MicroStrategy 10 : Successfully convert your Cognos

Environment

Robb Rogers – Senior MicroStrategy Consultant

Monte Stewart – MicroStrategy Professional Services

Manager

Audience Poll

Audience Poll

Audience Poll

Audience Poll

Audience Poll

Audience Poll

Session Overview

Topics Covered

“Real-Life” Case Study for Cognos Conversion

MicroStrategy Professional Services

Competitive Overview

Why Organizations Upgrade from Cognos to MicroStrategy

Types of Conversions

How to decide “What works” for your organization

Conversion Acceleration program, tools and options

Demo

Summary

Q&A

Real Life Scenario

Welcome to MicroStrategy

Congratulations! Your organization just purchased the Best BI Enterprise

platform on the planet which is MicroStrategy 10.2

You have been asked to lead the effort

What now?

Where do you start?

How do we transition?

When?

Why?

The task migrate 600 Reports Cognos to MicroStrategy with a hard very

tight timeline.

Seriously

Monte Stewart

Over 10 years of experience in

Business Intelligence, Visualizing

Data and Reporting.

Over 5 years of experience with

MicroStrategy leading complex

integrations, conversions and

solutions.

Passionate about customer

engagements, successful solutions

and unearthing “hidden” answers in

big data.

MicroStrategy Professional Services

About Us

Robb Rogers

Over 15 years in Business

Intelligence. Have worked in many

industries including health, retail,

manufacturing and government.

Eight years as MicroStrategy

Consultant based in Texas. Have

led 30+ MicroStrategy projects.

MicroStrategy Professional Services at a Glance Accelerate our customers ability get the most from MicroStrategy products from strategy,

conversion and execution. Professional Services has developed, applied and refined

methods for delivering leading-edge technology solutions with a track record of success.

The largest staff of MicroStrategy

Certified Engineers

Dedicated to Business Intelligence

Success and Conversions.

Over 2,000 projects completed per

year

Over 1,000 unique customers served

per year

Offices across North America, Latin

America, Europe, Africa, and Asia

We have completed hundreds of

conversions

INDUSTRY ANALYST

Get unbiased perspective from one of the top industry analysts – BiScorecard 15

Source: BI Scorecard® Strategic and Product Summary – Q4 2014.

Industry Analyst

Get unbiased perspective from one of the top industry analysts – BiScorecard

12

“BI Scorecard is the only analyst firm that tests BI suites hands-on, based on over 300

detailed criteria, and with the customer perspective in mind.”

Gartner comments on MicroStrategy 10

Gartner’s “Modern BI and Analytics Platform Architecture”

Source: Gartner

MicroStrategy 10: Best in Class BI and Analytics Platform

Why Organizations Upgrade from Cognos to

MicroStrategy

Report Designers Create One Report and Can Render it on All Devices

Web

PDF

Flash

iPhone

BlackBerry

iPad

Microsoft

Office

Multiple Report

Designs

Cognos

Multiple

Rendering

Engines

Multiple

Rendering

Engines

Multiple

Rendering

Engines

Multiple Report

Designs

Multiple Report

Designs

MicroStrategy BI

Web

PDF

Flash

iPhone

iPad

Microsoft

Office

Single Report

Design

MicroStrategy

Universal

Rendering Engine

Typical Issues Reported by Cognos Customers

Multiple Interfaces and Loosely Integrated

Difficult to

Upgrade

Poor Support and

Increasing

Maintenance Cost

Difficult to

Administer and

Maintain

Inadequate

Mobile BI

Poor Performance

& Scalability

Fully Integrated Architecture Ensures Full Object Reuse and Easy

Upgrade

MicroStrategy Upgrade Path

• Single Metadata

• Organic Architecture

• Single Admin architecture

• Single Security Architecture

• No Acquisitions

• No Integrations

• In-line product upgrades

v1

v2

v4

v5

v3 8.0 9.0

7.5 7.0

8.1 9.4

10.2

Cognos Upgrade Path

• Multiple product architectures and meta-datas

• Many technology acquisitions

• Multiple migrations

MicroStrategy a Modern Platform What you need to know

Architectural Efficiency – Parallel In-Memory Processing

State-of-the-art in-memory architecture for higher scale and better performance

Core 1 Core 2 Core 3 Core 16 ………….

