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February 5, 2002

MicroStrategy 7i Weaves a Wider Web

The series of releases known as 7i will advance Web-based reporting and introduce new UNIX-based versions of MicroStrategy's servers.

by Philip Russom

MicroStrategy 7i is a series of releases that will bring a wide range of advancements to MicroStrategy Inc.'s products. However, two broad areas stand out:

MicroStrategy 7i is, first and foremost, about widening MicroStrategy's offering for Web-based reporting. It has numerous enhancements for the creation, delivery, and consumption of reports in Web environments, whether Internet, intranet, or extranet.
The other prominent area of advancement concerns platform support. MicroStrategy is porting most of its servers to selected UNIX platforms, as a complement to MicroStrategy's long-standing Windows-based versions.

Let's look at MicroStrategy's plans for Web reports and UNIX servers, so you'll know what to expect in releases throughout 2002 and early 2003.

Web-based Report Creation

MicroStrategy 7i furthers the company's commitment to increasing the ease of use of report creation, so that many business users with minimal training can create their own reports. With 7i, users create reports quickly and easily using drag-and-drop techniques in a more-or-less WYSIWYG environment.

For instance, imagine a browser window where the top half is a frame in which you select database structures or data manipulations and the bottom half is a frame in which you see a WYSIWYG representation of the report as you create it. You can simply click a table column name in the upper frame and drop into the lower frame. Or you can click a heading in the lower frame and drag it into the calculation editor in the upper frame. Note that MicroStrategy enables this high ease-of-use in a browser via server-based processing and dynamic hypertext markup language (DHTML), without downloading an applet or installing client software.

Web-based Report Delivery

MicroStrategy Narrowcaster Server can deliver reports in HTML format via email. Whereas previous releases relied on centralized administrative control, 7i shifts much of the control to end users, so they can subscribe and unsubscribe to reports, as well as schedule report runs themselves. Also new to 7i, Narrowcaster Server can serve a report one page at a time — which MicroStrategy calls a "page-by" stream — so the user gets the desired page quickly without waiting for the entire report to load.

Business intelligence (BI) extranets. MicroStrategy offers no functions explicitly for extranets. However, MicroStrategy supports security and Web technologies and standards, which many MicroStrategy customers use to implement BI extranets as their preferred medium for Web-based report delivery.

BI content delivered in a portal. Some corporations publish BI content on a portal. For instance, the decision support manager of a retail chain told me his company uses MicroStrategy's platform to include BI content in corporate portals (for employees) and Internet-based portals (for suppliers and distributors). MicroStrategy does not offer a portal per se (the market certainly doesn't need another!), but instead supports the appropriate technologies and standards so that BI content from MicroStrategy servers can integrate into portals from other vendors.

To ease the integration further, 7i includes a portal integration kit that includes support for portal integration APIs from Hummingbird, IBM, Microsoft, Plumtree Software Inc., and SAP Portals. The kit also includes extensions to MicroStrategy's SDK and a Web customization guide.

BI Content delivered via Web Services. MicroStrategy 7i builds on 7.1's support for SOAP and XML, as well as support for "traditional" Web technologies (HTML, HTTP, SSL, and TCP/IP). This support gives users everything they need to build any kind of custom service they want, even Web services. Furthermore, the 7i Web SDK includes sample code showing users how to set up generic Web services for BI using MicroStrategy Web and MicroStrategy Intelligent Server.

UNIX — Where No MicroStrategy Server Has Gone Before

Long tied to Microsoft technologies, MicroStrategy's servers have been Windows-only. MicroStrategy's sophisticated customers have squeezed a lot out of Windows servers, but many are pushing the envelope to achieve even higher extremes in user count and data throughput. To help these customers scale up, MicroStrategy began projects a couple of years ago that will soon enable them to offer its servers on both Windows and selected UNIX platforms.

The first foray into UNIX will support Sun Solaris and IBM AIX. Later targets are Linux, HP/UX, and Compaq Tru64. MicroStrategy has planned UNIX releases of MicroStrategy Web Server (Q2 2002), MicroStrategy Intelligence Server (Q4 2002), and MicroStrategy Narrowcast Server (sometime in 2003).

In a related platform issue, the drag-and-drop capabilities and other interactive features of 7i are implemented via Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASPs), and so require Microsoft's Web server, Internet Information Server (IIS). MicroStrategy will soon support Java Server Pages (JSPs), so that a wider range of Web servers, in particular Apache and IPlanet, can deliver MicroStrategy's interactive capabilities. Another goal of the JSP implementation is easy integration with popular Java-supporting application servers like WebLogic, WebSphere, and TomCat.

Assessment

Advancements in Web Reporting. Today we take for granted that Web-based reporting is a requirement for reaching a wide range of end users who are great in number and mostly new to report consumption. MicroStrategy's originally designed and positioned its product for business analysts, who are usually few in number and prefer the hefty functionality of a fat client. So it's a bit ironic that it was MicroStrategy Release 4.0 in 1996 that introduced the industry's first Web interface for reporting.

Since then, MicroStrategy has continued its commitment to serious analysts by expanding its Windows client and deep support for Microsoft Excel. At the same time, it has expanded the functionality available to end users via a browser (and also deepened support for all meaningful Web standards and technologies) to ensure that its platform is appropriate to deployments with high user counts in Web environments. The R&D push seems to be paying off, because a recent study from The OLAP Report comparing MicroStrategy's customer base to that of competitors concludes that "MicroStrategy customers have the greatest prevalence of Web seats."

UNIX Offering. The ports to UNIX will consume much of MicroStrategy's R&D resources during 2002 and early 2003. Company representatives have stressed that these are mostly ports, not feature or functionality enhancements. The point is that — if 7i (released throughout 2002 and early 2003) doesn't give you the advancements you need from MicroStrategy servers — you may need to wait for releases sometime in 2003.

Porting to UNIX is not just about scalability. After all, I've talked to many users with large production environments running on Windows, so I know it scales well when you apply best engineering practices to it. Besides, most processing in MicroStrategy's architecture occurs in the relational database, which can be on any networked platform. UNIX is now a requirement, because MicroStrategy is pushing hard to get its products adapted as the corporate standard for analysis and reporting within Fortune 1000 companies. MicroStrategy is giving these companies UNIX-based servers, so they can leverage their investment in UNIX — as well as sidestep perceived problems with Windows' performance.

Philip Russom, Ph.D. [www.philiprussom.com] is an independent industry analyst and consultant based in Waltham, Mass.