A Good comparision betwwen MicroStrategy and Cognos

Ashish Shah, a friend, has posted comparison between MicroStrategy and Cognos, on my MicroStrategy forum. Have a look.

MicroStrategy is not planning a development center in India

Peer BI compnaies have established IDC for quite some time but MicroStrategy is yet to setup an office in India. They currently outsource to Cybage a part of their Testing, Documentation and Widget development. It is least likely that MicroStrategy would start anything like development center, sales or consulting at India anytime for next 4-5 years. They are currently setting up the base at China and that's becoming their center too much focused. A center in China make sense for MSTR as 1) Compared to India there would be large probable customer 2) i18n into Chinese and other languages (Korean, Japanese etc) would be easy to do.

Though not development wise but mainly making the product ready into different languages (They are having it for quite some time) and thus marketing the prospective customer base is a killing thing to do business in China not in India. There are just 3 clients of MicroStrategy and Indian are brought up with mentality "sasta hai to achcha hai".

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.

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.

MicroStrategy Business Objects Cognos comparision

Single Metadata – Object definition is stored in a database (called metadata), How easy is changes to be integrated made from one interface to another.

64 Bit support – 32 bit system can’t address more than 4 GB of system space. All non-Windows OS are available in 64 bit for ages. Windows also got it in June 2005, but BI vendor should be able to support 64 bit OS.

Scalability – Any calculation performed in database is the best and fast and let very small load on the BI architecture. But not all BI vendors let it happen.

Reusable Objects – Make once use zillion times.

Objects Version Control – Ability to have different version of same (schema) objects.

WYSIWYG – Look and feel of what you created and finally how it looks.

Security – Object, User security.

Personalization – Single report but show different output to different users.

Manual fine-tuning SQL – Easily making changes to generated SQL.

Ease of SQL Generation – Make Schema object and system and forget about the right SQL generation.

MS Office integration – Run report directly from Word, Excel or Powerpoint.

(There is some bug with HTML parser on Blogger.com. Please scroll down for the comparison table. Do write into your comments. I'd update/add more information accordingly)

	MicroStrategy	Business Objects	Cognos
Single Metadata	Yes	No	No
64 Bit support	Very Good	Good	Good
Scalability	Excellent	Good	Very Good
Reusable bjects	Excellent	Good	Good
Objects Version Control	Very Bad	Excellent	Very Good
WYSIWYG	Very Good	Very Good	Very Good
Security	Very Good	Good	Very Good
Personalization	Very Good	Good	Bad
Manual fine-tuning SQL	Good	Excellent	Excellent
Ease of SQL generation	Excellent	Very Good	Very Good
MS Office integration	Very Good	Bad	Good
Learning Curve	Bad	Very Good	Very Good
Number of Clients	10000	42000	23000
Number of Employees	2000	NA	3500
Cost of License	$$$$$	$$	$$$
Support Cost	$$$$$	$$$	$$$
Average Pay (USD)##	83000	78000	79000
Job Security	Good	Excellent	Very Good
Cost of License	$$$$$	$$	$$$
Support Cost	$$$$$	$$$	$$$

## - indeed.com