MicroStrategy CTO newsletter

Transcription

1 Dear MicroStrategy Customer, At MicroStrategy, we take our responsibility to you very seriously. Every morning my leadership team meets with me to review the state of our products and customers. We discuss a variety of topics that range from new enhancement requests to complex issues escalated from our support organization. We review upcoming releases along with updates on the operational status of our Cloud systems. This process reinforces a customer-first approach across my leadership team, and it drives that same mentality throughout the entire technology organization. Our customer-centric approach is evident in 10.4 and in some of the new initiatives that I ve detailed in this quarter s CTO Newsletter. I m particularly excited about doubling the scale of MicroStrategy s server cluster capacity, and the brand new user and workload fencing capabilities. We re also excited to be among the first to support the AppConfig for Enterprise standard, which allows customers to securely deploy mobile applications. And for the IT administrators in the audience, we ve improved the express install and express upgrade processes, and introduced version-less license keys. For more details on the new features of MicroStrategy 10.4 and how they can benefit your business, I encourage you to keep reading the CTO newsletter. Sincerely, Tim Lang, CTO 1 Copyright 2016 MicroStrategy Inc. All Rights Reserved.

2 Top 10 features of 10.4: 1 Greater Horizontal Scale and Reliability In 10.4, we introduce an exciting new capability that significantly extends the capacity and availability of MicroStrategy. Through enhanced Horizontal Scalability we have expanded the certified Intelligence Server cluster configuration to eight-node clusters (from four). We are also introducing Workload Fencing, which enables the dedication of nodes to run specific workloads within a cluster. In addition, User Fencing enables dedicating specific nodes to specific users or user groups. The net result of this innovation is as follows: You can dynamically add capacity and improve service availability by leveraging Larger Clusters (up to 8 from 4). Benefits Quickly and easily increase system capacity and availability Load balance between dedicated fenced workload nodes Workload Fencing can be employed to separate scheduled workloads from interactive user activities (such as running reports, dashboards and the like). Benefits Ensures consistent batch completion Eliminates performance impact on interactive users Reduces stability risk for interactive/ad-hoc users Segment distinct user communities with User Fencing. Benefits Isolate performance and stability impact of highresource ad-hoc users (for example, Data Scientists loading large data sets on an ad-hoc basis) Reserve capacity for interactive user communities requiring elevated SLAs 2 Copyright 2016 MicroStrategy Inc. All Rights Reserved.

3 2 Thresholding on Attributes We spent a lot of time listening to our User Community, and this was one of the top requests, with over 180 likes! In MicroStrategy 10.4, users of Report Services or Desktop/Visual Insight will be able to easily add threshold-based highlighting on not just Metric Values, but also Attribute Elements. 3 Smart Defaults We designed Smart Defaults to significantly reduce the time that users spend on improving the readability and appearance of visualizations and dashboards. To this end, we have introduced a set of changes in 10.4 that provides a cleaner look to visualizations and layout components. Smart Defaults provide a combination of better default properties and improved rules for visualizations and layout components. Some examples are increased row height for improved readability, grid headers and gridlines formatting, graph axis and reference lines formatting, etc. We intend to keep investing in this area in upcoming releases to enhance the overall user experience. 3 Copyright 2016 MicroStrategy Inc. All Rights Reserved.

4 4 New Big Data Drivers We are continuously working to enable customers to successfully kick off Big Data projects in As part of this ongoing effort, we improved our integration with Cloudera Impala, Google Big Query, Hive and Presto by pushing more analytics down to the native sources, allowing you to leverage your infrastructure and minimize the run time for analytics. We have also updated drivers (SparkSQL, Hive, and Presto). In the future, we are planning to launch a benchmarking exercise to further validate performance of our big data integrations. 5 RESTful Data APIs We are continuing to build an eco-system of users leveraging MicroStrategy datasets, and customers building data-driven solutions. To this end, we have exposed an additional way to tap into the data in Reports and Cubes using an optimized RESTful API. Our plan is to further keep expanding the API functionality. 6 Hierarchical Reporting We re excited to announce that 10.4 will preview an upcoming new feature, Hierarchical Reporting. We ve made it much more streamlined to create hierarchy reports, including reports with unbalanced or ragged hierarchies. Typical examples of such reports include financial and HR reporting. This is made possible by using a new attribute type, Hierarchical Attribute, which represents an entire hierarchy and its levels. In 10.4, this feature is supported for Microsoft Analysis Services and Essbase. 4 Copyright 2016 MicroStrategy Inc. All Rights Reserved.

