Functional Benefit	Brio Description	Brio Financial Benefit	MicroStrategy Limitation
Deployment Speed	Because Brio Intelligence does not require the creation of a complex semantic layer to manage access to disparate data sources, nor the development time associated with language/GUI report generation tools, most implementations are done in less than a week The server components on NT can be literally installed and configured in less than an hour. Under Unix, the server components can be installed and configured in a couple of hours. This not only includes the configuration, but creating some base content as well.	Increase Revenue: End users can take advantage of an analytical reporting infrastructure in a fraction of the time required to either build an in- house application or by using competitive products on the market. The ROI is realized sooner, and incremental revenue is derived from the earlier use of the application. Cost Savings: IT can place the responsibility of report creation and maintenance on the End User community. IT maintains the database and creates a master data model for the end users, who then create all report format and content. IT personnel can be better utilized, focusing on systems, performance, and availability. End Users can focus on formatting and creating new reports to make better business decisions.	The MicroStrategy (MSTR) solution is very closely tied to the dimensional design and processing capabilities of the data warehouse for efficient performance. MicroStrategy 7 is optimized on the snowflake schema, requiring customers to redesign their existing data warehouse accordingly. Because the data modeling is done within the data warehouse, large implementations usually come with a lot of consulting, with rollouts taking anywhere from 6-18 months to complete.
Flexibility and Ease of Use	User Interface: Highly intuitive Wizards/Office 2000 Look and Feel. Menus, toolbars, dialog boxes and browser-style navigation of reports follow the MS Office Look/Feel standards. New Microsoft look and feel, and familiar browser functionality provides users with a familiar user interface. Drill Path: Brio provides complete drill functionality with both Drill Anywhere and Pre-Defined drill-down paths. This unique flexibility offers users multiple ways to investigate data, including free form analysis and pre- defined paths for guided navigation. In addition, Brio allows the users to add additional fields and Drill Anywhere capabilities. Therefore, users do not have to consistently turn back to IT to gain access to important data. Product Integration: Brio’s entire product line is completely integrated. All interfaces are the same and all functionality is contained in one product. Brio uses one file format for the complete product line so users can share queries and reports across platforms and between client/server and the Web. Analysts agree. Brio always wins from an ease of use and ease of deployment perspective.	Increase Revenue: Allows IT staff to focus on strategic, revenue-driving activities rather than creating and maintaining reports. Cost Savings: Minimize the amount of training required to make end users productive initially and on an on- going basis. Cost Avoidance: Eliminate the need to hire additional FTEs to support reporting activities.	User Interface: MicroStrategy 7 has a Web interface that is not as user- friendly as Brio’s. Responding to pressure from customers, MicroStrategy has created the OLAP Provider as a way to enable companies to use preferred front- ends on top of MSTR 7 via ODBO. Brio’s front end is one of the first certified. MSTR no longer supports ActiveX, eliminating the popular right-click functionality that many users like are comfortable with. Drill Path: Users are limited to the paths created by report developers. In MSTR Web reports, graphs are displayed as GIFs with no drill down available.| Product Integration: MSTR’s Web client and the Agent full client have different functionality and different interfaces.
Ease of Maintenance	With Brio’s Open Metadata Interpreter (OMI), users can easily see the important information about their data. OMI leverages the new pre-defined metadata settings of various metadata vendors, existing metadata can easily be accessed and any changes are immediately read the next time Brio is used. This is a standard BRIO.QUERY feature. Brio’s zero administration Web-based client transparently upgrades users’ software without involving IT resources.	Increase Revenue: Allows IT staff to focus on more strategic activities that drive revenue versus the role of creating and maintaining specific reports. Cost Avoidance: Eliminate the need to hire additional FTEs to support reporting activities.	Because MSTR 6 demanded much customization to work properly, customers wishing to migrate to 7 will encounter difficulties. Some may need to continue running applications with v.6 while also upgrading to 7. Gartner has reported that there have been difficult migrations to v.7 recently. Developers must create reports via XLS style sheets that cannot be modified by users. Consequently, Developers become a bottleneck as users demand changes in report formatting or metrics.
