MicroStrategy 10 offers new mapping features.
Recognizing the growing tension between IT departments and enterprise users eager for more self-serve analytics tools, MicroStrategy has added heightened security and governance capabilities to the latest version of its namesake BI platform.
MicroStrategy 10 Secure Enterprise, which arrives a full six years after version 9 of the platform, promises to combine enhanced business-intelligence functionality with data discovery, mobile analytics and enterprise-grade security.
"The idea is to empower business users with strong self-service access to analytics but in way that's governed," said Paul Zolfaghari, the company's president.
As easy-to-use analytics tools have become more commonly available, some organizations are experiencing problems associated with the lack of enterprise-level oversight, including data-quality issues, inconsistencies and data silos.
MicroStrategy 10, unveiled Thursday, aims to combat such problems with new administrative controls.
Unlike niche BI products that can yield siloed sets of results when used by individual users or teams, MicroStrategy 10 uses a common metadata framework and scalable enterprise backbone to ensure that there's always a "single version of the truth," he added.
Revamped data-discovery tools in MicroStrategy 10 include enhanced exploration and visualization capabilities for both Mac OS and Windows. New built-in data-wrangling capabilities, for example, are designed to let users quickly prepare data for analysis without needing to use other tools.
Focusing on big data, meanwhile, new native Hadoop access via Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is designed to make it easier to analyze petabytes of multi-structured data.
Improved in-memory performance in MicroStrategy 10 lets users put more data on parallel-partitioned in-memory cubes, so organizations can run faster queries across larger volumes of data.
Also included in the new release are a completely redesigned HTML5 interface, a new Operations Manager for administrators, an employee-productivity app for managers, a smartphone app for user verification and enhanced platform security powered by biometric and multi-factor authentication.
MicroStrategy 10 Secure Enterprise is now generally available; upgrades are included with current customers' maintenance contracts. The new MicroStrategy 10 Desktop stand-alone client for data discovery and visualization -- available on Mac and PC -- is priced at $600 per user.
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