5 7 EMM Support via AppConfig for ios MicroStrategy Mobile now supports EMM capabilities via the implementation of the AppConfig Community guidelines. This functionality delivers the first standard, vendorindependent approach to configuring and securing applications for the Enterprise by leveraging the native capabilities of ios. Any MicroStrategy Mobile app can be deployed and configured remotely by any AppConfig compliant EMM provider without requiring any vendor specific SDK or wrapper. 8 Silent Express Installation We are excited to announce that with 10.4, we have made Express Install programmatically accessible from a script as part of a Silent Installation process. Enterprise customers can employ their automated scripting tools and have the same benefits as with the Express Install where the entire platform is deployed and configured. Included with this new feature are sample scripts to get you up and running. 9 High Performance Mac Unlock with Zero-click Web Login Mac lock: Last quarter we released the ability to unlock a Mac computer using proximitybased detection from your iphone. This quarter, we will release the ability to Lock your Mac based on the same proximity based detection. Mac Lock provides enhanced user security by locking a computer when the user is not present. And of course, when the user come back to their desk, Usher will unlock their computer. For users with Windows machines or Android devices, the Technology team continues to work to deliver the same lock / unlock capabilities. Stay tuned for more information regarding these features in 10.5 and Copyright 2016 MicroStrategy Inc. All Rights Reserved.

6 Web SSO (single sign on): Expanding our ability to provide seamless user experience, we have enhanced Usher s logical access capabilities to enable Single-Sign-On to web applications. Once a user has logged on using Usher, the user can directly access applications like Rally, Salesforce and other applications using their Usher credentials...without having to input any other application-specific credentials. This process ensures that access to web applications is both easy and simple, while also being secure. Check out the examples images below for a quick view of this process in action. 10 Mobile Improvements for Tutorial Many of you have reached out to us requesting improvements to the consumption experience of the MicroStrategy Tutorial. With 10.3 we began this journey by improving the overall fit and finish for Web, now with 10.4 we are announcing an improved Mobile experience for the getting started Tutorial. There are dedicated Mobile home pages designed for Apple and Android devices, automatically configured through our Express Installation. We look forward to your feedback as we continually improve these systems! 6 Copyright 2016 MicroStrategy Inc. All Rights Reserved.

7 CUSTOMER UPGRADE Through the activities associated with our releases such as the customer council, as well as more direct channels like our user groups and community forums we have received great feedback and understand the need to simplify your process of upgrading MicroStrategy to the latest version. Your feedback raised certain key themes: Hotfixes are easier to apply than performing a major release upgrade Testing and validation of applications, workflows, performance requires significant time and investment Functional testing is common. Load testing is becoming more popular as a part of an upgrademaintenance windows are more difficult to schedule as global user bases force demanding SLA times Need more post-install configuration services in order to fully automate the upgrade process The launch of Customer Upgrade Validation program at World 2016 has been a fantastic success... This feedback has helped us refine our roadmap and we are focusing on improving upgrade ability through increased automation, sample upgrade scripts, employing upgrade validation, and reducing the time it takes to upgrade. With most enterprise software, what is installed eventually needs to be upgraded or uninstalled. In the 10.4 release, to improve the programmatic install experience, we now provide sample commented response files showing example automation for the silent install on Windows. When it comes to uninstall, we haven t always cleaned up after ourselves properly, which has caused issues on machines that have frequently changing versions (for example, development systems, or server machines used for proof of concept testing). Deploying an entirely new OS image, while effective, isn t always an optimal strategy, so we re working on cleaning up after ourselves better. The launch of Customer Upgrade Validation program at World 2016 has been a fantastic success, and has provided very valuable feedback to our development teams. We have been able to validate more than 5,000 production reports and documents, and collected capacity data based on over 100,000 executions during this release cycle. In this release alone we have found and resolved over 60 priority items based on this testing. We want to engage another 15 customers actively in this partnership by the end of 2016, so please reach out to Jaime Perez (jperez@microstrategy.com) if you would like to work with us. We are taking this program on the road and are looking to visit 50 customer sites with 10.4 to validate upgrades in the field and feed results back to the team at HQ. This program is designed to provide fast responses and rapid field deployments of the latest MicroStrategy software providing real-world feedback on production systems across core usage profiles. We shall address challenges and work to remove any blocks to the upgrade process. We would love to hear your feedback about any of these topics and can be 7 Copyright 2016 MicroStrategy Inc. All Rights Reserved.

