MicroStrategy Inc., a worldwide provider of business intelligence software, has announced the release of MicroStrategy 9, which it describes as its most significant software release in nearly a decade. MicroStrategy 9 was introduced in January 2009 at the company's annual user conference and is now generally available. The new release delivers new technology and features to extend the performance, scalability, and efficiency of enterprise BI, to enable the rapid deployment of departmental BI applications, and to provide a seamless consolidation path from departmental BI to enterprise BI.
First, to extend enterprise BI, MicroStrategy 9 includes new adaptive caching technology called In-memory ROLAP, which takes advantage of the large addressable memory now available on 64-bit Unix, Linux, and Windows computer servers, and provides a performance-optimized middle-tier database that can respond directly to data requests from reports, dashboards, and OLAP analyses. MicroStrategy 9 also introduces new SQL generation optimizations that can greatly improve performance for sophisticated queries involving complex metrics.
Second, MicroStrategy 9 includes new architectural components and features designed specifically to support the needs of smaller-scale BI systems for departments. It enables departmental BI applications to be set up quickly, providing end users with the ability to create reports and dashboards, and to distribute information among themselves with little or no IT support. This is accomplished with features such as multi-source ROLAP, in-memory ROLAP, and rapid metadata creation that enable business departments to quickly access multiple databases without the technically-intensive work of first creating a data mart or data warehouse.
Third, the new release provides seamless consolidation from departmental to enterprise BI environments. Organizations often have a mix of departmental and enterprise BI systems, and face the problem of having multiple ‘versions of the truth' across these BI islands that can undermine the credibility of their BI systems. A solution to this problem is to merge the islands of BI into a more cohesive, enterprise-wide BI system gradually and incrementally. Using the new multi-source ROLAP capability in MicroStrategy 9, metadata and reports from departmental BI islands can be gradually merged into larger enterprise BI metadata, without also having to move any of the original data into data warehouses or data marts.
Eric de Roos, director of product management at MicroStrategy, tells 5 Minute Briefing that "because we have one common metadata repository that can be used for all styles of BI analysis and reporting, customers and partners in specific vertical industries such as retail or healthcare can efficiently create end-user applications for numerous business processes that run on the MicroStrategy BI platform." For more information, go here.