What are Microstrategy Dashboards?

Microstrategy dashboards are simply business intelligence dashboard deployments based on reporting and dashboarding solutions from Microstrategy Inc. While Microstrategy dashboards have historically been focused on enterprise markets, recent moves by Microstrategy have begun to position Microstrategy dashboards towards mid-market applications. A Microstrategy dashboard certainly provides a robust and capable business intelligence framework for enterprise companies, but given the restricted resources, both financial and physical, of mid-market companies, Microstrategy dashboards are often ill-suited for companies that do not have armies of IT staff and dedicated business intelligence analysts on staff.

Key Advantages of Microstrategy Dashboards

Microstrategy dashboards certainly have a number of positive features and advantages. Unlike dashboard products from companies like Business Objects or Cognos, Microstrategy dashboards provide a richer feature set that includes advanced visualization capabilities and easier to use reporting and dashboard development tools. In enterprise deployments, Microstrategy dashboards have gained a reputation as capable products that are good alternatives to established players. When looking beyond the enterprise market, however, Microstrategy dashboards have significant drawbacks that make them less than ideal.

Drawbacks of Microstrategy Dashboards

Microstrategy dashboards have significant drawbacks that can often become problematic for both large and medium-sized organizations. On a feature level, Microstrategy dashboards often have features that are not as well thought out as their competitors or that are more limited in scope and functionality. The true achilles heel of Microstrategy dashboards, however, is their reliance on a mixed deployment model that makes them expensive to deploy and even more expensive to maintain. A lack of collaboration features also makes Microstrategy dashboards less than ideal for companies wishing to deploy more agile BI applications.

Microstrategy Dashboards and the Mid-Market

Microstrategy dashboards are not well positioned for mid-market applications because of the problems already outlined. From a deployment standpoint, Microstrategy dashboards can be exceedingly expensive to deploy because of their complicated deployment model. Microstrategy dashboards in fact rely on a traditional server and client based model that limits the platforms supported and makes implementations longer and more expensive. Maintaining Microstrategy dashboards is also more expensive because of the same reasons, while also introducing new security issues because of the delivery model used.

Alternatives to Microstrategy Dashboards

For mid-market companies there are alternatives to Microstrategy dashboards that can provide similar if not greater features at more affordable price points. New products are coming to market that focus on a centralized approach to deployment that Microstrategy dashboards cannot reproduce. In this new alternative to the Microstrategy dashboards, the logic of all features and functions of the BI platform reside on a server, with delivery of the client done through a standard browser AJAX and HTML interface. This alternative to Microstrategy dashboards is significantly easier to deploy and maintain.