MicroStrategy Rolls Out Analytics Solutions for Cloud, Mobile Information-Driven Apps
Long-time BI leader MicroStrategy Inc. debuted a new generation of solutions for enterprise-class operational analytics at January’s MicroStrategy World user conference. Attendees say innovations for cloud, mobile and a new category of what the company calls “information-driven applications.” Under the covers, the capabilities look to address a number of issues, including support for new and multiple data types, faster performance, larger data volumes, security and governance of data across enterprise silos.
“MicroStrategy has always done well in the front end and with the visual slicing and dicing of data. And, we’re also known for our architecture support for governance, performance and high volumes. In 2104, we’re carrying those capabilities to help deliver innovation to mobile, cloud and Big Data, such as Hadoop,” MicroStrategy president Paul Zolfaghari told IDN. MicroStrategy is expanding its analytics product line as big data solutions are poised to go mainstream within enterprise companies, and competition gets fierce mindshare and market share.
One crucial key to MicroStrategy winning its share of the coming next-gen analytics business, Zolfaghari said, will be to underscore how MicroStrategy’s foundation architecture will meet the self-service needs of business users without sacrificing IT’s need for data governance. “Many customers want more agile and self-service analytics capabilities for business users, especially as they look at mobile and cloud. To get that, some desktop and other new visual data discovery companies lead them to think they will have to give up their ability to enforce data consistency and data governance at the backend. We say you can and should have both,” Zolfaghari said In fact, Zolfaghari said, having both will prove crucial to capturing business value from investments in analytics.
“There will always be a market for localized or desktop products. But, big value from analytics can only come when users can be sure of the consistency and trustworthiness of their data,” he said. “We’re architecting our enterprise technology to bring that best of both to new mobile and cloud [environments].” Here are some highlights from the latest offerings revealed at MicroStrategy World: Cloud. A new cloud-based massively parallel, in-memory analytics service, MicroStrategy Prime, brings terabyte scale, high performance analytics to the cloud for easy prototyping, adoption and management. To ensure high performance from the cloud, Prime sports a massively scalable architecture, powered by a MicroStrategy-designed in-memory analytics capability pioneered through a partnership with engineers at Facebook.
Prime, which stands for Parallel Relational In-Memory Engine, delivers extremely high performance, especially for use cases that require large data sets and complex analytical applications. It is built on the MicroStrategy Analytics Platform.
Prime is a cloud-optimized version of an highly-performant analytics capability Microstrategy built for Facebook.to use on-premise.
“We have two levels of cloud – a cloud express version designed for departmental users, and a full-blown analytics cloud platform, which includes basically our whole stack,” MicroStrategy’s director of products for enterprise analytics, Bala Chandran, told IDN. Just how full-featured? “With Prime, our cloud now has BI, ETL, database and in-memory layers, everything you would need to run a very rapid big data proof of concept, as well as go to operations,” Chandran said. MicroStrategy Cloud also allows companies to migrate their existing on-premises metadata repositories, data definitions and data governance or even start to build those from scratch.
Prime pushes the envelope of MicroStrategy Cloud further, to support interactive analytics applications that can support up to hundreds of thousands of users, he added. Mobile: MicroStrategy also rollout tactical and strategic offerings for mobile analytics.
