The social media revolution has finally struck Business Intelligence. Customers have gradually understood the potential of Facebook and Twitter as a vast mine field of customer data. This data if analyzed properly can help the companies very well understand the sentiment of the customer about its various products, services and strategies.
BI tools are gradually scaling up their potential to access and mine this social media data. As a step forward in that direction MicroStrategy has come up with many products at the enterprise and personal level; one of them being MicroStrategy Gateway.
MicroStrategy Gateway is a MicroStrategy Cloud based application which allows exchange of data between Facebook and enterprise applications. MicroStrategy Gateway works by converting Facebook information into a format in which it can be stored in relational database systems.
Companies develop Facebook applications which help it to interact better with its intended audience. Every Facebook app requires explicit permission to be granted to them by the users to collect the user’s Facebook data. After the user provides permission to access personal data, Facebook grants a ‘token’ to the app to collect Facebook data via the Graph API.
MicroStrategy Gateway provides a value add by enabling organizations to gather data from the social graph database of Facebook without worrying about to interact with Facebook APIs. This data can now be stored into relational databases to be analyzed further to know customer preferences. With MicroStrategy Gateway Facebook applications can also be developed which can directly feed customer data into RDBMS systems.
MicroStrategy Gateway would also help to keep customer data updated by enabling scheduled load of customer data from the Facebook APIs into the relational storage systems.
Gateway is hosted on MicroStrategy Cloud which provides with the following advantages:
- · Gateway would be up and running in the shortest possible time span
- · MicroStrategy Facebook expertise could be leveraged
MicroStrategy is also planning on the launch of the following enterprise level applications which would help tale organizations a step forward in social analytics. These to-be released applications would also be built upon the MicroStrategy Gateway platform.
· Alert for Enterprise