Mstr_8_vs_sas

MicroStrategy vs. SAS A Comparison White Paper by MicroStrategy

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MicroStrategy vs. SAS

I. Executive Summary............................................................................................................................ 3 II. MicroStrategy – A Market Proven, Industrial-Strength Technology.............................................. 4 MicroStrategy 8 Overview..................................................................................................................... 4 Why Companies Choose MicroStrategy?.............................................................................................. 5 III. Comparison of MicroStrategy and SAS on the 13 Key BI Requirements....................................... 6 IV. Critical Questions to Ask when Evaluating MicroStrategy and SAS............................................ 10

I. Executive Summary In the business intelligence marketplace, MicroStrategy competes vigorously with vendors such as SAS. At first glance, both MicroStrategy 8 and SAS 9 can be used to report and analyze corporate data, providing business insight to organizations. However, once customers implement these business intelligence (BI) solutions, they recognize critical differences derived from the architecture and paradigms of these very different technologies. Key architectural differences affect the variety of report types, the breadth and depth of analysis, as well as the cost required to maintain the BI application. The architectural differences result in disparities in performance, scalability, usability, efficiency, and reliability of the system; all of which impact user adoption and ultimately, the success of the BI project. Ironically, as user and business requirements have become more complex, IT budgets have come under increasing pressure. Business intelligence applications must now be developed, deployed, and maintained with the minimum of IT resources, while serving more users across the global organization. Clearly, the BI architecture can be either a liability or an asset to IT departments. A technologically superior architecture will meet all the needs of the end-user, while minimizing the amount of IT maintenance and administration. An inferior architecture will require redundant and repetitive administration, and the constant development of one-off workarounds. MicroStrategy technology is based on a completely relational object-oriented metadata model that insulates the BI application from changes in the data and business environment. This centralized and reusable metadata is self-maintaining and adapts real-time to changes in user requirements, data schemas, and business logic. In MicroStrategy, report developers don’t need to duplicate metadata definitions across hundreds of reports as they may do in SAS. This duplicated effort increases the cost of ownership and change management of the BI application. With MicroStrategy, IT departments have an industrial-strength administration infrastructure on which they can rely to maintain their BI applications with ever increasing economies of scale. Securing corporate data is a top priority in today’s enterprise BI applications. Drug prescription records, human resources records, cell phone call records, and financial transactions are just a few types of sensitive data. The security requirements become even more urgent when information is distributed via extranets or when users drill from the high-level performance reports to detailed transaction information, anywhere in the data warehouse. MicroStrategy provides airtight security with 128-bit end-to-end encryption and cell level protection applied automatically across all reports and all data. SAS does not provide the same level of security out of the box and relies on third party components to offer comparable protection. SAS has pursued a growth strategy based on independent, specialized applications which is directly correlated to its poor level of architecture unification. Conversely, MicroStrategy has concentrated on a single product architecture that spans reporting, ad-hoc query, analysis, proactive notification, scorecards and dashboards under the same user interface and metadata, thus ensuring a single “version of the truth.” SAS 9 still requires many

reports, SAS Web OLAP Viewer for Java for advanced OLAP functionality. The business users must access the SAS Information Delivery Portal for customized dashboards or scorecards. A greater number of user interfaces means more training for end-users, elevating the total cost of ownership of the business intelligence application.



MicroStratEGY VS. SAS

different architectures and interfaces. In SAS 9 you will need SAS Web Report Studio for ad-hoc query or managed

For over a decade, MicroStrategy customers have built thousands of mission critical BI applications with MicroStrategy technology. With an administration-friendly architecture, robust security, a self-service zerofootprint Web interface, and proven user and data scalability, MicroStrategy is the only business intelligence vendor to obtain the highest technology score from the leading industry analyst firm’s Vendor Ratings. MicroStrategy has been proven in the marketplace as unanimously confirmed by 1,679 enterprise global customers in the most respected independent survey of real-world BI implementations, The OLAP Survey 61. As a newcomer, SAS has surprisingly few references to enterprise wide implementations. SAS was not analyzed in The OLAP Survey 6 because the number of customer responses was too small to be statistically significant proving that despite marketing claims by SAS there are relatively few successful enterprise BI implementations. MicroStrategy surpasses SAS, delivering higher business value and better technical support resulting in the highest customer loyalty ratings across any BI vendor. This document discusses in detail the important characteristics of the MicroStrategy 8 architecture, the key differences between MicroStrategy 8 and SAS 9, and the critical questions that should be asked when evaluating SAS and MicroStrategy. Conclusions are rooted in publicly available documents and not subject to individual interpretation.

II. MicroStrategy – A Market Proven, Industrial-Strength Technology The MicroStrategy architecture is the result of 4 years of development and 5 years of subsequent refinement, driven by the needs of the most demanding BI applications in the world. MicroStrategy is an industrial-strength BI technology, uniquely capable of serving BI application requirements characterized by the largest scale, most sophisticated analytics, highest report volumes, and most users. This caliber of BI technology is now being sought after by companies, not just for their most demanding BI applications, but for the purpose of hosting all of their BI applications – standardizing all BI onto a single, highly-functional and economical architecture and reaping significant economies of scale and enterprise-wide consistency. Unlike BI Suites and BI Series offered by other vendors, MicroStrategy offers the only organically grown BI architecture. All of the MicroStrategy 8 components were expressly built to work within a unified architecture and not as separate standalone products or acquired technologies that were subsequently joined together.

MicroStrategy: Best in Business Intelligence

MicroStrategy 8 Overview Launched in 2005, MicroStrategy 8 offers the latest in technical innovations with over 2,000 enhancements across the platform. One of the key differentiators of MicroStrategy 8 is its integrated BI platform, eliminating the need for companies to use numerous distinct technologies from different vendors for reporting, analysis, and performance monitoring. MicroStrategy 8 provides a BI platform that companies can standardize on for all their BI needs. With a scalable architecture and a single metadata, users can seamlessly navigate from scorecards and dashboards to reports and analysis without being required to open and close multiple BI tools and navigate dissimilar interfaces.

