All roads lead to Mumbai

This is the city that raised me.

I'll be visiting the city of dreams. Wanna enjoy every second there.

Are MicroStrategy clients doomed?

What's common in following companies who filed for Chapter-11 bankruptcy protection or had massive lay-offs of recent times or got Govt bail-out?

Circuit City
DHL
Lehman Brothers
Vachovia
Fannie May
Freddie Mac
AIG
Vodafone
Thomas Cook
UBS
Credit Suisse
Merrill Lynch
General Motors
Mervyn's
Best Buy
AMD
Royal Bank of Scotland
Yahoo
Home Depot
.....

Most of this companioes listed above user more than MicroStrategy for their BI.

MicroStrategy Inc has bad days ahead

MicroStrategy Inc have under performing the wall street estimates and it is going to be a bad time for them for next couple of years. Why?

1. Companies have tighten their purse strings.
2. The growth of number of companies that may have had required the use of MicroStrategy for their BI would slow down drastically due to global recession. (This will be biggest hurting factor as MicroStrategy charges a premium and compnaies won't be interested or deals would happen at below rake rates)
   
3. When IBM and SAP acquired Cognos and Business Objects, MicroStrategy ran campaigns to specifically tap the rats from these companies at all costs. Everyone was tapped, Consultants, Developers and Sales and during this campaign people were taken for steep prices w/o considering their value. This is going to add too much of flab to MicroStrategy Inc. Anything suffixed/prefixed BI is a costly professional. :-)
   
4. All BI companies are going to face a good show by in-memory BI compnaies. Traditional MD, Engine, Server type BI may completely die in 5 years (If the so-called DW/BI papers issued by so-called DW/BI companies, heavily funded by these BI companies, give due share to this in-memory BI companies)
   

One the whole there would be less requirement for consulting positions from the existing companies too as now everyone would like to get more out of current. So if you have invested in MicroStrategy shares, sell off as future is going to be worse compared to peer BI companies and if you are working on competing BI tool, don't jump ship. Global slowdown will hurt MSTR worse than its peer.

Learn Data modelling

Well, no one can learn by just reading but I found this site to be very interesting and helpful. Doesn't go to fine details but pretty good in understanding concept soon.

Why MicroStrategy proferssioanl are paid too much (comapred to BO, Cognos, etc)

Short answer is MicroStrategy, Inc

Long Answer: Look around, why there is scarcity of MicroStrategy guys. There are very less number of clients. Less than 10K compared to 23K of Cognos and 45K of BO. I wouldn't compare to SAP BW, as that's the crappiest BI tool around, even worse than Oracle BI Discoverer or SQL Server 2005. Hyperion, the original BI tool, lost to late entrants.

Now who needs MicroStrategy. Not small companies. Usual license cost of MicroStrategy is around ~500K PLUS cost of support and kind of support (Bronze, Silver, Gold.. Upcming Diamond, Platinum and Crude oil -;. That's hell lot of money for even a big companies. The only and only reason I would ever support any company going for MicroStrategy is the the size of warehouse (back-end). BO and Cognos are known to get slow with bigger Warehouse where as back-end scalability of MicroStrategy is immense. MicroStrategy has better COE in long term over BO and Cognos. Learning curve of MicroStrategy is very steep.

This has infected the consulting companies with rotten MicroStrategy professionals. Even they (Companies and professionals) can't help it. People with zero or near zero MicroStrategy experience are working for MicroStrategy implementation of Fortune-100 companies. That's what I call gamble. For service based companies what matter is the billing and MicroStrategy gives them top dollars compared to other BI tool.

Now is the worst part. MicroStrategy education as well as certification are obscenity costly. Giving exams costs USD 650. Education is even costly. Getting a 2 week training and 3 certification will take some aback by USD 6500. Well, that makes finding a good MicroStrategy professional hard to come by. Search amazon and you won't find a single book on MicroStrategy, where as for other BI tools, you will find tons of books. MicroStrategy training the books are privileged one and unavailable outside.

Probably the companies buying MicroStrategy never factor out the cost of hiring a MicroStrategy professional (feeding him) and the time required to hire a suitable candidate. Else 50% companies who purchased MicroStrategy wouldn't have purchased it. Not only quality even quantity resource are hard to find. BTW, most of companies purchasing MicroStrategy get the initial setup and development done by MicroStrategy Inc itself at some USD 100+ per hour. As company MicroStrategy Inc has very much right to charge it but lack of reasonably charged good education (that implies in getting good guys to maintain a company's BI system) should defiantly deter or think thrice before purchasing MicroStrategy BI platform. There are more number of MicroStrategy implementation and development consultation in MicroStrategy Inc then rest of world; something that's not true in case of BO and Cognos. One should not take it as joke.

So as long as MicroStrategy Inc doesn't change its lookout for reasonable cost education, it is not so good picture for MicroStrategy Inc. Till then I can actually sit, relax on couch.