pixel-perfect formatted enterprise
documents, between two reports, documents, or dashboards.
Integrity Manager can detect the impact of any change to the BI ecosystem. The results
of the reports can be stored as historical snapshots and used as a baseline for subsequent
report comparisons. Integrity Manager is designed to handle thousands of reports thus
adding value exponentially. Data and report integrity testing that previously took weeks if
not months of IT effort can now be accomplished overnight.
The MicroStrategy SDK™ is a comprehensive development environment primarily used for
integrating MicroStrategy functionality into other existing systems, especially enterprise
portals, and customizing and extending the functionality of the MicroStrategy Web. The
MicroStrategy SDK includes:
• Documentation of the API and platform functionality
• Development kits for portal, external security, and Web services integration
• Utilities and sample code the show how the APIs can be used
The SDK is a key architectural component used to fully exploit the power of the
MicroStrategy platform through its documentation of the platform’s open APIs. The APIs
expose the complete set of functionality contained in the platform. The platform includes
the following groups of API’s:
• MicroStrategy Web API
• MicroStrategy Mobile API
• Visualization API
• Portal integration API
• Web services API
• MicroStrategy Office API
28
8.4
New Product Offerings
MicroStrategy Cloud is a cloud-based service that allows customers and prospects to
adopt/acquire the MicroStrategy BI platform. This offer allows customers to get new
MicroStrategy implementations up-and-running within 48 hours and eliminates the
burden of up-front capital expenditure from the process. MicroStrategy Cloud is a payas-you-go model, with monthly billing. MicroStrategy Cloud has the scale to support
the largest MicroStrategy customers that are currently supporting 40,000-75,000 user
populations, as well as smaller mid-market customers with as few as 20 users.
Social networks are a growing phenomenon. They account for more internet usage
than any other single activity. With so many consumers spending so much time in
social media, organizations are expanding their spending in social media through the
traditional strategies including advertising, broadcast marketing to “followers”, and
social media monitoring. With a deep history and accumulated expertise in data analysis
and in mobile technologies, we view the social media phenomenon as a significant
opportunity. MicroStrategy has developed three products — MicroStrategy Gateway
for Facebook, MicroStrategy WisdomTM, and MicroStrategy Alert — that are part of our
Social Intelligence Platform and can be used in different combinations by organizations
worldwide to harness the power of Facebook data.
29
9 MicroStrategy
Differentiations
Integrated Architecture – Supports BI at all levels with one organically-grown platform
and a unified interface over an integrated architecture. This powerful architecture allows
you to utilize only the capabilities you require with a plug and play approach while
efficiently meeting the needs of thousands of users with unique data, functionality, and
interface requirements.
Desktop / Laptop
Mobile
Email
x
x
x
iPad
1:55 PM
100%
Inventory Turns vs Profit Trend
1,500
$1,500,000
1,250
1,000
$1,000,000
750
$750,000
500
$500,000
250
$250,000
$0
Windows
Office
Browser
iPhone and iPad
MicroStrategy
Web
MicroStrategy
Mobile
Distribution
Services
OLAP Services
Report Services
Transaction
Services
2010 Q1 2010 Q2
2010 Q3 2010 Q4
0
Gross Profit
BlackBerry
Android
Enterprise
Manager
Command
Manager
Object
Manager
MicroStrategy Intelligence Server
Architect
2009 Q4
Admin Tools
Developer Tools
Desktop
Designer
2009 Q3
Full Spectrum of
Full Spectrum of
Web
Professional
2009 Q1 2009 Q2
Inventory Turns
Portals
Inventory Turns
Gross Profit (USD)
$1,250,000
x
Clustering Option
MultiSource Option
Integrity
Manager
SDK
Databases
Cube
Databases
Transactional
Applications
Website
Content
System
Manager
Rapid Development and Deployment against Multiple Data Sources – Promotes
rapid development and deployment of new reports and applications through a vast
array of reusable metadata objects, a comprehensive security architecture, and design
paradigms that accelerate the report design process. MicroStrategy also allows you to
access your data from multiple data sources to speed creation of your BI solution.