1

The OLAP Survey 6- Author: Nigel Pendse http://www.survey.com/olap/ 

MicroStrategy 8’s newly designed Web interface is specifically tailored for the business user. The user interface includes an array of “one-click” actions with familiar paradigms to make business users more productive. For the first time, users can format reports and dashboards in WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) mode and leverage the formatting skills they already have to radically reduce the time it takes to develop and deploy new reports. Why Companies Choose MicroStrategy? 1. Integrated architecture: The MicroStrategy product set is built from a single architectural foundation, delivering all 5 Styles of BI: Scorecards and Dashboards; Reporting; OLAP; Advanced Analysis; Alerts and Proactive Notification. 2. Full featured Web interface: MicroStrategy’s Web interface delivers a Windows-like feeling with drag-anddrop interactivity from any Web browser. The advanced Web architecture is “zero-footprint,” using no Java or Active X controls, and delivers a rich reporting experience both inside and outside the firewall. 3. Seamless integration of reporting, analysis, and monitoring: MicroStrategy can embed OLAP features directly into enterprise reports like scorecards and dashboards, providing a seamless user experience that uncovers root causes without the need for programming or switching interfaces. 4. Ease of use and self service: MicroStrategy’s unique WYSIWYG report design and editing allows MicroStrategy end-users to easily design and refine reports over the Web using familiar skills similar to Microsoft® PowerPoint or Excel. 5. High performance scaling to thousands of users: Unlike other BI providers, MicroStrategy software expands with the application to efficiently scale from hundreds to thousands of people. 6. Proven data scalability: For the past five years, The OLAP Surveys have ranked MicroStrategy highest in data scalability. With terabyte-size databases commonplace, MicroStrategy’s field-proven technology enables customers to deploy more BI applications with greater analytic sophistication and user functionality. 7. Automated report maintainability: Dynamic metadata architecture ensures that changes ripple throughout all reports automatically. 8. Pervasive security and user administration: Security is automatically applied to all users, reports, and data through role-based user administration. 9. Engineered on a single code base: MicroStrategy is widely recognized for its meticulously engineered software based on a single code base, scaling to organizations and applications of all sizes; leveraging any hardware, operating system, and data source infrastructure while making BI more approachable for the

MicroStratEGY VS. SAS

average business user.



III. Comparison of MicroStrategy and SAS on the 13 Key BI Requirements Business intelligence has the power to provide performance feedback and visibility to all people in an organization, enabling businesses to make thousands of better decisions every day. However, not all BI technologies deliver on this promise, falling short on a number of key requirements demanded of enterprise BI applications. The following table outlines the 13 overarching and important criteria by which all modern BI technologies need to be assessed, and provides a side-by-side evaluation of MicroStrategy 8 and SAS 9 along these requirements.

MicroStrategy 8 Key Competitive Differentiators KEY BI REQUIREMENT Unified BI Architecture • Seamless integration of analytics and reporting for root cause analysis • Single code base across platforms • Single Web interface • Single metadata

MICROSTRATEGY 8

SAS 9

YES

LIMITED

MicroStrategy’s unified architecture provides a seamless integration of analytics and reporting from a single web interface.

SAS claims a single metadata architecture. The SAS Metadata Server works as a single access point to the various applications but in reality there are three types of metadata repositories residing on this server. Not all of SAS products fully support the three types of repositories. This makes the product’s configuration and object administration difficult to perform.

MicroStrategy is a single code base product that is truly platform independent. A single shared metadata consisting of all reports and underlying reporting objects ensures one version of the truth. A unified web interface means a common reporting and analysis paradigm for all users.

SAS 9 architecture is loosely unified, relying on up to four different servers with different configuration requirements. This results in increased setup requirements and maintenance costs. SAS 9 has four different web interfaces that overlap in functionality, forcing users to switch interfaces for the desired reporting style. This reduces the user adoption rate and increases the total cost of ownership of the BI solution.

MicroStrategy: Best in Business Intelligence

Market Proven Enterprise Scalability and Performance • 64-bit business intelligence processing • Minimal re-query of the database • Multi-layer caching technology • Large user and data scale customer references • Aggregate awareness • Multi-pass SQL • Leveraging the right platform for the right processing • Minimal network traffic

YES

NO

The MicroStrategy platform is designed for enterprise scalability. MicroStrategy’s ROLAP and multi-pass SQL approach leverages the latest innovations from database technology. It efficiently processes large volumes of transaction level data in the database, minimizing network traffic.

SAS 9 has few references to enterprise wide BI implementations; including deployments with data and user scale.

Data is cached at multiple levels to reduce redundant computations and network traffic. MicroStrategy’s SQL engine aggregate awareness can dynamically determine the most efficient table in every analysis. 64-bit processing allows MicroStrategy to support greater numbers of users and data sizes while improving performance.



SAS 9 caching capability is limited. With limited support for on disk caching, the SAS OLAP Server is limited to using the system’s virtual memory. There is limited caching for relational database queries or multilayer caching, increasing the number of database queries and reducing performance. SAS’ relational access capability does not fully support multi-pass SQL or features that optimize database performance such as automatic aggregate awareness.

KEY BI REQUIREMENT Reusable and Rich Metadata Layer • Robust abstraction layer (where all physical constructs can be modeled logically and hidden from business users) • Highly reusable metadata • Automatic change management • Object oriented metadata

MICROSTRATEGY 8 YES

NO

MicroStrategy’s object-oriented metadata defines your enterprise’s business layer in a single repository. The objects can be nested as building blocks to create more complex objects, e.g., Profit (revenue, cost). If an object changes, every other object dependent on it automatically changes. This ensures consistency across business definitions and minimizes the number of objects to maintain.

The SAS 9 Metadata is not fully objectoriented. Administrators who create measures, hierarchies or dimensions cannot fully reuse these objects to build others. This results in reduced scalability and increased maintenance, making enterprise deployments difficult.

