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Simple, flexible and highly visual products are what’s selling within the business intelligence and analytics arena, and MicroStrategy is hoping to leap on that bandwagon with free cloud and desktop versions of its product designed to be easy to apply.

MicroStrategy has established its reputation as one of the crucial innovative business intelligence vendors — early to adopt mobile, in-memory, and cloud. The product is legendary for enterprise scale, but in addition for complex implementations. It is not lots that the product itself was harder to implement than comparable BI platforms, but rather, that it required a clean data model, with conformed dimensions. Customers who did not have an enterprise data warehouse usually sought alternatives from more flexible BI platforms or newer visual-data-discovery vendors.

With MicroStrategy’s latest release, the seller has gone far to enhance ease of use and deployment, setting its sights on engaging even every-day decision makers with free versions of MicroStrategy Desktop and MicroStrategy Express. MicroStrategy Desktop is a brand new product aimed toward individual BI users. It’s in line with Microstrategy’s Visual Insight product and competes most directly with the likes of Tableau. Users can import data (modeled or not) and immediately create interactive visualizations and dashboards. Dashboards could be emailed as a PDF to other users.

[ Want more on data visualization? Read Tableau Data Visualization Tool Gets Major Revamp. ]

Although MicroStrategy has branded this new product “desktop,” it is just not confused with the vendor’s original desktop interface. This new product installs locally and creates an internal website at the local desktop, so users work during the same browser-based interface utilized by the specific and Enterprise products. This approach makes for a more consistent user experience around the product line and a straightforward transition route to a bigger deployment. However, in comparison with other BI products which might be truly desktop-based, the beginning-up process is slower.

MicroStrategy Express, the cloud-based version of the product, has more robust capabilities than Desktop, including highly formatted reports, report scheduling, and file sharing. The seller says it’ll make MicroStrategy Express free for the primary year, with out a cap at the variety of users. The primary limitation is that data should be loaded to the cloud, whereas the cost-based MicroStrategy Cloud can analyze data left on-premises.

Besides getting an overall face lift, all versions of MicroStrategy now support data blending, a method where users can mash together data from multiple data sources. Data can come from a flat file, spreadsheet, dozens of relational databases, Hadoop and Hive, or existing MicroStrategy reports. Previously, the power to blend data was one in all MicroStrategy’s biggest limitations — while a strength of competitors Tableau, QlikTech, and TIBCO Spotfire. Meanwhile, more scalable and centrally controlled data federation on the server level is supported through MicroStrategy’s Multi Source option.

By offering two free versions of its product, MicroStrategy is obviously attempting to seed the market and get customers to take a re-evaluation on the new MicroStrategy. The seller tried this seeding approach once before with a Reporting Suite product that met with mixed success — mainly because that version was hard to deploy and lacked dashboards. With the convenience of use and suppleness offered within the latest release, the seeding strategy just might provide a significant boost to MicroStrategy’s competitive position.

These latest moves by MicroStrategy are more proof that visual data discovery is without doubt one of the hottest trends within the BI market.

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