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
Corporate Express
Jupiter Telecommunications
…..
All of the companies listed above use MicroStrategy.
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?
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.
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.
There are just two companies that use MicroStrategy. Wipro ePeripherals (Not Wipro Software) and Ashok Layland. Wipro license is of 7.2 and it is expired and they are not sure to purchase latest version of MicroStrategy. ALL is still using MicroStrategy.
Now Pentaloon Retail is the latest purchaser of MicroStrategy and Mudra Garment is an unconfirmed buyer. I’ll update the information as and when available.
Well it happened in March or something, but I didn’t ask anyone about it. Cybage has a practice of not introducing a newbie unless he is well versed, but worse is if you are replacing someone good who left company/project, you will not be introduced to MicroStratgy for a real long time. I was a undisputed defect (main deliverable to client) finder within 2 months but I was introduced to MicroStrategy only after release of 8.0. They took 202 days to introduced me to MicroStrategy. They gave me absurd reason about having introduced 3 people who joined after me. This is sad story of Cybage all together.
BTW, I was (kinda) demoted by having shifted to Front-End team from Back-End team on MicroStrategy in Cybage. Reason, I used to wear (and still) funky cloths to office, Limp Bizkit style. Frond-End team does QA of Desktop products and Administration where as Back-End team does QA of Configuration settings and NCS. Bank-End testing has steep learning curve. I do not know Narrowcast Server and Customization well. I was categorically kept away from both.
In spite of all these, MicroStrategy@Cyabge was the best job. It was all new technology. Getting trained by some of real hardcore guys. Person responsible for Analytical Engine (Hani) has been working at MicroStratgy for a decade and he is a gem of person. He has showed us the bugs in MicroStrategy in a hardcore technical manner. I really really liked that. I know how to fake the output of a report completely. There is a secret tool using which you can directly communicate to MicroStrategy Metadata. Last but not least, you can created a report using the Object IDs. Yes, just using Object IDs. But that tool (I won’t name it) is full of bugs. When I sat full, really full. That has been created by Engine team for internal use and they know to use it. There are no checks, you can enter whatever you want, but these guys won’t go wrong.
This partiality is a common issue with Cybage. I know it is everywhere but Cybage has to 3-4 times more than the companies I work after leaving Cybage. Specially you feel sucked when your PM (Gurvinder Singh Chhatwal) tries to discredit you for the appreciation that you receive from Client. MicroStrategy is considered a client who will not easily appreciate offshore employees, but I received appreciation for “delaying 8.0 SP2 UNIX build for more than two weeks”. I not only found a show stopper issue with the build that was going to be GA also gave them the workaround. When client appreciated the same, there was a long mail then usually sent by MicroStrategy and it was full of talking about that UNIX issue I uncovered, PM forwarded to All Managers to CEO he just forgot to mention me. When I asked his about the same, he asked to do that next time and he would definitely do it. Man, you don’t have Olympic every day or month. Don’t wanna say anything more than this. BTW, my PL, for whom I was a bone of contention, left Cybage and has joined MicroStrategy. This guy named Paramjeet Singh Sidhu (valid Orkut login required) is a a best guy in fixing and setting up and office politics. All people who left Cybage while he being the PL, mainly due to the fact that he wouldn’t have let them grow in the team. This guy will go to any level of politics for progress. Some happiness taht Lopea (SR QA Manager) is among my connection on LinkedIn.