MicroStrategy stores objects and dynamically builds the report SQL during run-time. It does not store a finished report as a static SQL statement.

• Fully interactive reporting, completely zero-footprint over the web from any browser • WYSIWYG document design and editing over the Web • Self-service • Easy to learn, familiar windows on the Web paradigm

Industrial Strength Multi-level Security • 128-bit encryption - extranet ready • Integrate with any security infrastructure with single sign-on • Same report yields different views of the information based on user profiles • Truly zero footprint. No use or download of ActiveX and other plug-ins • Cell level security

SAS Web Report Studio report objects are usually created for each report. If a common report object needs to be redefined, then designers usually must manually modify each report one-by-one in order to apply the change. If a user moves, renames or deletes a SAS Information Map. This may result in an inconsistent metadata repository and nonfunctional reports.

YES

NO

Business users create highly formatted reports using any reporting object via a zero-footprint WYSIWYG design and runtime editor that drastically shortens the report development time.

In SAS Web Report Studio, the user interaction is basic and limited. Users cannot fully create derived metrics, format column headings, control alignment, expand column widths, set the font, undo actions or drag and drop attributes into report templates.

End-users have a high degree of interactivity and are able to create, manipulate and format information through a single Web user interface. Changes are available right away without any need to “publish” or “export” information to other environments.

The design of the reports is of low boardroom quality. The reports are based on pre-defined templates that specify how tables and charts are positioned. There is limited WYSIWYG design capability and the objects cannot be fully sized at the pixel level.

MicroStrategy does not rely on ActiveX. Report designers can use any browser.

SAS Web Report Studio does not fully support all the versions of internet browsers, limiting SAS’ ability to be deployed in extranet environments. Internet Explorer browser support means SAS is vulnerable to ActiveX security threats.

YES

LIMITED

MicroStrategy provides centralized security administration across reporting, analysis and delivery. User profiles and privileges ensure users only access the appropriate information and functionality. Security filters provide the right data access down to the cell level.

SAS 9 does not fully support 128-bit encryption out of the box. To protect the integrity of the data, an extra license of SAS/ SECURE is required. This application must be installed on each SAS-server host, Web-server host, and the client machines, increasing maintenance and TCO.

MicroStrategy supports 128-bit end-toend encryption with a zero-footprint Web client making it a secure platform behind the firewall. MicroStrategy integrates with existing security authentication infrastructure such as LDAP, NT, and databases.

SAS’ security configuration is not fully centralized and requires heavy user authentication between the OS where the SAS products reside and SAS security. This increases the administration overhead.

MicroStratEGY VS. SAS

Interactive WYSIWYG Web Interface

SAS 9



KEY BI REQUIREMENT Dynamic Report Personalization • Comprehensive parameter and question prompting • Security profiles personalize report content for individual users • Report bursting

Centralized Enterprise Administration • Self-tuning scalable server for maximum performance • Usage monitoring / auditing • Controlled environment for analysis • Object management / migration • Single management console

MicroStrategy: Best in Business Intelligence

Flexible and Powerful OLAP Analysis • Integrated predictive analytics and forecasting with best-ofbreed data mining tools • PMML Integration • Collaborative processing (between analytical engine and RDBMS-based processing) • Built-in financial and statistical functions • Business question complexity supported by multi-pass SQL capability • Drill anywhere fosters investigative analysis • Set analysis

Seamless Microsoft Office Integration • All Office products supported (Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook) • Leverage all BI reports and reporting objects • Full new report creation • Persistent and interchangeable formatting across Office and Web

MICROSTRATEGY 8

SAS 9

YES

NO

In MicroStrategy, a single report can span hundreds of possibilities tailoring to different user needs. Advanced report parameters, like object and hierarchy prompts, allow users to pick the business attributes and KPIs to include in the report.

In SAS Web Report Studio, report personalization is fairly basic. There is no capability to prompt for column selection, include filters in prompts or include prompts within prompts. As a result report designers must create and maintain thousands of reports for all the users increasing the TCO of the implementation.

A single report definition for IT to maintain can burst personalized information to hundreds of users.

Unnecessary data is returned to the user when creating reports with SAS OLAP data sources. Filters can only be applied while viewing the report result set, increasing server and database overhead.

YES

NO

MicroStrategy’s centralized administration provides a single console for real-time user and system management.

SAS’ security must often be configured in at least two places, the SAS metadata repositories and the host operating system where the SAS applications reside.

Enterprise Manager provides hundreds of KPIs and corresponding dashboards to perform impact analysis, auditing and tuning of the BI application. Object Manager facilitates life cycle, metadata dependencies and project management.

SAS 9 administrators and users can manually break the metadata integrity by moving or renaming SAS Information Maps. Users must often authenticate multiple times. LDAP authentication is only supported by two out of the four main servers, the SAS OLAP Server and the SAS Metadata Server. The SAS Stored Processes Server and the SAS Workspace Server must use the host’s OS to verify user identities.

YES

LIMITED

The MicroStrategy SQL Engine’s ability to dynamically generate multi-pass SQL allows users to ask complex business questions such as market basket and set analysis, e.g., view sales for the current year for all customers who purchased product ‘x’ last year. Users can drill anywhere for a boundary-free speed-of-thought investigative analysis.

OLAP analysis is not fully accessible through SAS Web Report Studio. For more advanced OLAP analysis, users are required to switch interfaces to the SAS Web OLAP Viewer for Java.

MicroStrategy’s Data Mining Services leverages definitions from all major thirdparty data mining vendors, providing predictive analytics to thousands of users. MicroStrategy’s Analytical Engine provides hundreds of built-in financial, statistical, and mathematical functions. The SQL Engine and the Analytical Engine work collaboratively to ensure that processing is performed efficiently on the optimal tier.

SAS access to relational data sources is restricted. There are limited multi-pass SQL or aggregate awareness capabilities. One SAS Information Map can only handle one dimensional schema. When multiple fact tables are included in one Information Map a Cartesian Join may not be prevented, compromising data integrity and causing double-counting of measures. When reporting from relational data sources, SAS reports have limited hierarchy awareness and drill paths must be pre-defined by the SAS Information Map designer; there is no true drill-anywhere capability.