30
Office
Broweser
Mobile
Desktop
Email
Easy-to-Use Interface for All Users – Supports BI users of all skill levels with a single and
intuitive zero-footprint web interface that enables them to easily satisfy their BI reporting,
analysis, and monitoring needs. Users can also interact with the exact same reports and
dashboards via a Windows interface, Microsoft Office, email clients, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, and Android mobile devices.
Reduced Administrative Efforts – Provides a comprehensive set of tools to centrally
and granularly manage and automate the BI infrastructure. The platform delivers greater
economies of scale as a system grows and ensures implementations require an absolute
minimum of IT personnel, hardware, and database resources.
Comprehensive Security – Provides a multi-layered security architecture design
optimized for high performance and high scalability while providing information security
and a single version of the truth throughout all reports, dashboards, and analyses,
regardless of who creates them.
Scalability and High Performance – Includes a strong relational on-line analytical
processing (ROLAP) engine that is recognized as the industry leader in providing scalable
and detailed reporting against any amount of data. Additionally, an in-memory multidimensional on-line analytical processing (MOLAP) engine enables subsets of data to be
pre-calculated for faster performance. The integration between these two engines enables
users to get the performance of MOLAP cube engines with all the power and flexible data
access of a ROLAP engine.
31
Lowest Total Cost of Ownership – Supports deployments with efficient administrator
efforts. MicroStrategy’s centralized administration, single object repository and single
server avoids the overhead of redundant metadata and tools and delivers an overall lower
total cost of ownership.
End-User Self-Service­– Reduces IT design activities through BI capabilities that allow a
fewer number of more flexible reports, end user self-service, and design reuse, resulting
on users creating and formatting their own reports without IT involvement. This empowers
users to answer their own requests without IT involvement.
Auto Personalization
SINGLE
REPORT
DEFINITION
Automatically taylors the content presented to
every user based on their security profile.
ROLAP Engine Can Deliver the Most
Powerful Parametrization
Users Can Save and Share their
New Reports
- Any Attribute (unique to ROLAP)
- Any Metric (unique to ROLAP)
- Any Aggregation (unique to ROLAP)
Revenue Contribution by
b Subcategory
Detailed Table
Supplier
Supp
plier Analysis
Art &
Architecture
25.0%
3.3%
Science &
Technology
Subcategory Performance
17.2%
Sports &
Subcategory
9.1%
Health
- Any Format Auto Styles
Revenu
ue
Revenue
Pro
fit
Profit
Profit
Margin
Supplier
Share
$1,253
$1
25
53
$1,011
$892
$810
$744
$644
$438
$376
$358
$33
$338
38
$
28
84
$284
$
25
52
$252
$
21
10
$210
$195
$19
$150
$118
$101
$94
26
26.98%
6.98%
98%
28.09%
28.25%
25.93%
26.
6.21%
26.21%
23.
.29%
23.29%
26.
.94%
26.94%
26.
.86%
26.86%
26.
.26%
26.26%
19.2%
15.5%
13.7%
12.4%
11.4%
9.9%
6.7%
5.8%
5.5%
McGraw
McG
Graw
G
raw
w Hill
Bant
ta
am
m Books
Bantam
John W
iley & Sons
Wiley
Warn
nerr Books
Warner
Simo
on & Schuster
Simon
Scrib
bne
er
Scribner
Perig
gee
e
Perigee
Pren
tice
e Hall
Prentice
Vinta
age
e Books
Vintage
20.3%
Literature
Books Miscellaneous
Graph Summary
Sup
pplier
Supplier
25.1%
Business
- Any Filter
My Reports
Revenue
Profit
P
ro
rofi
o
Art & Architecture
Business
Literature
Books Miscellaneous
Science &
Technology
Sports & Health
$918
$1,024
$826
$26
61
$261
$27
75
5
$275
$20
$201
$28
$7
$120
$700
$371
$97
Total
$3,606
$961
$
$600
$439
2006 Monthly Revenue and
nd Pro
P
Profit
fit Tr
Trends
rends
Save new reports
for personal use
Detailed Table
$500
$400
$300
$200
Supplier Analysis
Revenue Contribution by Subcategory
25.0%
Business
25.1%
%
Sports &
Lets users surf to any place in the database,
dynamically generating new reports, never
before designed.
