Book Image

Discovering Business Intelligence using MicroStrategy 9

Book Image

Discovering Business Intelligence using MicroStrategy 9

Overview of this book

Business Intelligence is a type of technology that has been proven to support business decisions in an organization. MicroStrategy 9 is a fully-integrated BI platform that makes Business Intelligence faster, easier, and more user-friendly. It enables businesses to generate their own reports and dashboards without the need for technical knowledge.This practical, hands-on guide will provide Business Intelligence for executives, as well as enable BI reports and dashboards without the dependency of IT savvy personnel. It will allow you to design, build, and share business relevant data in hours, in a secure way, including mobile devices and show you how to leverage your transactional information.This example-oriented book looks at the value proposition of cloud computing and the MicroStrategy platform, and features practical exercises for BI reports and dashboard enablement, including the design phase and best practices for when we design a BI report.The book begins with an exploration of MicroStrategy along with typical business needs. Our focus then shifts to best practices for BI reports and dashboard definitions from the functional stand point, with easy-to-do exercises that will allow you to enable the reports in the platform. You will learn about scorecards and dashboards, along with sharing the reports. Next, you will get acquainted with cloud-based services provided by the MicroStrategy platform. By the end of this book, you will able to design, enable, and share BI reports and dashboards without the need for comprehensive technical knowledge, and leverage the latest technology on the market.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Chapter 6. MicroStrategy and the Cloud

In the previous chapters, we learned how to use the MicroStrategy platform for creating new models, reports, scorecards, and dashboards.

We also saw how to share via different channels without any complex setup of hardware, software, and specialized consultancy from an IT specialist; everything in a do-it-yourself approach.

All of this is possible due to the easy-to-use platform and, more importantly, the usage of the Cloud. But in order to be on the same page, we need to understand what the Cloud is.

In a Cloud approach the companies lease their digital assets, and their users are abstracted from the physical location of resources, such as data centers, applications, and databases they're using.

These resources are just in the Cloud somewhere; in our case, they are in the MicroStrategy Cloud. Firstly, in the Cloud approach, customers lease the infrastructure and software platform instead of buying them, shifting IT from a capital expense to an operating...