YES

LIMITED

MicroStrategy delivers the complete reporting and analysis environment to Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook users. MicroStrategy Office applications are linked to MicroStrategy security and administration, ensuring 100% data consistency across the enterprise.

SAS offers the Microsoft Office Add-in with limited functionality. The Office add-in differs in functionality depending on the SAS data source being accessed.

Users are able to access existing reports or create new ones. Changes are immediately reflected interchangeably across MicroStrategy Office and Web interfaces. Microsoft Office formatting changes are preserved after automatic data updates.



However SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office is delivered with two key limitations. Users cannot fully create new Web Report Studio reports and cannot fully access SAS Web Report Studio reports from the Office Add-in. Without this data source integration, users must recreate every Web Report Studio report and cannot fully leverage the previously created reports.

KEY BI REQUIREMENT Dynamic Enterprise Dashboards • Dashboards Integrated with Industrial-Strength BI Platform • Full power of ROLAP analysis • Single design environment • Infinitely Extensible Visualization • Advanced Visualization Flash Libraries • Native parallel Flash and DHTML visualizations • On-Dashboard interactivity • WYSIWYG Design Paradigm

MICROSTRATEGY 8

SAS 9

YES

NO

MicroStrategy’s Dynamic Enterprise Dashboards fully leverage the MicroStrategy 8 platform. Dashboards are created using reports and objects from MicroStrategy’s single metadata. Intelligence Server provides its sophisticated processing, security, caching and analytical capabilities.

SAS 9 provides dashboards through the SAS Information Delivery Portal via coded portlets and SAS Web Report Studio. The SAS dashboard’s layout is restricted and has limited interactivity.

Users design dashboards from MicroStrategy’s single web interface using the already familiar design paradigm. Dashboards are created in a zero-footprint web interface, Pixel Perfect™ and freeform layout. Dashboard Designers create highly interactive dashboards and can render them in DHTML, Flash, PDF or Microsoft Office products.

SAS Dashboards do not fully support pixel perfect positioning or WYISWYG design. Users cannot edit dashboards while viewing the information. Users must contact IT to make small modifications in the portal. Users must switch tabs to view different layers of information. Dashboard layers within the same panel are not supported for enhanced screen real estate. Interactivity between dashboard components is limited and there is limited inter-panel control. Advanced visualizations like heat maps, useful for the viewing of complex data, are not supported out of the box and require hand coding through the SAS/Graph module.

• Direct access to SAP® BW for reporting and analysis • Direct access to Hyperion Essbase • Direct access to Microsoft Analysis Services • Operational database reporting with Freeform SQL

YES

LIMITED

MicroStrategy allows a single document to present data pulled directly from multiple data sources.

SAS 9 provides support for heterogeneous data sources, connections to SAP BW and other ERP systems through SAS/ACCESS interfaces.

MicroStrategy’s Freeform SQL Engine can generate reports from data residing in any operational database across the organization. MicroStrategy can directly query SAP BW InfoCubes and QueryCubes.

However, SAS Web Report Studio and the BI Server’s OLAP Viewer can only access the SAS OLAP Server natively and provides limited support for third-party OLAP databases such as Microsoft Analysis Services or Hyperion Essbase. In SAS Web Report Studio Reporting, joins between heterogeneous result sets are typically not automatic. Instead, heterogeneous joins are usually manually pre-defined for each SAS Information Map. In SAS Web Report Studio users must ask IT to create SAS Stored Procedures and Information Maps to access multiple data sources from a single report tab. SAS requires multiple servers to extract information from the various data sources.

MicroStratEGY VS. SAS

Heterogeneous Data Source Access from a Single Web Document



KEY BI REQUIREMENT

MICROSTRATEGY 8

SAS 9

Robust Enterprise Reporting

YES

NO

• Support for wide range of report styles • Pixel-level absolute positioning • In-place analysis • Desktop publishing formatting • High quality printing • Export to Excel

MicroStrategy’s Web Interface is designed to maximize business user and report designer productivity. Highly formatted documents are built using common desktop publishing paradigms such as rulers and pixel-level positioning, all over a zero-footprint Web.

SAS 9 does not provide a product for Enterprise Reporting. SAS is not optimized for hierarchical or banded reporting, making it difficult to create operational reports. SAS does not support pixel perfect positioning.

MicroStrategy offers comprehensive report styles from banded reports to dashboards and scorecards. These documents are highly interactive providing in-place analysis, pivoting, drilling and Excel-like formatting toolbars.

SAS Web Report Studio is restricted to information consumption and basic report creation. Users are often required to switch to SAS Web OLAP Viewer for OLAP analysis and to SAS Information Delivery Portal for predefined and highly customized Scorecards. Exporting to Excel in SAS Web Report Studio is limited. The charts and graphs are exported as images or tab-delimited text, resulting in the loss of report interactivity or formatting added by the report designer.

Information Delivery and Proactive Notification • Wide range of output types: Web, print, fax, wireless • Alerting and Thresholds • Dashboards and Scorecards • Corporate Portals integration

YES

NO

Users get personalized alerts triggered by dynamic events and time scheduled reports, via portal, print, email, wireless or file servers.

SAS 9 has basic delivery capabilities. There is limited support for scalable delivery and notification capabilities such as mid-tier slicing, automated distribution list generation or event based notification.

MicroStrategy platform leverages highly scalable technology that slices a single report and dynamically distributes personalized information to the right users. Reusing a single report across hundreds of users saves processing resources.

SAS 9 does not support Scorecards out of the box. Administrators must rely on SAS Information Delivery Portal or SAS Solutions Services to implement a basic version of Scorecards through portlet customization.

Users can easily assemble scorecards and dashboards based on existing objects and integrate several data sources, without the need of an extra application or interface.

