MicroStrategy World 2018 - vision for the intelligent enterprise

Tim Lang, MicroStrategy’s Senior VP and CTO, showcased the latest MicroStrategy release 10.10 and the features planned for next quarter, while breakout sessions covered data discovery, cloud, mobility, mobile identity, data science, AI, machine learning, and big data. With a range of customer case studies there was something of interest for all delegates, irrespective of where they are on the MicroStrategy journey.

Map of the Intelligent Enterprise

Organisations face challenges in the form of technology - cloud, machine learning and AI – as well as regulatory and competitive forces and market pressures from companies such as Apple, Amazon and Google.

For a company to thrive and grow in this environment Michael Saylor presented MicroStrategy’s blueprint of what a data driven organisation requires from an enterprise platform, the map of the intelligent enterprise. This includes people, processes and the architectures necessary to empower users and teams with a single version of the truth, and features new types of information access from wall displays and TVs to wearables and voice. Saylor spoke about the growing importance of a governed enterprise platform that meets the diverse needs of the intelligent enterprise, while still providing a single version of the truth. This map helps any organisation see where they are on the intelligence journey and what their next steps are.

MicroStrategy latest release 10.10 and future technologies - Tim Lang CTO

Tim Lang, MicroStrategy CTO

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MicroStrategy CTO Tim Lang presented the new features of MicroStrategy 10.10 and what’s planned for the next quarter. MicroStrategy’s overarching vision is for “Intelligence Everywhere”, meaning a pervasive enterprise platform that can deliver information to users anywhere on any device.

MicroStrategy’s new quarterly features release programme is now driving innovation faster than ever before and customers don’t have to wait as long for new features and innovations.

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A new version of MicroStrategy Desktop

10.10 includes a new version of free Desktop for self-service data discovery.  MicroStrategy’s aim is to have a “self-evident” product that naturally guides the user. The MicroStrategy community website provides many examples for Desktop that users can download. Tim demonstrated MicroStrategy’s new natural language processing (NLP) capabilities that can formulate a visualisation from a sentence of text entered by the user due in a later release.  MicroStrategy now also provides a new KPI visualisation that displays the KPI value compared to target or previous values. Responsive mode released in 10.10 allows for different screen layout arrangements with the developer changing the arrangement of visualisations on the page.

New Library and Dossier Features

Library and Dossier, first released in 10.9, now make it even easier for consumer users to search and explore content. For capability planned for Library includes an Amazon-like recommendation engine, to provide similar Dossiers the user may be interested in when searching for content.  Collaboration is a new “chat” feature allowing users to comment on Dossiers and store filters that provide context - what a user was viewing when they made a comment.

The “visualisation filter”, new in 10.10, allows a Dossier to have a popup filter, which makes it easy for users to select another visualisation. Mapbox has now been added to ESRI and Google Maps geospatial visualisations.

Library now also provides “prompting” to enable users to filter data and queries for their Dossiers.

A future important feature coming for Library and Dossier is support for the iPhone, so formatting better fits the mobile screen, due in the next quarter release.

MicroStrategy on AWS

MicroStrategy’s cloud offering “MicroStrategy on AWS” is a fast way to deploy and scale MicroStrategy. This uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) architecture tools and a MicroStrategy-developed web console to automate the install, configuration and upgrade of MicroStrategy instances on AWS.

MicroStrategy Workstation

MicroStrategy Workstation for Windows or Mac includes all the functionality of Desktop plus the ability to create and manage datasets, users, security and roles and environment management.  In time this will become MicroStrategy’s single tool for management and administration of the enterprise platform.

Governed data discovery, and determining which data is certified, has been requested by many MicroStrategy customers.  MicroStrategy can now enable restricted access, Dossiers and Documents can also be certified to indicate whether they have been quality assured.

Workstation’s “performance analytics” is a new feature due next quarter that provides visibility into user activities for Dossiers. It looks at how a Dossier is performing, who’s using it and when. Workstation can also show what is running across the whole environment. This will allow services to be stopped and started and provides insight into which objects are being used and the server resource utilisation.

MicroStrategy’s open ecosystem continues to expand, with more than 199 different connectors planned for 2018.  MicroStrategy can now be used as a data source for other data discovery tools such as Tableau, Qlikview and Power BI.

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The future: MicroStrategy, voice + Alexa

To wrap up his future-oriented presentation, Lang demonstrated the use of Amazon’s Alexa to ask MicroStrategy for information just by using voice requests and delivering information without requiring any displays or keyboards.

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MicroStrategy continues to provide market leading innovations for the intelligent enterprise on a scalable and reliable platform. We look forward to seeing (and helping to implement) intelligence everywhere!