8 reached through the Community sub-forum on Environment: Installation, Configuration & Upgrades ( Environment-Installation/bd-p/351). Workstation, Dossier and the Upcoming Early Adopter Program Workstation will consolidate capabilities...in a single unified interface. Workstation will consolidate capabilities such as report development, schema building, object migration, scripting and workflows currently provided in different products (Command Manager, Object Manager, Architect, etc.) in a single unified interface. This means that developers and administrators no longer need to switch between different products and interfaces streamlining the process of developing and managing BI applications. Dossier provides a new way to quickly and easily combine many dashboards and reports into a single, interactive book of business. The new Table of Contents feature empowers users to logically organize analytical content into chapters and pages to create an intuitive end user experience. The redesigned filter panel provides an easy way for users to slice and dice data at the individual page and chapter levels, or even across the entire dossier. Users can also leverage powerful sharing and collaboration capabilities for a more interactive and meaningful analytical experience. Dossier creation will be made available in MicroStrategy Workstation. Some teaser images of the product are shown below: 8 Copyright 2016 MicroStrategy Inc. All Rights Reserved.

9 Early adopter program MicroStrategy invites customers to work with the Technology team to help drive the product direction for Workstation and Dossier. If you are interested, please contact our Product Evangelist Team at Participation in the program would involve two onsite visits where members of the Technology department will first gather your requirements and then test the software on a customer-provided environment. MicroStrategy 10 Series License Key MicroStrategy has simplified the process of license key management with the introduction of version-less keys. This means that the 10.3 key can be used on any future MicroStrategy 10 release! So, unless you are adding new users/cpus or changing your configuration, you no longer need to go through the new key generation process to before installing our latest software. This convenient feature also makes the 10.4 (and later) install/upgrade easier by automatically pre-populating the license key (screen shot below): MicroStrategy has simplified the process of license key management with the introduction version-less keys Hot Fix 2 This standard maintenance release is well underway, with General Availability planned by mid-june. The primary objective of this release is to continue to harden the platform based on production feedback from our customers, and it builds upon critical fixes already available with Hot Fix 1. The scope of Hot Fix 2 includes critical stability issues, and a cumulative roll-up of all patches into a generally available product that all customers can now benefit from. 9 Copyright 2016 MicroStrategy Inc. All Rights Reserved.

10 Call for participation MicroStrategy invites customers to work with the Technology team to help drive the product direction for Workstation and Dossier. With 10.4 deployed, and 10.5 on the horizon, we are looking to find out more regarding how MicroStrategy is used by you and in your business. While we have had the opportunity to meet with many of you at World, visits to HQ or one of our regional offices, we would like switch things up by sending key business leaders and subject-matter experts to your offices. These full-day sessions would allow MicroStrategy experts to meet with all users and beneficiaries of our product in order to see MicroStrategy in action. The goal of these visits would be see how our products help you achieve your business goals, gain insight to future features, and address any immediate challenges you may be facing; while exploring, validating and removing any barriers prior to upgrade. If you are interested in your company participating in this program, please contact the Product Evangelist Team at for further information. We are planning on beginning these visits in late June and are confirming schedules now. Operations Manager Managing and monitoring multiple applications and complex environments efficiently requires a comprehensive set of functionality. Recognizing this, capabilities provided by numerous administration tools and utilities, including Operations Manager, will be made available as a single unified admin experience driven through the development effort of the MicroStrategy Workstation, available for preview in early Additionally, MicroStrategy will introduce an Workstation Early Adopter program for customers to use capabilities of the product and provide feedback. As you can see, the teams have delivered a robust set of capabilities in MicroStrategy We sincerely appreciate our customers input and willingness to continue to trust us for your business needs. Please continue to provide your feedback on this release. You can access a live demo at demo.microstrategy.com. Sincerely, Tim Lang, CTO 10 Copyright 2016 MicroStrategy Inc. All Rights Reserved.