IV. Critical Questions to Ask when Evaluating MicroStrategy and SAS There is a fundamental difference between the software architectures of SAS and MicroStrategy. SAS, which stands

MicroStrategy: Best in Business Intelligence

for “Statistical Analysis System,” has focused on delivering complex statistical and niche analytical applications for small groups within organizations. SAS did not release a business intelligence offering marketed to larger user communities until SAS 9 was introduced in March 2005. SAS 9, also known as SAS Enterprise BI Server, is composed of multiple tools with non-unified architectures and distinct interfaces that overlap in functionality. Underlying reporting objects; such as calculations or filters, are not easily shared or reused across the various products. This translates into multiple user interfaces requiring excessive user training and unnecessary re-creation of report definitions, increasing the effort on maintaining the BI system. In comparison, MicroStrategy’s code base was completely rewritten over the course of 4 years as a unified servercentric architecture. MicroStrategy has been building its platform organically and keeping the utmost integrity and efficiency. This basic difference allows MicroStrategy customers to benefit from:

10

• A greater range of functionality through a single Web interface and unified architecture which decreases training and maintenance costs. • A productive WYSIWYG edit environment which can be used across any Web browser. • A market proven user and data scalability with more efficient use of network and server resources. • Greater analytical breadth, including predictive analytics. • A market tested and bullet-proof security infrastructure. • Lower total cost of ownership by lowering IS support and maintenance requirements. The following questions elicit these basic MicroStrategy strengths with some very specific comparisons that should be made when evaluating MicroStrategy and SAS. 1. MicroStrategy 8 Intelligence Server supports a wide range of reporting styles of BI as well as common services of metadata management from a single unified architecture. Can SAS Enterprise BI Server deliver similar functionality through its server?

Despite the marketing claims that SAS provides an integrated architecture, SAS Enterprise BI Server is a suite of independent products and SAS Foundation Servers each providing overlapping functionality. In order to support the 5 styles of business intelligence, the SAS 9 architecture requires four independent servers. These servers are: SAS Metadata Server, SAS Workspace Server, SAS Stored Process Server and the SAS OLAP Server. These servers require independent configuration, setup, maintenance, security settings and tuning, increasing the administration overhead and total cost of ownership. Despite having four servers, SAS does not offer an Enterprise Reporting product.



The SAS Metadata Server is marketed as a single metadata architecture, but in reality it is used as a single access point for the various types of metadata repositories. The different client applications still need to be configured to one of the various different types of repositories. Not all client applications support the three types of repositories, making environment design and configuration difficult. Users are required to know exactly where the information they need to access is stored. Each of the three different types of repositories have specific characteristics, capabilities and restrictions. The definitions for SAS Information Maps or SAS Reports are saved as XML files in the metadata and when changes are made to the underlying objects, changes are not automatically updated. Users or administrators can manually corrupt a metadata repository by changing a name or moving an object from a folder.



To gain access to relational databases administrators require a SAS/ACCESS engine. This engine often requires manual mapping and has restricted capabilities such as no multi-pass SQL or aggregate awareness capabilities. Drill paths must be pre-defined by the IT Administrator in the SAS Information Maps, increasing the report design time and interaction between the IT designer and the business user.



MicroStrategy Intelligence Server, the heart of the MicroStrategy architecture provides all common services including metadata management, prompt generation, scheduling, shared caching, security, user management,

each of the 5 Styles of BI as plug-and-play “service modules” that can be mixed and matched in any combination.

As the central contact point to the metadata, Intelligence Server dynamically assembles the metadata objects to create optimized, multi-pass SQL queries for every major relational database. Intelligence Server retrieves the

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MicroStratEGY VS. SAS

query generation, query governing, and administration. More importantly, it is the core engine which supports

data, performs any additional analytical calculations not available in the databases, formats the report, and delivers the reports to business users via MicroStrategy Web, MicroStrategy Office, Desktop, or Narrowcast Server.

Intelligence Server is a highly scalable, parallel-processing, self-tuning analytic server. Intelligence Server manages high performance interactions accessing terabytes of data by tens of thousands of users using caching, load balancing, resource prioritization, and connection pooling. It accesses and joins data from multiple data sources, such as data warehouses, operational databases, multi-dimensional (cube) databases, and even flat files. Intelligence Server also manages users, system security, data security, and user functionality access. A clustering option is available with Intelligence Server that increases scalability, and provides fault tolerance with automatic failover.

2. MicroStrategy provides all the major styles of BI – Scorecards and Dashboards, Enterprise Reporting, OLAP Analysis, Predictive Analysis and Alerts and Notification from a single unified web interface. Why does SAS require three web-based products to deploy a limited subset of this same BI functionality?

MicroStrategy Web provides Dynamic Enterprise Dashboards through a powerful and business user-friendly interface. MicroStrategy’s Dynamic Enterprise Dashboards fully leverage the MicroStrategy 8 platform. Dashboards are created using reports and objects from MicroStrategy’s single metadata. Intelligence Server provides its sophisticated processing, security, caching and analytical capabilities. Dashboard designers create highly interactive dashboards and can render them in DHTML, Flash, PDF or Microsoft Office products. Users design dashboards from MicroStrategy’s single web interface using the already familiar design paradigm. Dashboards are created in a zerofootprint web interface, Pixel Perfect and freeform layout.



MicroStrategy’s Web architecture provides a single, consistent interface to all users whether the BI application is departmental and internal, or an extranet application deployed to hundreds of thousands of users. MicroStrategy Web allows users to move fluidly between all styles of BI to satisfy all reporting, analysis, and monitoring needs.



MicroStrategy Web generates an interactive BI experience including report viewing, formatting, exporting, pivoting, sorting, drilling, and ad-hoc querying to WYSIWYG report design and creation from a single Web interface.



MicroStrategy Web accomplishes all of its functionality through a cookie-less, zero-footprint Web client without using ActiveX® or Java Applets resident in or downloaded to the Web browser.



