MicroStrategy 2019 has a Truly Transformational Capability with Federated Analytics

Federated Analytics Through MicroStrategy 2019

Through many conversations with MicroStrategy customers and prospects, there is certainly a lot of excitement about the new platform and its mobile capabilities. Many attendees at the conference envisioned “zero-click” insights with hyper intelligence. We presented a demo of a use case where companies could get insights and analytics about their customer’s directly from social media channels, without a single click, and without actually being on the MicroStrategy app. However, one of the capabilities we are most excited about at Smartbridge is the truly transformational enablement of federated analytics.

We have seen analytics transition to a more decentralized model in recent years, rendering departments and business units to spin up their own analytics initiatives. This was because either the IT or centralized analytics group had competing priorities, were overly governed, or simply could not move at the speed required. Often, IT still owns and governs the analytics data architecture (although we are seeing changes here with the agility of cloud data warehouses like Snowflake).

This decentralization, without any governance present, still posed the same challenge that led to centralization in the first place; no single source of truth, discrepancies in metrics values from one report or system to then next, the list goes on. For example, you can have one department using MicroStrategy, another using Tableau, and a third using Power BI. Even if they all connect to the same data warehouse, they can end up with different values for a metric, like comparable net sales. They may also end up in different roll-up or aggregation values, due to the applied logic against the dimensions. Furthermore, the expansion of the big data ecosystem and data science means it’s less feasible to do a majority of analytics through a single data warehouse. For example, it’s a challenge for certain use cases to analyze sensor or other IoT data with a traditional data pipeline to a data warehouse. The combination of analytics decentralization, and expansion of the data ecosystem has led to a major challenge that is not easy to solve.

MicroStrategy 2019 Has a Solution to This Problem Through Federated Analytics

Tools like Tableau, Power BI, and Qlik have grown and proliferated organizations, especially within business unit analyst groups. However, they have always lacked true enterprise capabilities and a robust semantic layer, which exists with MicroStrategy. Now, MicroStrategy 2019 is filling that gap by enabling platform and semantic layer connectivity to other analytics tools, as well as their ever-expanding data solutions with it’s enterprise semantic graph.

This capability truly has the ability to transform how companies operate their analytics organizations. It strikes a better balance between the benefits of centralized enablement, and the democratization of data and analytics.

Keep Reading: An Introduction to Sentiment Analysis in MicroStrategy