Companies Can Freely Mix and Match BI Styles as Needed
MicroStrategy Intelligence Server is the industry's first and only business intelligence server to provide all 5 Styles of BI on a single, unified architecture using a Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Companies using Intelligence Server for their BI applications can freely mix and match different styles of BI as needed. New BI Services plug-ins allow companies implement only the BI Styles they need and gradually add to the functionality of other BI Styles as their needs expand and users master the new capabilities.
Common Set of Backplane Services Facilitate Rapid Deployment
With advanced security and management tools, MicroStrategy Intelligence Server provides cost effective solutions to deploy and manage BI applications at large scale. With competitive BI architectures, organizations often find that as the demand for applications increases within the enterprise, associated administrative and management costs escalate dramatically. Fragmented architectures result in multiple development teams with little to no reuse between applications, many security models and user groups to maintain and multiple administrators to deploy and support these applications. MicroStrategy Intelligence Server's unified, flexible architecture provides the lowest total cost of ownership as it allows organizations to create a BI environment with a single security model, advanced parameterized reports and a common metadata repository, resulting in rapid deployments and reduced administrative and development overheads.
Ultra-High Performance with High User or Data Volumes without Increased Hardware Expenses
MicroStrategy Intelligence Server has been benchmarked to provide industry-leading performance while supporting the largest user populations and data volumes. Over the last decade, the average data volumes and number of users accessing BI applications has seen an exponential growth. System architects can be assured that their BI architecture based on MicroStrategy Intelligence Server will scale seamlessly with any future growth, and their technology investment will never become obsolete. With intelligent four-level caching, automatic load balancing and a unique ROLAP architecture optimized for each major database; MicroStrategy Intelligence Server supports transaction level analysis of terabytes of data for user bases in the 10's or the 1,000,000's.
Perform Detailed Analysis Against Disparate Data Sources
MicroStrategy Intelligence Server can seamlessly access enterprise data warehouses, data marts, operational ERP systems, multi-dimensional databases such as SAP® BW and flat files from within a single business intelligence application. A single unified view of the business is possible by joining data across these various systems in scorecards and dashboards.
- Optimized Multi-Pass SQL Engine: This engine is ideally suited for dynamic access to structured relational data sources such as enterprise data warehouses, which store terabytes of data. The dynamic SQL engine allows seamless OLAP analysis and drilling for end users across the entire breath and depth of data. Users interact within a familiar business model, and do not have to write code or understand the underlying data storage structures. The SQL can be tweaked using VLDB (very large database) settings.
- Dynamic MDX Engine: This data access engine is used to access data sources containing data in multi-dimensional format. The engine automatically generates MDX (multi-dimensional expressions) when running reports and drilling to more detail to access data stored in cubes such as SAP BW. Users interact with elements of the cube to generate and run reports.
- Freeform Operational SQL Engine: This engine is ideally suited for data that is stored in operational systems. This data is usually not modeled explicitly for BI and needs specific SQL to access the schemas. Developers can quickly create reports against these structures by creating freeform SQL. End users then access these reports to perform OLAP analysis against these sources.
Achieve Extremely High System Availability Out of the Box
MicroStrategy Intelligence Server enables organizations to deploy critical BI applications requiring extremely high uptime with confidence. BI applications are becoming a vital component of the business process infrastructure in many organizations. Analysts, managers and executives rely on these applications to make the right decisions on a daily basis, and any failure or lack of availability of these applications results in lost opportunity and productivity. MicroStrategy Intelligence Server has been architected from the ground up to allow organizations to deploy these applications with confidence. With built-in features such as clustering, hot failover and self-tuning, MicroStrategy customers can achieve 99.99999% uptime out of the box with little administrative overhead.
Highly Secure and Easy to Manage with Minimal Expense
MicroStrategy Intelligence Server exceeds the strictest security requirements, employing a centrally managed, flexible, iron-clad security architecture. This architecture protects data to the cell level, controls individual user functionality and safeguards BI application access, thereby minimizing deployment and administrative expense. MicroStrategy Intelligence Server is easily administered using graphical user interfaces, text-based scripting that can be run from a command line interface and through easy integration with third-party systems management software.