Business intelligence (BI) vendor MicroStrategy recently kicked off its worldwide Roadshow to promote the release of the newest version of its BI platform, MicroStrategy 9. The new platform is takes a simplified approach to the creation, implementation and integration of BI projects across the enterprise. The goal is self-serve BI that eases the pain of historically difficult tasks such as Cube development and dashboard design, etc. The strategy is to encourage wider deployments of BI across enterprises (departmental BI) to better leverage the technology, and increase the number of seat licenses. Whether self-serve BI will be received as a relief to IT departments or a new service headache remains to be seen.

Wider BI Deployment with Simpler Development Tools

Behind the new push for enterprise-wide BI deployment are tools for the development of Cubes, business data models, easier report generation and dashboard design. Many of these capabilities are made possible by MicroStrategy's move away from desktop design to Web-based BI. This new application was designed using the Extreme development methodology and leverages AJAX programming and the 64-bit capabilities of current server platforms.