MicroStrategy Web provides the Web interface using Active Server Pages (ASP) on 32-bit processor computers running Microsoft Internet Information Service (IIS) on the Microsoft Windows® operating system. In contrast to

MicroStrategy: Best in Business Intelligence

MicroStrategy Web, MicroStrategy Web Universal provides the identical end-user functionality through ASP or Java Server Pages (JSP) on either 32-bit or 64-bit processor computers running any supported application servers on any operating system.

Despite SAS’ efforts to market their product as a single and unified architecture capable of delivering all styles of BI, users are often required to switch from product to product to satisfy their reporting needs for ad-hoc querying, OLAP reporting or analysis. Regardless of the many user interfaces, SAS does not have a product for Enterprise Reporting. SAS Web Report Studio is a fairly basic web interface that is not available for the .NET environment and only supports the Internet Explorer web browser. Web Report Studio is mostly used for information consumers with little report interaction. Ad-hoc query or Reporting is restricted to the SAS Information Map Data Sources,

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previously defined by the system administrator, SAS Stored Processes or SAS Base code. OLAP analysis is restricted in Web Report Studio forcing users to switch to SAS Web OLAP Viewer for more OLAP functionality. Scorecard creation is not an out of the box functionality and requires portlet customizations to the SAS Information Delivery Portal or SAS Solutions Services to implement a basic version of Scorecards. True dashboard functionality is not available throughout the whole suite. For more in-depth analysis like statistical analysis or forecasting, users are required to use the SAS Enterprise Guide for the creation of SAS Stored Processes.

This tool fragmentation affects the user adoption of technology, requiring business users to learn multiple interface and reporting paradigms. A loosely integrated architecture requires more environments to maintain increasing overall administration complexity.

3. MicroStrategy 8 utilizes a multi-level caching architecture. MicroStrategy achieves high inter-user and inter-report caching rates that allow maximum utilization of the IT resources, resulting in the lowest cost per report. Does SAS 9 provide a similar enterprise caching architecture?

MicroStrategy 8 provides a comprehensive caching architecture that has been built and improved during the years. With the MicroStrategy platform, caching is synchronized across clustered machines. All users can access the portion of the cache for which they have permissions. Permissions are determined after applying security filters, privileges and access control lists. With MicroStrategy, the cache is automatically refreshed whenever any underlying report object or data changes. This is critical in maintaining a “single version of the truth.” MicroStrategy’s multi-level caching architecture offers the following caching levels for maximum reusability:



• Report dataset caching allows quick access to full and intermediate result sets, enabling inter-user and inter-report caching.



• Metadata object caching allows the reuse of attributes, metrics, hierarchies and other report objects. This greatly improves the response time during report creation and manipulation.



• Lookup table element caching provides great reusability for prompt values. For example, a hierarchically sorted list of a thousand product categories or SKU items can be cached, eliminating expensive queries to the database.



•X  ML definition caching delivers different report presentations from the same XML cache without the need of querying the database again. The XML cache is also used for incrementally fetching data on-demand through the report pages or for increasing the performance of system-to-system data transmission via web services.



• Intelligent cubes enable quick user manipulations such as slicing and dicing, pivoting, subtotaling, banding, sorting, drilling and adding new derived metrics. This enhances the usability of the system and speeds up the investigative process.



MicroStrategy 8 uses one or more datasets as data sources for the documents. These datasets are cached immediately when they are first used. As a result, any other report that uses the same dataset immediately benefits from this cache. Performance and throughput are improved significantly for subsequent reports. MicroStrategy 8 prompted reports can display hundreds of options, e.g., SKU item pick list, where this list can



The SAS Enterprise BI Server suite has four different servers to process requests against the database. Out of the four servers, the SAS OLAP Server is the only server that fully provides limited caching capabilities.

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MicroStratEGY VS. SAS

be cached for future use in any similar prompted report.



SAS 9 Workspace Server does not fully provide caching functionality to allow true inter-user and inter-report caching. Users cannot reuse the same report results requested by a previous user. When SAS Web Report Studio users run reports through the SAS Workspace Server the query is run against the database and all the results are brought back to the user with no mid-tier processing. This means SAS 9 will have to generate and re-run the same SQL every time, putting a tremendous strain on the database, network and client resources.



In Web Report Studio there is no full support for prompt elements search. Every time a user runs a report with a prompt, this user has to pick his choice from a list of elements. This may become a very painful task when having to select from hundreds of options, taking into consideration that in SAS 9 there is no search functionality for the element prompt lists.



The SAS Metadata Server does not fully support caching either, this means that every time a user requires a SAS Information Map, a Report Definition or a Stored Process Definition, the SAS Metadata Server will query the metadata repositories for this information.



The SAS OLAP Server has a limit on the size of the aggregate data sets. The size of the data cache memory should be no more than 10% of the system’s virtual memory. The SAS OLAP Server only caches the most frequently used cube aggregations in memory. This means that the actual reports from users are not cached. When a user makes a request, the OLAP Server will have to process the information from the aggregated tables and send it to the user. This results in increased processing overhead for the server host requiring more powerful and costly infrastructure.

4. MicroStrategy supports aggregate tables which optimize the performance of the OLAP and Reporting application. MicroStrategy’s engine is “aggregate aware” so it selects the most efficient table to retrieve the data. Is SAS 9 “aggregate aware?”

MicroStrategy supports a wide variety of data schemas, from the common star schema to sophisticated snowflake with split-fact schemas. Using these schemas, the data is modeled following an object-oriented paradigm where, e.g., “Region” is an object or attribute that defines a geographical characteristic of the data. In this case “Region,” regardless of the number of instances it is found across the tables in the data warehouse, will be recognized by the MicroStrategy’s SQL engine as the same object. This logical abstraction layer provides MicroStrategy with many reusability and optimization capabilities. Factual “Regional” data could exist across several tables with different levels of aggregation, e.g., ‘daily sales’ fact table or ‘monthly sales’ fact table. If the

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user runs a 2005 sales report broken by “Region,” the MicroStrategy engine will select the most efficient table. In this case it will select the ‘Sales per month’ table as it provides the highest level of aggregation and the least effort to aggregate the yearly requested data.