Health
Subcategory
3.3%
Science &
Technology
McGraw Hill
Bantam Books
John Wiley & Sons
Warner Books
Simon & Schuster
Scribner
Perigee
Prentice Hall
Vintage Books
Subcategory Performance
20.3%
Literature
Books Miscellaneous
ROLAP Drill Anywhere
Supplier
Supplie
er
Detaailed Table
Art &
Architecture
17.2%
9.1%
Revenu
ue
Revenue
Profit
Art & Architecture
Business
Literature
Books Miscellaneous
Science &
Technology
Sports & Health
$918
$1,024
$826
$371
$97
Total
$3,606
$961
Graph Summary
Revenue
e
Profit
Profit
Margin
Supplier
Share
$1,253
$1,011
$892
$810
$744
$644
$438
$376
$358
$338
$284
$252
$210
$195
$150
$118
$101
$94
26.98%
28.09%
28.25%
25.93%
26.21%
23.29%
26.94%
26.86%
26.26%
19.2%
19.2
2%
15.5%
15.5
5%
13.7%
13.7
7%
12.4%
12.4
4%
11.4%
11.4
4%
9.9%
$100
$0
$7
$120
Revenue Contribution by Subcategory
Detailed Table
Art &
Architecture
25.0%
Health
$371
$97
Total
$3,606
$961
$7
$120
Oct Nov Dec
Share new perorts
with others
Full security automaticallcy applies
Graph Summary
Revenue
R
evenue
Profit
Profit
Margin
Supplier
Share
$1,253
$1,011
$892
$810
$744
$644
$438
$376
$358
$338
$284
$252
$210
$195
$150
$118
$101
4
$94
26.98%
28.09%
28.2
25%
28.25%
25.9
93%
25.93%
26.2
21%
26.21%
23.2
29%
23.29%
26.9
94%
26.94%
26.8
86%
26.86%
26.2
26%
26.26%
19.2%
15.5%
13.7%
12.4%
11.4%
9.9%
6.7%
5.8%
5.5%
$700
$600
$6
$500
$400
$300
300
$200
$100
$0
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
Revenue
20.3%
3.3%
Profit
Subcategory Performance
Science &
Technology
Sports &
$28
$439
Aug Sep
Profit
Shared Reports
McGraw Hill
Bantam Books
John Wiley & Sons
Warner Books
Simon & Schuster
Scribner
Perigee
Prentice Hall
Vintage Books
25.1%
Business
Literature
Books Miscellaneous
$261
$275
$201
Jul
2006 Monthly
hly Revenue
enue and Profit Trends
Supplier
Supp
plier
Profit
$918
$1,024
$826
Apr May Jun
Revenue
Supplier Analysis
Revenue
Feb Mar
$261
$275
$201
$28
$439
Subcategory Performance
Subcategory
Art & Arch
hitecture
Business
Literature
e
Books Miscellaneous
Science &
Technolog
gy
Sports & Health
Jan
6.7%
5.8%
5.5%
17.2%
Sub
bcategory
Subcategory
9.1%
Revenue
Profit
Art & Architecture
Business
Literature
Books Miscellaneous
Science &
Technology
Sports & Health
$918
$1,02
24
$1,024
$82
26
$826
$37
71
$371
$97
Total
$3,60
06
$3,606
$961
$2
28
$28
$43
39
$439
$261
$275
$201
$7
$120
Supplier Analysis
Supplier
McGraw Hill
Bantam Books
John Wiley & Sons
Warner Books
Simon & Schuster
Scribner
Perigee
Prentice Hall
Vintage Books
Graph Summary
Revenue
$1,253
$1,011
$892
$810
$744
$644
$438
$376
$358
Profit Supplier
Profit Margin Share
$338
$284
$252
$210
$195
$150
$118
$101
$94
26.98%
28.09%
28.25%
25.93%
26.21%
23.29%
26.94%
26.86%
26.26%
19.2%
15.5%
13.7%
12.4%
11.4%
9.9%
6.7%
5.8%
5.5%
x
32
x
x
MicroStrategy Incorporated • 1850 Towers Crescent Plaza, Tysons Corner, VA 22182 • 703.848.8600 • www.microstrategy.com
COLL-1065 0512
All Contents Copyright © 2012 MicroStrategy Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.