DATA DATA DATA DATA ………….

16 core CPU

PRIME Cube

2B 2B 2B ….

MicroStrategy PRIME is designed to deliver high performance analytical applications running on

large data sets

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Big Data – Native Connectivity to Big Data

Realize the full potential of your data by natively accessing HDFS

1 Direct connectivity to HDFS: MicroStrategy’s Big Data Engine can

natively tap into HDFS. It generates the schema on read and hence

make Hadoop more suitable for ad hoc querying.

2 Bypass Hive, no tedious ETL from HDFS to Hive: MicroStrategy’s

native connectivity saves users from the tedious process of ETL from

HDFS to Hive and consume unstructured data in Hadoop. Also, helps

in overcoming any ODBC overhead that comes with Hive.

3 Parallel data load from HDFS: Big data engine enables parallel

loading of data from HDFS, hence much faster than single thread

ODBC connection. The unified architecture ensures that users can

benefit from other platform capabilities like leveraging PRIME

architecture when bringing Hadoop data in in-memory.

4 Wrangle HDFS files without relying on IT : MicroStrategy’s data

wrangling capability is integrated with the native connectivity. It

enables users to cleanse and refine their data through an intuitive

interface and make the Hadoop data ready for analysis.

22

MicroStrategy Analytics

Hadoop

HDFS

Big Data Engine

1 Multi-factor authentication via secure biometrics,

device validation, and secure code: With MicroStrategy

Usher, users can securely log in to their MicroStrategy

applications using their smart phones. It replaces

traditional forms of enterprise identity such as IDs,

passwords, and tokens, with mobile identity badges

securely delivered on a smartphone.

2 Convenient and password-free user validation:

Business users can instantly connect to their application

without the hassle of entering and remembering their user

credentials, thus, simplifying the user experience and

eliminating the vulnerability with storing and typing user

credentials to access critical systems and information.

3 Geo-fenced environment access: Administrators can

control user access based on a specific location, thus,

limiting users to access critical reports only when in a

specific area and enhancing security.

4 Time-based access restriction: Administrators can

control user access to a particular time period, limiting

users to access a secure report for a specific time only.

Log into applications without the hassle of remembering and entering passwords

Secure Identity

Secure and seamless way to verify user identity

23

Enterprise-grade security for every business

1 Agile modeling (self-service data Import): MicroStrategy Data Import allows users can easily connect

to data sources and pull in data for analysis. MicroStrategy will automatically create a semantic layer

behind the scenes that can be shared and governed.

2 Out-of-the-box connectors for your data lake: Connect to almost any data source, including files,

databases, appliances, OLAP\MDX, Hadoop, cloud sources like Google BigQuery, Dropbox, Google

Drive, Google Analytics and social sources like Facebook and Twitter.

3 Multi-source data import: Users are not restricted to importing data from just one data source. It’s easy

to combine data from many different data sources into a single in-memory structure.

4 Automatic join detection: Relationships in data are automatically identified and appropriate joins are

generated.

5 Automatic data enrichment: Data attributes like Geographical and Time data are automatically

identified and enhanced. For example, if you have a country column in your dataset, MicroStrategy will

automatically generate the latitudes and longitudes for each country so you can easily plot the data on a

Geographical Map for visualizing it.

6 Automatic semantics detection: MicroStrategy distinguishes dimensions and measures automatically

by looking at characteristics of the data like data type and cardinality. Users can easily change data

elements from dimension to metrics if need be.

7 Connect live or create in-memory dataset: Users can either connect to a source and pull data into

memory, or choose to connect “live” to a data source. The latter allows user to retrieve and render only

the required slice of data that they are interested in analyzing. At any moment, users have the flexibility to

toggle from a live connection to an in-memory cubes and back again.