SAS 9 requires a SAS/ACCESS engine to connect to relational databases. This engine often requires manual mapping to the relational tables and columns to create a SAS data source. Administrators then connect to the SAS data sources through SAS Information Map Studio to create data models and “Data Items.” These Data Items are business representations of the actual data. These business representations are one-to-one mappings of the data warehouse table and table columns structures. Reports are then created by selecting these individual “Data Items.” Since data modelers must specify to what specific table or column the “Data Item” must map, it

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constrains the “SAS Query Services” engine from pointing to many tables. This critical limitation in SAS 9 causes a lack of aggregate awareness, meaning SAS does not always access the optimum data table. SAS Information Maps have other critical limitations that restrict the analysis that can be performed with relational databases like no support of many-to-many relationships, no support for star schemas, no support for multiple join paths between two tables and no support for more than one fact table per Information Map without causing Cartesian joins.

All these critical limitations in SAS 9 cause restrictions in the analysis complexity and limit the performance, maintainability and scalability of the Business Intelligence applications.

5. MicroStrategy reporting objects are all object-oriented. Report objects can be used as building blocks for other objects, so the same report component can be used by multiple reports, reducing redundant work. Do SAS reports automatically inherit changes, such as new names, metric formulas and filter criteria, from other metadata objects?

MicroStrategy Report components are dynamic, reusable metadata objects built with the data abstraction objects, business abstraction objects, and other report components. These three layers of metadata objects are combined to create new reports and analyses in both MicroStrategy Desktop and MicroStrategy Web. In all cases, the metadata objects retain their reusable and dynamic characteristics, and a change to a single object in the metadata is automatically reflected in all other dependent metadata objects. For example, if the “Region” attribute changes from mapping to Table A to Table B, all reports that use the attribute “Region” will seamlessly inherit the new change. MicroStrategy’s object-oriented metadata lowers development time by reducing redundant work, and reduces maintenance work by minimizing the number of objects that need to be maintained.



SAS Web Report Studio stores the definitions of the reports as an XML file in one of the metadata repositories. All the components of a report are saved as parameters within this XML file and not as reusable objects. Many report components cannot be reused across reports and cannot be reused to build other reports. When changes are made to one report definition, changes are not automatically propagated across the other reports that use the same object. For example, if a user wants to change the filtering criteria for “Year,” the user must find and go into each of the reports that contain this filter and make the change manually. XML report definitions also store the information about Information Maps connectivity. If an administrator moves or renames the Information Map, this may result in a corrupted metadata and unusable reports.

6. MicroStrategy’s ROLAP architecture allows it to scale to tens or hundreds of terabytes of information. Can SAS scale to handle similar data volumes? MicroStrategy’s ROLAP architecture is not constrained by data volume. The MicroStrategy Intelligence Server is a true application server with aggregate awareness and multi-pass SQL capabilities. MicroStrategy’s intelligent shared caches minimize the load on the network and the database, ensuring tens of thousands of Web users can access tens or hundreds of terabytes of information. Data does not need to be replicated out of the database. In MicroStrategy, calculations are performed on the optimal platform, either in the database using MicroStrategy’s optimized SQL or in collaboration with a mid-tier analytical OLAP engine. Since the database’s analytical capability is fully leveraged and only result sets are passed across the network, there are no data volume limits when performing analysis.

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MicroStratEGY VS. SAS





In general, cubes are inherently limited in data scalability and are prone to database explosion due to the extensive amount of pre-calculation required. SAS Data Cubes are constrained and are limited in the number of dimensions, the number of levels and the levels per hierarchy per cube. At a maximum, SAS recommends no more than 7 hierarchies and 7 levels per hierarchy to guarantee appropriate server processing costs and to avoid database explosion.



SAS Web Report Studio performs limited calculations in the middle tier server, returning the results of data from the database to the client’s desktop for client side processing. The performance for running a report may be determined by the amount of information that is transferred through the network and hardware capabilities of the desktop machines. This inefficient transfer of data results in an inordinate strain on network, middleware and client resources especially as the number of users increase.

7. MicroStrategy offers a WYSIWYG web environment of report formatting and analysis that increases productivity of business users and speeds up design. Does SAS Web Report Studio allow web users to format and interact with data without switching to a “wizard” or “design” mode?

SAS Web Report Studio is the new reporting interface from SAS. In this product, SAS users can design reports by using predefined templates or starting from scratch. SAS users are constrained to a portal design style, where they can only add individual report attributes and metrics to create tables or graphs, with the option of adding text around the report but without free form layout flexibility. SAS does not provide a WYSIWYG environment for users to create reports with pixel level placement. The user interaction is basic. Users have limited capabilities to create complex derived metrics, format column headings, control alignment, expand column widths, set the font, undo actions or drag and drop attributes into report templates. IT Administrators are required to make even minor report modifications, normally involving programming changes. To include ad-hoc analysis capabilities it requires users to change to the SAS Enterprise Guide desktop interface or to the SAS Web OLAP Viewer web interface. If Dashboards are required, users must use the SAS Information Delivery Portal. These dashboards are pre-customized portal version based on portlets. All this increases the costs for user training and deployment of BI applications.



With MicroStrategy, end-users are able to author a wide variety of report types. From operational to scorecard and dashboard reports, users have pixel level control to create zone-based reports or perform modifications to existing ones. MicroStrategy users can also interact with the data on the report without having to learn multiple products or interfaces. A functional and intuitive unified web environment is important to make

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end users truly self-sufficient. After users obtain the first access to reports, they will want to interact with them. If end users have to turn back to IT departments for simple modifications such as changing the font or alignment of the title, then both IT departments and end users become less productive, adoption rates drop and, with that, the ROI of the BI application. 8. How flexible is the reporting and analysis environment? What degree of ad-hoc reporting and analysis is available? Can an end user drill from any attribute to underlying lower level detail? Or is it restricted only to drill paths that have been created and defined manually by an administrator?

