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Business Intelligence vendor MicroStrategy recently released the latest
version of it's BI tool. Country Manager Jim Broadly was at the launch event in Toronto.
It's called MicroStrategy 9.
IT has 8,000 enhancements in the product.
That's a ton of enhancements but the major focuse is multi-source in-memory ROLAP.
Advanced analytics, predictive analytics and performance increases.
MicroStrategy's always been focused on enterprise business intelligence we have
by far the largest organizations running
MicroStrategy for tens of thousands of users, so very scale below in that aspect.
What we've done is made the modeling and the architecture piece very easy for
small environments, departmental groups to be able to rollout business
intelligence projects and applications very quickly.
As it builds, they can then rollout into an enterprise approach
just based on the architecture that MicroStrategy has in place.
Also at the launch event was a customer of MicroStrategy's BI tool, the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
CIHI developed an analytical tool that we call CIHI Portal and we use
MicroStrategy as the business intelligence platform behind that tool.
We use CIHI Portal to give access to healthcare decision-makers across the country.
for use in hospitals, regional health authorities, and Ministries of Health.
Some of the challenges that we have faced have been providing good education
to all of our clients so that they are able to both use the tool and understand the data that they're using.
We have about 40 sites and 300 users that currently using CIHI Portal
and the response has been very good. MicroStrategy has been very helpful in
allowing us to provide good education and a good quality tool to our users.
A new customer, General Financial Canda recently selected MicroStrategy's BI tool for
national and eventually global deployment.
We definitely want to have a single source of the truth for our data.
We have data from a probably about eleven different sources
So one of the key aspects of the project
is to ensure that
data means the same to everybody. So when I say appraisal date
marketing is going to
they say the same thing that finance is and they're all going to agree that appraisal date means one thing.
And then of course having the ability for users
to, across the board, to be able to get to that single source of truth and report out.
We just always through
quite an extensive RFP process and MicroStrategy came back as probably one
of the most user-friendly tools.
The easy and drag-and-drop functionality. The ability to be able to take that data from
MicroStrategy into your Microsoft products like Excel or Access, very easy.
And our salespeople loved it because of the Blackberry
opportunities of being able to get the reports on the Blackberries.