MicroStrategy’s New Visual Insight Helps Users Analyze Data Visually
New features help enterprises embed information in rich interactive dashboards.
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MicroStrategy Incorporated has released MicroStrategy 9.2, which includes Visual Insight to help business people explore data to get the answers they need quickly and without assistance from their information technology (IT) teams. In addition, the latest release includes significant new features that allow organizations to embed even more information in interactive dashboards.
A new feature in MicroStrategy's core BI platform, Visual Insight gives business people a better way to analyze data that is simple, powerful, and fast. In under 30 minutes, business people can uncover insights that lay buried in tabular data by using highly interactive data visualizations and without IT support. Visual Insight is designed to help users answer business questions on their own, avoiding the lengthy process of report specification and design. Instead, Visual Insight puts the power of BI into the hands of business people, allowing them to control the process and to get answers to questions quickly and easily.
Visual Insight lets business people analyze data from across the enterprise, regardless of where it resides. Users can access data from a full spectrum of data stores, from massive enterprise data warehouses to distributed departmental databases, from financial databases to data residing on the individual's desktop computer and in Excel spreadsheets. MicroStrategy's Web-based data import feature allows business people to import data directly from their desktop computers for visual analysis and sharing with others.
Visual Insight allows users to create multi-tabbed "insight dashboards" that can present different views of a business issue. These dashboards can be saved and shared so colleagues can access them and benefit from the analysis. MicroStrategy's data security architecture automatically ensures that people only see the data they are allowed to see.
Visual Insight requires only a Web browser for its user interface, so enterprises can provide Visual Insight as an internal software-as-a-service offering.
To see a demonstration of the new Visual Insight data exploration capabilities, visit http://www.microstrategy.com/bi-visual-insight.
Richer Interactive Dashboards
MicroStrategy customers routinely distribute large dashboards to thousands of business people every day, and each dashboard may contain a wide range of data and interactivity to support the recipient's decision-making needs. The enhancements in MicroStrategy 9.2 provide even more user interactivity, more data visualizations, and more information content within a single dashboard.
In addition, the product offers:
- More Interactivity: New dashboard selector controls allow users to navigate through analytical workflows faster and switch more easily between dashboard information panels.
- More Visualizations: Users can analyze geographical data in their dashboard using MicroStrategy's Connector for Google Maps. Data can be plotted as markers on a map that vary in color and size depending on the business metric values. Tapping on a marker enables the user to drill to more detailed views. The maps can also include an "affinity visualization" that links map points with lines whose color and thickness depends on the strength of affinity between the two points.
- More Information: New pop-up information windows deliver additional business data. The information windows are context-sensitive when activated, so the data in the window is relevant to the specific area of the dashboard being viewed.
With MicroStrategy 9.2, users can access their dashboards using the Google Chrome and Apple Safari browsers as well as Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
New Features for High Performance Operation
MicroStrategy 9.2 offers features that provide even higher performance to end users and at the highest levels of usage. These features include:
- Greater Use of High-speed In-memory BI: Organizations can stage more information in MicroStrategy's high-speed, in-memory technology using the new incremental in-memory update features. These features allow companies to avoid refreshing the entire in-memory data store in favor of simply updating the changed portions of data, which frees up additional processing time and allows companies to pre-position even more data into high-speed memory.
- Greater In-memory Hit Rate for Multidimensional Data: MicroStrategy 9.2 can automatically redirect queries to in-memory data stores when the data originates from multidimensional data sources, including SAP BW, Microsoft Analysis Services, IBM Cognos TM1, and Oracle Essbase.
- Automatic Joining of Heterogeneous Data from Multidimensional Sources: the new version can automatically and transparently combine multidimensional data with relational data and retain full analytical capabilities, including drilling, sorting, pivoting, adding thresholds, aggregating, and adding calculations. Users can report on and analyze information that spans financial databases typically stored in multidimensional databases with non-financial data that is typically stored in relational databases.
More information is available at www.microstrategy.com.