The increasing demand to empower end users to access, analyze, and deliver information in an organization has increased general awareness of the business intelligence (BI) market and its technology. BI can help an organization more effectively, responsively, and productively decide and act at all levels: strategic, tactical, and operational. This area of the software market has a wide variety of technologies, such as analytic servers and tools for query and reporting, online analytic processing (OLAP), and data mining. These technologies have traditionally been distinct and not integrated, which has resulted in segregation of user communities unable to share information.

The need to better unify these communities has driven technology vendors to provide an integrated BI platform and toolset that's accessible to various user types and supports their functional requirements. These diverse user types include executive management, analysts, managers, and individuals. This enterprise-class BI requires an underlying platform to support exponential growth of users and data.

This class of software, however, introduces a new set of challenges for IT, which has to manage it as part of the enterprise infrastructure. This reality exerts new pressure on these technology vendors, such as MicroStrategy, to provide easier manageability and support enterprise integration.

Five Styles of BI

MicroStrategy 7i release 7.2.2, a BI platform and end-user environment, is a product suite that MicroStrategy says has "five styles of BI": ad hoc query and reporting, information delivery and alerting, statistical analysis and data mining, cube analysis or multidimensional OLAP, and enterprise reporting. These five functions are built on a unified platform and server architecture that supports MicroStrategy's end-user tools. The tools use thin-client, dynamic HTML (DHTML) Web technology.

This release provides a new user environment through MicroStrategy Web Professional. Also, for analytic power, this release enables more flexibility via MicroStrategy 7i OLAP Services (an interface for third-party products) and Intelligent Cube technology (which operates in MicroStrategy Intelligence Server). For IT control, this release provides new cross-platform support and integration via MicroStrategy Web Universal, porting to Unix operating systems, and third-party application server technology.

I assessed MicroStrategy 7i 7.2.2 using the Ventana Research six-point assessment matrix that's part of the Ventana Research DecisionCycle methodology, a criteria for assessing BI-compliance to performance management (See Figure 1.) This six-point assessment matrix examines the areas of usability, integration, manageability, reliability, functionality, and adaptability. The following assessment looks at the incremental advancements in releases 7.2 and 7.2.2.

Usability. This evaluation criterion is critical for end-user adoption of any BI product. The product's capabilities should align with the functional requirements and capabilities of each user community. Users should be able to reap value from the information and collaborate with different types of users across organizational boundaries. The MicroStrategy 7.2 release made significant enhancements to usability.

For example, MicroStrategy Web now lets end users directly leverage the simplicity of a Microsoft Windows environment in a thin DHTML Web interface. MicroStrategy Narrowcaster lets users broadcast or subscribe to metrics from within the Web interface. The MicroStrategy Intelligent Cube technology now makes it simpler to perform analysis and deployment by providing summarized information for quick interactive analysis.

Integration. IT must be able to integrate elements of the BI platform into the enterprise: data and applications, users and authentication, metadata and information, application servers, third-party tools, custom applications, and enterprise portals. Enterprise BI products must flexibly support integration across all these elements. In the 7.2 release, there were key enhancements to integration across the product suite.

For instance, the custom application interfaces that the MicroStrategy SDK already provided have been extended to include the MicroStrategy Portal Integration Kit and MicroStrategy Web Services Development Kit. Portal Integration Kit lets you encapsulate the MicroStrategy search and folder capabilities within third-party portals. Web Services Development Kit provides XML and SOAP interfaces. The MicroStrategy MDX Adapter has been extended to support query execution caching and additional third-party tools from ArcPlan Inc., Business Objects SA, and Crystal Decisions Inc. It still supports Brio Software, Cognos Inc., and Microsoft products.

Manageability. This evaluation criterion is critical for an IT organization that needs to manage a BI platform as part of the enterprise infrastructure. The ability to manage BI projects is one of the most underevaluated categories of BI tools and is critical for managing total cost of ownership (TCO). TCO should always be evaluated by examining the cost, time, and resources to implement, deploy, and manage BI across the user communities in the enterprise.

In the 7.2 release, there were incremental improvements to manageability: MicroStrategy Architect now supports graphical administration of logical and physical models, hierarchy editing, and attribute aliasing and flexibility. MicroStrategy Web enables end users to manage information deployment, through MicroStrategy Narrowcaster, and to create, deploy, and manage cubes and reports.