MicroStrategy, a leading worldwide provider of enterprise software platforms, has unveiled MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop, the company’s new desktop-based product for self-service data visualisation. The product is freely available and can be downloaded online.
MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop is a fast, powerful, easy-to-use product that will enable business end-users to gain deep insight into their own data. With MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop, it takes just minutes for an end-user to gain valuable insight into their data by creating stunning, useful visualisations without the need of an IT department.
After a simple download and installation process that can be completed in less than five minutes, an end-user can:
* Access data – users can quickly connect to data from any source. Users can pull data from Excel files, relational databases, multi-dimensional databases, cloud-based applications and even Hadoop – all without writing a single line of scripting or SQL code.
And, unlike pricey data visualisation solutions that charge even more to access data from databases, with MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop, it’s all included for free.
* Visualise – business users can quickly illuminate the story in their data by creating beautiful, impactful data visualisations. With just a few clicks, these brilliant visualisations – from basic pie graphs to advanced matrices, networks and maps – bring the underlying data to life.
MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop is powered by MicroStrategy’s lightning-fast in-memory database technology – the same technology behind some of the world’s largest business intelligence implementations, but in a package now easily accessible to everyone.
* Build dashboards – building dashboards has never been faster or easier. Users simply drag-and-drop to arrange multiple visualisations in a dashboard to convey a story. Users can also blend/combine data from different sources to create new metrics and data views. No IT needed.
* Share – users can share insights by exporting and sending their dashboard as an image, a PDF file, or a full MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop file. It’s never been easier to creatively share and experience visual insight from data.
“MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop represents an extraordinary advance in analytics and BI because it allows users to connect to data, create compelling visualisations, and share those insights within minutes, all without IT assistance,” says Paul Zolfaghari, president, MicroStrategy.
“We designed it to be easy to download and install, so that anyone could get more from their data in minutes. We also made it fast and easy to use, with MicroStrategy performance and power — so you can literally analyse billions of rows of data on your desktop. It’s faster than ever and it’s stunningly effective.”
According to Wayne Eckerson, president, BI Leader Consulting and industry analyst, TechTarget: “The new MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop makes MicroStrategy a top-tier competitor in the red-hot visual discovery market.
“The company was one of the first enterprise BI vendors to ship a visual discovery tool, so its offering is mature compared to others in its peer group, but it was locked away inside its existing platform. By offering a stand-alone desktop visual discovery tool and making it freely available, MicroStrategy places itself among the leaders in this new sector of business intelligence.”
MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop is part of the newly released MicroStrategy Analytics Platform family of products. It leverages all the relevant features of that new release, including enhanced data blending features, in-memory performance, and map analytics.
MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop users will be able to seamlessly upgrade to other products in the MicroStrategy Analytics Platform family if and when their requirements expand beyond standalone desktop-based self-service data visualisation.
“Over the last several years, many new users, previously limited to Microsoft Excel, have embraced self-service visual data discovery tools to unlock the potential value of their data.
“But very often these tools are just the starting point of an organisation’s analytical journey. Inevitably, users start looking to extend to information-driven applications, mobile applications, enterprise data publishing and reporting, advanced big data analytics, and other higher-value analytical applications,” continues Zolfaghari.
“Standalone data visualisation point solutions simply don’t support these use cases. So organisations hit a dead end. Our goal with MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop is to give business users a seamless path from quick, easy, desktop-based data visualisation to enterprise-grade business intelligence that fully supports a full range of high-value, production analytics,” he says.
According to Cindi Howson, founder, BI Scorecard: “The new data blending feature in MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop will boost this enterprise solution’s agility, and the easier-to-use, more appealing interface will up the ante in the competitive visual data discovery market.
“The new MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop, with no complicated modelling and free for now, seems easy enough for any BI user to test drive.”
