In February this year Gartner released their famed Magic Quadrant and it had a surprise. For the first time in many years MicroStrategy is out of its Leader quadrant. For many of us who are quite used to seeing MicroStrategy in that top bracket of BI platforms this would came quite as a surprise. Questions would pop up if this is the end of road for MicroStrategy?
But on ground the picture looked to be quite contradictory. MicroStrategy had just launched MicroStrategy 10 mid last year and are firming up the platform with a major release every quarter. Then where is the gap? A detailed read of the Gartner report provides the answer.
Let’s first look at what good Gartner has got to say about MicroStrategy.
As you would notice these are quite good pointers; then why MicroStrategy is not considered in the leader quadrant. The reason is even though MicroStrategy is having a great product it is not having the right mix of support services. It is not the core product which is a cause of concern; what is alarming is the lack of focus from the organization to promote the goodness of its products and provide a support infrastructure which can make the customers comfortable. As Gartner has put it:
“….MicroStrategy's sales execution and its weak customer experience scores (except for product) during the past year — which have been compounded by a new recent round of executive turnover — have kept it out of the Leaders quadrant.”
So here are the things which are not good with MicroStrategy:
Overall to say MicroStrategy as a product is at an important bend of its career as it transitions from v9 and v10. Having devoted to build a robust architecture which can scale up to any level to support enterprise reporting, MicroStrategy is scaling upon its visualization and self service capabilities in which it was so far seen to be lagging behind market leaders Tableau. Organizationally also the company has been going through a rough phase with many of the top executives quitting the focus on service, customer enrichment and partnerships is diluted.
Thus in marketing parlance for service sector MicroStrategy is doing good in 4 P’s Product, Pricing, Placement and Physical Evidence, its poor score in the other 3 P’s Promotion, People and Process is actually pulling the rating for the offering as a whole downward. But we hope to see organization soon to be back to its winning ways.
But on ground the picture looked to be quite contradictory. MicroStrategy had just launched MicroStrategy 10 mid last year and are firming up the platform with a major release every quarter. Then where is the gap? A detailed read of the Gartner report provides the answer.
Let’s first look at what good Gartner has got to say about MicroStrategy.
- MicroStrategy’s capability to make use of business user generated data model and data from enterprise data sources is unique and supports large scale self-service.
- As per the report the stand out features of MicroStrategy such as multisource, self-service data preparation, advanced data manipulation, native Hadoop access, PRIME provides business users with data exploration capabilities at par with market leaders such as Tableau but on more complex and very large datasets.
- For existing customers MicroStrategy 10 comes with attractive new features which can be availed at an incremental cost thus ruling out the need of products Tableau and Qlik. MicroStrategy 10 provides native Hadoop connectivity, thus ruling out the need of specialised tools for the purpose.
- MicroStrategy has revamped and simplified its pricing model. The new pricing model is well received by customers.
As you would notice these are quite good pointers; then why MicroStrategy is not considered in the leader quadrant. The reason is even though MicroStrategy is having a great product it is not having the right mix of support services. It is not the core product which is a cause of concern; what is alarming is the lack of focus from the organization to promote the goodness of its products and provide a support infrastructure which can make the customers comfortable. As Gartner has put it:
“….MicroStrategy's sales execution and its weak customer experience scores (except for product) during the past year — which have been compounded by a new recent round of executive turnover — have kept it out of the Leaders quadrant.”
So here are the things which are not good with MicroStrategy:
- The awareness of the product and its latest features outside the installed customer base is very less. The sales and marketing capabilities of the organization is rated below average but that is partly contributed by the wave of top level executive changes which MicroStrategy has noted in the recent past. Clearly MicroStrategy needs to spend more effort in educating its existing customer base and increase awareness beyond letting them know why MicroStrategy is a better bet than Tableau.
- MicroStrategy also scored very poorly in customer experience and operations. They have low score on support and product quality. We also have noted particular glitches in its v10 release which were later rectified in v10.2. MicroStrategy is working in these fronts and some of its customer facing initiatives like Community, MicroStrategy World, Webinars and online tutorials are generating positive response. MicroStrategy 10 is a revamped new platform and these gaps are likely to be filled as the organization moves forward.
- One other factor which MicroStrategy does need to work, and is actually being worked upon, is collaboration. And yes MicroStrategy’s platform is still a hard nut to crack for new bees; but once you are seasoned you are bound to love this tool.
Overall to say MicroStrategy as a product is at an important bend of its career as it transitions from v9 and v10. Having devoted to build a robust architecture which can scale up to any level to support enterprise reporting, MicroStrategy is scaling upon its visualization and self service capabilities in which it was so far seen to be lagging behind market leaders Tableau. Organizationally also the company has been going through a rough phase with many of the top executives quitting the focus on service, customer enrichment and partnerships is diluted.
Thus in marketing parlance for service sector MicroStrategy is doing good in 4 P’s Product, Pricing, Placement and Physical Evidence, its poor score in the other 3 P’s Promotion, People and Process is actually pulling the rating for the offering as a whole downward. But we hope to see organization soon to be back to its winning ways.