8 Graphical view of data: MicroStrategy provides a simple drag-and-drop style graphical query builder.

Business users with little or no knowledge of SQL can easily define data relationship and create their own

data model through the intuitive graphical interface

Superior Self-Service – Easy Data Access (Data Import)

Easily import and combine data from many different sources

DB Cubes

Files Big Data Social Data

Cloud Data Web Data

MicroStrategy data import

Easily access and combine data from many

different places

24

1 Self-service data prep/wrangling: Data Scientists and Business Analysts can

spend as much as 80% of their time cleaning and preparing data before getting

to Data Discovery. MicroStrategy’s new Data Wrangling functionality

automatically generates predictive transformations as users interact with their

data. Analysts can quickly clean data for analysis by using our extensive library

of built-in functions.

2 Predictive transformation functions: As users interact with the data, they are

presented with a list of possible transformations that can be applied to clean

the data. This helps users to clean their data with limited or no learning curve.

These Predictive transformations functions are generated based on whether

user is clicking on a cell, a column or a few characters in a cell.

3 History script: Every transformation that the user applies to clean the data is

recorded as a script. Users can anytime undo-redo these operations which

provides a great deal of flexibility. This script is stored with the dataset and can

be reused anytime the user updates the data or incrementally adds new data.

In addition, this script can be exported so that the same steps can be applied to

other datasets as well.

4 Large library of transformations functions: The data wrangler product ships

with a wide variety of functions that help the user to Split, Extract, Dedup,

Delete, Find & Replace, Fill, Concatenate, Pad, Remove whitespaces, Cluster,

Check cardinality distribution and many others.

Superior Self-Service – Easy Data Preparation (Data Wrangling)

Cleanse data and prepare it for analysis with just few clicks

25

Predictive transformations that are suggested

based on user interactions with the data.

Every transformation applied by the user is stored

as a script which can be reused during data refresh

or exported for other datasets

• Color by

• Drag and drop

• Auto geocoding

• Visual selections

• Size by

• Break by

• One-click actions

• On-the-fly data blending

1 Intuitive data exploration with built-in best practices for data

discovery: MicroStrategy provides a drag-and-drop interface for data

exploration and rapid dashboard development. The interface is

designed to provide a highly productive, powerful and intuitive

experience for performing data analysis. A number of visual exploration

best practices are embedded within the product. For example, auto

geocoding, auto time hierarchy creation, and multiple drop zones like

color-by, and size-by for easy multidimensional analysis. Intuitive visual

selections for performing filtering actions and many one-click actions

enable fast, iterative, visual data exploration.

2 Self-service data blending capability: Business users can easily

combine data from different data sources on-the-fly. Users can also

blend data from flat files like Excel sheets with databases or even

modeled data. This provides a high degree of data analysis flexibility.

Superior Self-Service – Intuitive Visual Exploration

Perform data analysis quickly and iterate rapidly to get to insight faster.

26

Intuitive visual exploration

1 Native apps provide immersive user experience: Fully native apps for iOS and Android devices provide an immersive

user experience by fully utilizing the native device capability like GPS, camera, sensors and the native user interface

components.

2 Deliver multimedia content through mobile app: Deliver multiple forms of information (PDF, Videos, Presentations, etc.)

within the same App with the capability of connecting to a WebDAV or SharePoint environment, accessing objects online

and offline.

3 Actionable mobile apps: Implement transactional capabilities into the information driven mobile apps to not only monitor

but also act on information. These transactions can be either performed online or offline through the device.

4 Create workflow-driven apps: High degree of design flexibility to build multiple screens and combining them into a single

workflow-driven app or dashboard.

5 Deliver rich apps on small screen devices: Ability to do screen design and workflows provide powerful capabilities to

build apps for small screen devices.

6 Powerful offline interactivity: Interact with the dashboards without network connectivity. Perform transactions and access

multimedia offline.

7 Seamless collaboration: Annotation and highlighting, adding notes and sharing insights directly from Mobile.

8 Highly secure: In addition to fully leveraging powerful platform security infrastructure, there are many additional mobile

specific security enhancements, such as, partnership and integration with MDM and secure containers like Good

Technologies, AirWatch and MobileIron.

9 Mobile activity monitoring: Capture fine-grained statistics on mobile usage such as which screens are most frequently

accessed, manipulations, query times, usage patterns, app adoption, GPS location, app & OS versions and devices and

much more.

