MicroStrategy has become the latest business
intelligence software maker to add reporting services to its product lines, joining rivals such as as Cognos, Business Objects,
Hyperion
and Actuate
in the process.
The Mclean, Va. maker of software that gauges customer and employee behavior
to help better inform enterprises about their business decisions has now unveiled
MicroStrategy Report Services, the fruit of more than a year of development.
The software can deliver scorecards to executives, “managed metrics” reports
to business-unit leaders, business performance reports to divisional
managers, operational reports to personnel, and invoices and statements
to external consumers, according to MicroStrategy Co-founder and COO Sanju
Bansal.
Bansal said his company considered buying rather than building about a year
and a half ago, but eschewed that scenario because of the difficulty and
uncertainty with integrating software code from an alien company into its
own products.
Still, Bansal said MicroStrategy has taken stock of what the
competition has built or bought and believes it has the superior product
because it offers a convergence of a reporting tool with list reports,
dashboards and interactive analyses in a single module that uses the same
infrastructure, security, calculation engine and deployment options as the
rest of the company’s product line.
First, Bansal told internetnews.com MicroStrategy Report Services
bridges the gap between detailed analysis and report formatting, which has
traditionally been reserved for few, technically adept business analysts.
With MicroStrategy Report Services, users can receive any type of enterprise
report, including Web-based scorecards with performance indicators to
multi-page printed operational reports sectioned across multiple dimensions.
The software features not only the summarization and data, but the visual
representations in the form of pie charts and bar charts. Bansal also said the new
product specializes in a type of report that is becoming increasingly
popular — a managed metrics report to help an analyst cope with 20 different
metrics culled from multiple systems via the Web. And it does so rapidly,
with an enterprise-class throughput of 72,000 reports per hour.
The Web-based functionality also helps reports reach more users than ever
before, with each user receiving a personalized version of each report, he
said. As if it were a customized portal, report contents, report language,
and report drill-down paths are all personalized per user. Users can further
custom-fit the way they receive information through “parameterized
reporting,” which provides lists of customization options.
Also, at a time when universality is important in global business, the Web
interface renders reports in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian,
Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Swedish out of the box.
While these are options that many reporting software products provide,
Bansal said his company and team looked for specific differentiators for
their products by talking to customers. To wit, the company believes it has
bridged the gap between reports that look great online, but don’t translate
so well to paper when they are printed.
That’s why his development team has worked hard on a design interface to
create the perfect report without programming or outside help, allowing
users to create reports that rival the quality of desktop publishing for
their existing data. Users create reports with pixel-perfect precision by
simply dragging-and-dropping and then formatting reports for presentation,
the COO said. MicroStrategy Report Services also delivers reports in
Portable Document Format (PDF).
Lastly, unlike other platforms such as those offered by Cognos, Bansal said,
his outfit’s new product is fully integrated with the rest of the
MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform so that users can move from
reporting to analysis and back again. In this regard, Bansal said, most
companies suffer a hitch because they have different architectures for
reporting and analysis.
“Our new software is simply a service in MicroStrategy’s service-based
architecture, so the user interface stays the same as users move from
reporting to analysis, minimizing product training and easing user
adoption,” Bansal said.
Eric Rogge, vice president and research director with Ventana Research, said
the product is a boon for companies looking to cut costs by buying an
integrated solution as opposed to several piecemeal applications.
“Acceptable reporting solutions must now handle any and all kinds of
reporting needs from traditional production reporting to business
intelligence-related reporting.” said Rogge. “MicroStrategy Report Services,
which offers leading-edge integration of banded and ‘zone-based’ report
layout approaches, combined with their existing BI modules on a unified
architecture will raise the standard for reporting platforms.”