Analytical Application Builder	Brio’s EIS provides UI controls, layout tools, and live embedded report components for designing valuable customized ‘dashboards’. By adopting JavaScript as the new scripting language, application developers use this powerful script language to control and build Brio analytical applications that work on all platforms and via client/server and the Web. High-performance calculation engine brings results in seconds rather than minutes, as with competitive dashboards.	Increase Revenue: Enables all users, regardless of skill level, to manage to key performance indicators, thus better aligning the business and improving performance. Cost Savings: Intuitive EIS dashboards virtually eliminate training and lost productivity caused by discomfort with analytics.	MicroStrategy has an SDK that enables developers to build customized applications. However, the feature from v. 6 that allowed easy EIS creation is no longer supported. MSTR believes that users who relied on EIS systems can use the MSTR Web product instead. MSTR Web is not as intuitive as EIS dashboards, meaning customized applications must be built for executives seeking EIS functionality.
Proven Solution	Brio has a large presence in North America. There is a good chance that new employees who are in the position of analyzing data would have experience with Brio at a previous employer. META Group rated Brio as best overall BI Solution, especially in ease of use and ease of management. * Brio is deployed in 69 of the Fortune 100 and nearly half of the Fortune 500.	Cost Avoidance: Incremental training costs can be avoided as a result of having existing in-house knowledge of the solution.	Despite the industry awards it touts, MSTR has a small, specialized customer base. They have only about 1100 customers, primarily in retail and finance. Of those, only several hundred have adopted MSTR 7. There are performance issues with simple queries (30 sec/report) and large numbers of concurrent interactive users.
Off Line Analysis and Reporting	Brio provides offline analysis for both client/server and Web, minimizing OLAP server stress. The reduced network traffic of a Brio web- based solution allows for more concurrent users within a given architecture than does a solution based entirely on server- based processing.	Cost Savings: By not requiring a network connection, network traffic and resulting costs are reduced. Increased ROI: Enabling offline analysis enhances user productivity	MSTR does not support offline analysis or adaptive reporting. MSTR is a batch reporting tool rather than an interactive tool. All reports rely on style sheets that cannot be changed once created. Modifying fonts, number formats, and shading on the fly is impossible. No spotlighting.
User / Cube Scalability	rio has numerous customers operating with terabyte-sized databases precisely because Brio doesn’t rely on pre-built cubes. Brio builds cubes dynamically based on data the user wants to see. Brio doesn’t need to have hierarchies, because we drill anywhere into our mini cube. Each user has their own mini cube on their desktop. All the issues associated with defining, building, and distributing cubes is no longer an issue. We take IT right out of that business, as well as the report building business.	Improved ROI: Enterprise scalability allows deployment against the largest volume of data, maximizing tool utilization and ROI. Increase Revenue: Allows IT staff to focus on more strategic activities that drive revenue versus the role of creating and maintaining specific reports.	Much of the work in implementing MSTR is done “upstream” in the DW, making it difficult for users to modify data structures to their needs. Developers use templates to build reports; users cannot configure them once created.
Platform Flexibility	The Brio Performance Suite solution, which includes the Intelligence, is designed for a ‘Best of Breed’ philosophy’ understanding that an integrated solution will change over time. Brio supports Unix, NT and legacy mainframe environments, in addition to multiple, heterogeneous databases such as Oracle, DB2, Microsoft SQL, Informix and Sybase. Brio also supports Open OLAP Data Sources such as DB2OLAP, Essbase, Informix Metacube, Microsoft OLAP Services to name a few. Brio Intelligence Server is available on both NT and UNIX servers. Supporting both platforms means data is available anywhere and everywhere. Brio improves SAP/BW performance by optimizing MDX queries (reduces the number of requests to the database by 75% or more).	Cost Avoidance: Customers can employ a single; integrated solution to address all analytical and reporting needs, and avoid the risk of having to switch solutions should the environment change. Brio provides the most open Data Access solution. Leveraging current investments in an enterprise’s current DBMS or OLAP solution.	MSTR 7 cannot access multidimensional databases. MSTR requires IBM’s DataJoiner to access multiple data sources. MSTR supports only the Oracle, DB2, or SQL Server as metadata platforms. The MSTR Intelligence Server runs on NT only. MSTR has no direct support for accessing specialized data sources such as SAP BW and ERP operational data.

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Other Considerations BRIO MicroStrategy

Market Perspective

From its beginnings, Brio has approached the development of BI tools from two equally important perspectives: the needs of the business user and the demands the tools place on IT. Brio is widely recognized as the easiest to use by end users and the easiest to maintain by IT.

MicroStrategy is virtually the sole ROLAP-only vendor in the market today. They continue to attempt to modify their ROLAP technology to meet the multidimensional analysis requirements of most businesses. However, they serve a very specialized customer set – those with exceptionally large data volumes and who require broadcasting capabilities to a variety of devices.