10 Geospatial analytics: MicroStrategy Mobile integrates with the maps provided by the respective Mobile OS (Google Maps

and Apple Maps). Integration with the device GPS enable creation of stunning location-aware geospatial visualizations.

Native Mobile Apps

Mobile experience that users love

27

Immersive experience on mobile

1 Data written back to the data source: MicroStrategy Transaction Services

can not only write back to the data warehouses, datamarts, and

ERP/Operational Systems, but also to Web Services Applications (like

Salesforce.com).

2 Multiple formats of data input supported: Multiple control styles for data

input are supported such as – text/numeric fields, calendar dates, time,

binary values, drop-down lists, slider, steppers, switches, and camera.

3 Transactional mobile intelligence: The transaction capabilities are

available through MicroStrategy Mobile Apps and allow performing closed-

loop analysis by providing the end users the power to act on information. In

addition, the ability to provide transactional capability expands the use case

of mobile apps to go above and beyond pure BI use cases. For example,

creation of time and expense approval apps.

4 Offline transactions: Field employees often have limited connectivity to

network. MicroStrategy’s ability to support offline transactions on Mobile

allow field employees and mobile users to be productive with or without the

network connectivity.

Transactions and Write-back

Build actionable dashboards and mobile apps

28

Transaction services is fully integrated into MicroStrategy’s

organically grown platform

MicroStrategy Transaction Services

MicroStrategy Web MicroStrategy Mobile

Web browsers

MicroStrategy Report Services

MicroStrategy Intelligence Server

data warehouses datamarts erp systems operational systems web applications

Mobile devices

XQuery for Web Services

Applications (using

freeform XQuery editor)

SQL for database

transactions (using

freedom SQL editor)

ADVANCED ANALYTICS

Mine data for useful insights and predict business performance

1 Robust Integration with R: The MicroStrategy R Integration Pack makes it

easy for anyone to deploy sophisticated R Analytics. R Scripts execute inside

the BI engine so there is no server required. Centralized R Scripts Repository

enables easy deployment of analytics from development to production. All R

packages are supported.

2 Off-the-shelf R scripts: MicroStrategy provides a large number of pre-

configured R analytics like ARIMA, Stepwise Regression, k-Means Clustering,

Pairwise Variable Correlation, Random Forest, Naive Bayes, and many

others. Users with little or no R experience can easily perform sophisticated

analysis.

3 Import predictive models: MicroStrategy Data Mining Services enables

organizations to maximize their investment in data mining products by

importing their Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) and seamlessly

encapsulating the model as a predictive metric for use with any report or

document.

4 Large library of analytical functions out-of-the-box: More than 300 OLAP,

mathematical, comparison, financial, data mining, and statistical functions can

be used to perform sophisticated analysis.

10 Advanced Analytics

Mine data for useful insights and predict business performance

29

300+ analytical functions

out-of-the-box provide enough

capabilities for most organizations

Integration with 3rd party tools

like SAS, R, and SPSS for

additional capabilities

PERFORMANCE AND SCALABILITY

Highly scalable BI platform with superior performance 11

1 Push-down architecture: MicroStrategy is widely recognized by industry analysts &

customers as a highly scalable enterprise BI platform. MicroStrategy leverages the

database to its fullest extent by pushing data joins and analytic calculations to the database

whenever possible.

2 High performance multi-pass SQL: Multi-pass SQL queries provide greater analytical

power and minimize the amount of data that is pulled back to the mid-tier. MicroStrategy’s

SQL engine is one of the most sophisticated in the industry and leverages multi-pass SQL

in order to increase performance.

3 Automatic aggregate awareness: MicroStrategy maximizes database usage and

enhances performance by making use of data warehouse optimization techniques like

aggregate tables and table partitioning.

4 Parallel SQL execution: Multiple passes of SQL can be executed in parallel to improve

query performance.

5 MicroStrategy PRIME: MicroStrategy PRIME enables faster data loads with the capability

of parallel ODBC data fetch and hence faster cube publishing. With Prime, users are no

longer restricted to 2B rows per cube. This is possible due to data partitioning across

several cores of a CPU and to be able to split the data within the cube into multiple 2B

chunks

6 Powerful query engine: MicroStrategy’s Engine performs enterprise-wide, cross-

functional data analysis. Create powerful analytical objects that require use of temp tables,

derived tables, and common table expressions.

