MicroStrategy launches consumer-grade cloud BI

Business intelligence (BI) software provider MicroStrategy is launching a new, free personal BI service in the cloud.

 The MicroStrategy Cloud Personal software-as-a-service (SaaS) BI tool, released yesterday in public beta, is designed to 'consumerise' BI access to analytic insight previously was reserved for trained business IT analysts with skills in using specialised tools.

It uses the company's latest product developments to facilitate ad-hoc BI tasks or projects without having to wait for IT or wade through dense Excel spreadsheets. It also simplifies their graphic visualisation and sharing with others.

Kevin Spurway, vice president of MicroStrategy Cloud services, told Cloud Pro the company wants as many people as possible to experience its technology and the launch of this service was the best way to do it.

"We’ve designed the service to be so easy that any business user can get great results in just a few minutes," he said. "Then we’ve combined this with a social data sharing model that even makes it easy for people who aren’t currently users to experience how powerful and insightful our analytics can be.

"We expect that the more that people get to experience our newest technologies – Visual Insight for data discovery, MicroStrategy Mobile, and the MicroStrategy Cloud platform-as-a-service – the more we’ll drive demand for our products in the enterprise."

Spurway said the Cloud Personal service streamlines the user experience of these three core enterprise products by offering a subset of the full functionality of the whole platform. "It's been designed in such a way that any business user, even one not familiar with BI, can get up to speed with quickly and derive a lot of value from," he said.

While users can view and share dashboards on the web or via the Apple iPad, they can also share their BI dashboards via email, or publish them via Facebook, Twitter and blogs for instance. Security settings gives users control over which visualisations they want to share and the ones that should remain private. But users are encouraged to share their most insightful visualisations on the MicroStrategy Cloud Personal Gallery.

Built on MicroStrategy Cloud, the company said Cloud Personal delivers high levels of security, with data encryption, hardened network infrastructure, and other technologies to secure user information. Physical hardware environments are maintained in secure, SAS-70 compliant cloud-based facilities with layered physical security and multi-factor access control.

"The functionality in Cloud Personal is free and will remain so," Spurway added. He also did not rule out the eventual release of a premium SaaS-based service that builds on the experience of Cloud Personal. "In fact, we already have plans to announce significant functional enhancements to Cloud Personal that will make it even more valuable to business users," he concluded.