In SAS, most meaningful calculations and all drill through and navigation must be pre-determined using a client-server tool called SAS OLAP Cube Studio. Limited user interaction includes fixed and basic parameter

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driven reports but no true ad-hoc report creation for users. Very little analytical or functional capability is available unless fully built into the cube ahead of time. SAS is not an ad-hoc reporting environment given its drilling limitations, the need to pre-build all analysis, and the amount of time required to build cubes.

The SAS environment has two separate MOLAP and relational environments that must be manually bridged together to the extent possible. SAS OLAP Cube Studio, which is cube-based, is required for interactive OLAP style analysis. Users need an additional product, SAS Web OLAP Viewer, to perform analysis over the Web. SAS Web Report Studio is required for reporting. These are two separate tools each working off a separate data store and encouraging two different versions of the truth.



MicroStrategy Intelligent Cubes have been fully integrated into MicroStrategy’s scalable ROLAP architecture. Analysis can be performed within the Intelligent Cubes but are not constrained to the cube’s boundaries. The MicroStrategy engine seamlessly updates the Intelligent Cubes with data from relational data sources. Out of the box, users have the ability to drill anywhere to various levels of detail either within or seamlessly beyond MicroStrategy Intelligent Cubes. No administration is necessary to maintain these drill paths.



MicroStrategy end-users could drill from ‘Region’ to ‘Territory’ to ‘Product’ a drill from parent to child attribute and then to a completely different hierarchy. If a new attribute is added to a hierarchy, no database administration is necessary to make this attribute accessible for drilling. Also, as users are added into the system, security profiles ensure that users obtain the right level of access when navigating across the different hierarchies of information.

9. How much IT administration and system setup is required? Can SAS manage thousand user deployments? Can SAS Web Report Studio run in every browser?

SAS cubes usually require significant time and resources to set up. Setup tasks are numerous, including building and optimizing cubes, creating scripts for calculations, and maintaining the OLAP interface using SAS OLAP Cube Studio. Creating SAS cubes is equivalent to building another duplicate proprietary database on top of the data warehouse.



SAS does not provide an administration console where IT can conduct tuning of the different reports run by users. SAS is frequently deployed to small user populations within organizations and therefore lacks the experience in handling and administering enterprise wide deployments to thousands of users. SAS Web interfaces only work in the Internet Explorer web browser as they depend on ActiveX and WebDAV technologies, which have been known for exposing security holes in the past.



MicroStrategy Administrator is a comprehensive environment for developing, deploying and maintaining multiple applications across multiple platforms. A remote administration console enables complete control over system monitoring tasks and administration of users and objects. Object Manager facilitates complete life-cycle

environments and can be shared between users, groups, and projects. Complete user and data warehouse monitoring ensures maximum performance and throughput.

Report and cube creation using MicroStrategy software is a simple, quick task. MicroStrategy end-users use a WYSIWYG drag and drop paradigm to create Web reports or MicroStrategy Intelligent Cubes — the process

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MicroStratEGY VS. SAS

application management. Reporting objects can be migrated easily across development, test and production

is identical regardless of complexity of the cube or report. MicroStrategy object prompts and dynamic time transformations fulfill the needs of the user population with far less number of reports, decreasing maintenance costs and increasing service levels in the organization. The MicroStrategy Web interface runs in any kind of browser and does not use ActiveX. 10. MicroStrategy Web gives users control over report content. Prompts enable personalization of reports from a single report definition, reducing the number of objects stored in the metadata repository. Does SAS Web Report Studio support such advanced prompting capabilities?

SAS Web Report Studio prompting capabilities are very basic. Users cannot select via prompts the attributes or metrics that will define their reports. The elements from a prompt cannot be dynamically generated by a filter but must be previously defined by an administrator within the Information Map. This requires the users to go through a series of iterations before getting the desired final report layout. When accessing relational databases through SAS Web Report Studio, there is no hierarchy awareness. When accessing the SAS OLAP Cubes there is no way to prompt the users to filter the data while building the initial report. All the results are brought back to the user without any middle tier processing. This increases network traffic and generates overhead on the client side. When an administrator selects the particular prompt picklist values there is no way to customize by sort order. Users are not able to filter or search on the picklist, having to select from hundreds of possible values. Prompts cannot be optional, meaning that if a report designer includes a prompt in a report, the user will have no choice other than to answer it. Finally, the prompt interface does not support radio buttons, check boxes or calendar displays for date type filters.



This lack of prompt functionality in SAS encourages the creation of unnecessary reports and increases workarounds in the database and programming requirements. This elevates the administration and maintenance costs of the business intelligence application.



The MicroStrategy BI platform contains a sophisticated prompting engine that allows the selection of filtering criteria using attributes, such as a time period or a geographical attribute, and metrics, such as top 10% or bottom 10 by revenue. Report content becomes completely dynamic with object prompts. Users can choose the specific attributes and metrics from a list that is available on a report. This results in controlled, guided ad-hoc analysis that can be deployed to all end-users.



MicroStrategy supports more types of user prompts than any other BI platform. User prompts allow the users to input or make selections at runtime to alter the contents of the report. Simple prompts may allow users to

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pick from a list of years to filter down time criteria for a report; more sophisticated prompts may allow users to select the level of a hierarchy and the metrics they would like to see on the report. MicroStrategy supports the following comprehensive set of prompts.

• Hierarchy Prompts allow users to choose elements from a tree-shaped hierarchy



• List Prompts include Shopping carts, Radio Buttons, Check Boxes, Multi-select Boxes formats



• Object Prompts allow users to choose which objects to place on a report at runtime



• Value Prompts allow users to specify values or thresholds for specific reports



• Level Prompts allow users to choose dimensionality for the metrics on a report



With MicroStrategy, business users have the ability to specify what content should be included in a report each time they run the report by answering prompts. A single MicroStrategy report design can produce hundreds of report variations through MicroStrategy’s unique parameterized reporting capability.

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