7 Dynamic multi-level caching: MicroStrategy provides automatic caching at multiple

levels, including element list, metadata object, report dataset, XML definition, document

output, and database connection caching.

8 Proven scalability: MicroStrategy has been recognized as a clear leader in data volumes

by leading industry analysts like BARC (The BI Survey) and Gartner (Business

Intelligence and Analytics Magic Quadrant.)

Performance and Scalability

Highly scalable BI platform with superior performance

Minimum data movement

across the network Multi-pass SQL

Push-down joining uses

The DBMS engine

Multi-dimensional

business model

Join across databases

happen at the client side

Heavy data

movement

across the

network

Other BI vendors

MicroStrategy

30

ADMINISTRATION EFFICIENCY

Higher efficiency using administration and automation tools

1 Workflow automation: MicroStrategy System Manager merges different administrative tasks, such as creating

users, starting or stopping server, and many others into a single workflow. It is also possible to combine non-

MicroStrategy processes into the workflow.

2 Object management and migrations: MicroStrategy Object Manager facilitates metadata life cycle

management. The presence of a single metadata repository increases change management accuracy and

efficiency.

3 Automated integrity checking: MicroStrategy Integrity Manager automates the report comparison process

and verifies the consistency of reports by comparing both the SQL and the pixels of copies of reports and

highlights any inconsistencies. This automated process eliminates the need of manual consistency checking,

resulting in huge time savings while upgrading to a newer versions or during object migrations.

4 Automatic creation of most useful cubes: Cube Advisor recommends and automatically creates an optimal

set of In-memory Cubes based on usage patterns of users accessing the BI system. This process considerably

reduces administration workload and provides an efficient way to quickly improves response times of the most

time consuming and frequently accessed reports.

5 Automated command line scripts: MicroStrategy Command Manager reduces repetitive and time consuming

administrative tasks through automated command line scripts.

6 Automatic change journaling: MicroStrategy’s Change Journaling system automatically captures and logs

changes to all metadata objects, such as attributes, metrics, and reports. Change tracking is critical for

Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. Persistent commenting allows distributed development teams to communicate

with one another about their changes.

7 Out-of-the-box monitoring across the platform: MicroStrategy Enterprise Manager provides out-of-the box

platform monitoring with hundreds of KPIs and corresponding dashboards to perform impact analysis, auditing,

and tuning of the BI application. Administrators can also easily monitor mobile app usage to not only learn

about user behavior but also enhance the mobile applications accordingly for an optimized user experience.

12 Administration Efficiency

Higher efficiency using administration and automation tools

31

OTHER BI TOOLS PROVIDE

LIMITED ADMINISTRATION

1 Object reusability minimizes manual effort: MicroStrategy’s unified

platform and object-oriented development ensure that any change is

propagated to all related objects, ensuring one “version of the truth” and

reducing IT development and maintenance efforts. Object prompts enable

personalized views of a single report for efficient reuse across hundreds of

users.

2 Self service BI offloads work from IT: MicroStrategy Visual Insight allows

business users to quickly create visualizations and dashboards and serve

themselves and even others. As a result, the workload of IT is reduced.

3 Highly automated administration and maintenance increases

efficiency: MicroStrategy provides administration tools to easily automate

manual tasks including life cycle management, data integrity checking, and

platform monitoring.

4 Do more with less: Leading industry analyst studies conclude that IT

personnel cost is the single largest factor affecting BI TCO and accounts for

over 75% of the total cost of ownership. MicroStrategy serves the highest

number of end users per IT administrator making the MicroStrategy platform

highly TCO-efficient.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

MicroStrategy offers highly efficient platform that provides significant TCO benefit

32

“[MicroStrategy] Deployments serve, on

average, 773 users per IT administration

user — the highest score in the survey.”

– Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence

and Analytics Platforms, 2014

The Right Approach to Success Converting Techniques / Methodologies

Typical Conversion / Migration Approaches

“Board Room Chatter” Typical Approaches to MicroStrategy Conversions

1. Convert as is (one to one)

1. Convert existing reporting environment as it exists today

2. Mulligan (Do over) and do it right “this time” approach

1. Completely re-design / re-architect existing reporting system

3. Optimized Conversion

1. Convert and enhance

4. Coexistence with other BI products (On-Top of…)

1. Hook into existing BI platforms… Mobilize

MicroStrategy uses two basic conversion approaches:

There are Two Basic Conversion Approaches

Approach 1:

Direct Conversion

Approach 2:

Optimized

Conversion

Work:

• Re-create Cognos Catalogs

• Re-create Cognos reports

• Used mainly for Proof-of-Concept purposes

Result:

• Faster conversion of small environments

• Utilization of existing work

(e.g., Prompting)

Work:

• Detailed report analysis to eliminate report redundancies

• Re-create the Cognos reports

• Revise data model for higher performance

Result:

• More efficient environment that fits requirements

• Makes better use of MicroStrategy strengths

• More time consuming and potentially higher cost

The conversion process

How will your conversion be done ?

How easy will it be ?

Cognos MicroStrategy

Conversion Process Overview

Phase 1

Plan

• Review existing implementation

• Closely involve key stakeholders

• Small tests/POCs to verify assumptions and plans/Staged conversion of large environments

Phase 2 Implement

• Deploy development, test, and production environments

• Educate developers and end users

• Continuous communication with key stakeholders

Phase 3

Optimize

• Monitor environment after production implementation

• Plan for long-term optimizations and governance

• Optimization is an on-going process as usage evolves

A Majority of Prior Investments Can Be Reused

Estimated Cumulative Effort to

Establish the BI Environment Estimated Incremental Effort

to Convert to MicroStrategy

Identify Sources of Data –

10%

Design / Refine Data

Model – 15%

Set Up ETL and Data

Cleansing – 35%

Tune Warehouse – 10%

Create

Universes/Models – 5%

Establish Report/

Dashboard Specs-10%

Convert Universes/Models

Convert Reports Create

Cognos reports- 15%

Re-create Reports &

Dashboards – 15%

Identify Sources of Data –

10%

Design / Refine Data

Model – 15%

Set Up ETL and Data

Cleansing – 35%

Tune Warehouse – 10%

Establish Report/

Dashboard Sepcs-10%

reuse

reuse

reuse

reuse

reuse

Estim

ate

d C

um

ula

tive

Effort

In most

circumstances,

reuse of prior

investment

can be as high

as 80%

Re-create Schema – 5%

Cognos Conversion Case Study Robb Rogers

Company upgrading Windows,

Cognos ver not supported

Opportunity to evaluate MSTR

Performance was a problem

Complex security model

Conversion must be done quickly

5 Cognos Catalogs

Enhanced data warehouse design

data warehouse to reports faster

‘As is’ conversion

1st MicroStrategy project for a new

customer

Why MicroStrategy?

Implementation Higlights

Large Gaming Company migrated from Cognos to

MicroStrategy

B E

N E

F I T

S

Lower cost

Eliminate support of Cognos

Improved Performance

Offload many calcs from EDW

to analytics engine (i-server)

Stable/ Supported platform

BI infrastructure supported by IT

Greater ease-of-use

Powerful ad-hoc tools available

Improved Productivity

Able to create Joiner reports

could not be done in Cognos

Overall Approach

Assessment Study

Scope

Priorities

Establish Migration Approach

Develop Migration Roadmap

Design & Implement

Project Team

Architect ‘as is’ reporting

Change Management

Impact to MSTR Environment

Training

End Users Expectations

Conversion Assessment

Scope

Extensive Requirements Gathering

Modules:

Gaming - Slots

Labor

Gaming – Tables

Hotel

POS …

Total population of 570 Core Reports

Extracted Cognos SQL from reports

Typical Migration Report Reduction BusinessObjects/Cognos Inoperative

reports

Old/Unused

reports

Candidates for

combining into

one report

Candidates for

combining into

one report

Typical report reduction ratio is 7:1 to 10:1

depending on complexity of your environment

TARGETS FOR

CONVERSION

Private Copies

of

Public reports

Client Conversion Assessment

Scope cont.

Determine Core reports to develop – Phase I

Candidates for combining

All Reports 15300

Ad-hoc (14430)

Duplicates and User Copies (70)

Combining (prompts) (500)

Total to be Built 300

Conversion Assessment

Scope

Establish Migration Approach

“Like for like” – Build schema / metrics to mimic BO SQL

All Web based

No Free-Form SQL because of bad experience with Cognos

Establish priorities / order of implementation

Design / Implement

Blended Project Team

MicroStrategy On-Shore

1 Architect

1 Lead Developer

1 Technical Lead

1 Team Lead

1 Part-time Project Manager

MicroStrategy Off-Shore - GDC

4 Dedicated MSTR Consultants

Design / Implement

Develop Detailed Project Plan for Conversions

Design / Implement

Project Flow – Serial Catalog Conversions

Blended Team

1. On-shore Team

SQL Report Analysis

Developed Logical Data Models for Data Warehouse

Maintained documentation for changes to ETL / Physical Data Warehouse

Built MSTR schema objects and metrics

2. GDC Team

Built reporting objects – prompts / filters

Build Reports

Unit test reports

3. On-shore Team

Fix any discrepancies

Coordinate with Customer for testing

User Review Reports / Sign-off

Change Management

Impact to MSTR Environment

New environment

Sized by MSTR Professional Services

I-Servers to support large cubes (lots of memory!)

Training

Client used PEPs - Perennial Education Pass

Included training to perform ad-hoc

Challenges

Cognos Outer Joins

Logical views (put into the select whatever join you want)

VLDB settings (changes default join from inner to outer)

Report metric settings (report options – inner / outer joins for metrics)

Theta Joins

Joins that use >,<

Managing Project Scope

Users wanted to add more reports

Moved to phase II

Cognos uses flat files as data sources for prompts

Using flat files eliminates goal of ‘single version of the truth’

Client Benefits

Functional Benefits / All their Core reports needs consolidated into a small number of reports

/ Extensive use of advanced, dynamic prompting

/ Substantial performance improvements

/ No hard-coded SQL – allows for a single version of the truth

Advanced End User Benefits / Access to full functionality of the MicroStrategy interface (for development /

ad-hoc)

/ All data and information will be readily available in a common structure for

immediate consumption in various formats – Excel / Web

/ Enjoy the benefits of common metadata: fast development

A History of Success Convert/Migrate any environment

MicroStrategy

“Success Stories”

®

MicroStrategy 10.2 makes converting a success

Start Today

MicroStrategy Conversion

/ Transition Program :

A proven methodology to

a success conversion,

transition, integration and

implementation.

It is possible to substantially reduce

the total time and effort for the

transition by a) leveraging the new

capabilities of the MicroStrategy

platform

We can accelerate a significant part

of the total transition; increasing time

to benefit & ROI

Most of the business knowledge that was created and embedded in your

can be reused and will be

structured, anchored and

documented in the new platform

A B C

GENERAL

Don’t opt for a migration but aim for a smart transition

Aim for a ‘disruptive’ approach to get the most impactful results. Based on

advanced technology (in-memory, mobile, self-service data visualization, Usher,

Big Data, … ), a new governance model, a new development methodology

Low hanging fruit: while transitioning, enrich and enhance your existing assets:

Add a new ([Client]) User Experience across all your internal applications (web and mobile): rethink the GUI-design, add workflows, add graphical data visualizations, include multi-language, …

Enable new functionality in the user interface (out-of-the-box) : drilling, slicing and dicing, communication and collaboration, drop-down analytics, ….

Improve the performance of your reports and dashboards (PRIME)

CDS (conformed dimensions like actor, event, contract, products etc.’: build once,

reuse everywhere

Recommendations

55

Overview Summary

Consultants who are dedicated to conversions

Dedicated Personnel

Conversion Cost Calculator

Conversion Artifacts – Help speed up the conversion process

and reduce human errors

Conversion Methodologies

After doing numerous conversions, we have established a set

of optimal processes

Questions and Answers

Discuss How

MicroStrategy Can

Meet Your Evolving

BI Needs

Try a

Demonstration of

our Conversion

Capabilities

Let us Assess

Your BI

Environment and

Determine Best

Approach for

Migration

email: info@microstrategy.com