MicroStrategy BI Improves Access to CompuCom's Business Data 
Experienced IT outsourcer CompuCom has selected MicroStrategy Inc. as its business intelligence (BI) platform to improve customized access and presentation of business data to many of its non-technical business users, including sales analysts, financial analysts, and customer representatives.
Experienced IT outsourcer CompuCom has selected MicroStrategy Inc. as its business intelligence (BI) platform to improve customized access and presentation of business data to many of its non-technical business users, including sales analysts, financial analysts, and customer representatives.
Behind CompuCom’s decision to use MicroStrategy BI is the company’s underlying “Relational OLAP” (Relational online analytical processing) architecture, which is designed to create ‘virtual views’ of data that are easier for non-technical end users to navigate, retrieve information and create reports.
“MicroStrategy’s flexibility and intuitive reporting capabilities were well-suited for our BI environment [and] MicroStrategy will enable us to be more responsive to the needs of our organization by providing a seamless BI environment where users are empowered to create their own reports for enhanced visibility into the business” said John Douglas, CIO of CompuCom, in a statement. 
Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy’s COO said CompuCom is representative of the types of businesses turning to BI make it easier for business users to get at data they need for analysis and reports. “MicroStrategy’s powerful reporting platform is designed for business user productivity, with a user-friendly Web interface that puts control in the hands of business people to access the information they need without relying on support from IT personnel,” Bansal added in a statement.
Inside MicroStrategy’s BI Architecture,
Easy-to-Access Technology Features
MicroStrategy’s BI enterprise reporting and ROLAP architecture allows quick and comprehensive reporting and analysis of data stored across multiple platforms -- relational database, multidimensional database, or flat data file. MicroStrategy ROLAP allows a complex relational database can be expressed using a “virtual” multidimensional cube structure, which can be more easily understood by business users who want to navigate through data.
With MicroStrategy, end users do not need to understand databases, table structures, or query languages -- just how to point and click. Further, MicroStrategy's workflow guides help users "drill" into detail as represented by their business model, not their database model.
Two notable features of the MicroStrategy approach are:
- Intelligent Cubes -- In-memory caches stored by MicroStrategy’s Intelligence Server that allow users to easily add or remove report objects (such as attributes and metrics), add new metric calculations and filter their view of the data in an ad hoc fashion. Data stored outside an Intelligent Cube is automatically accessed using the ROLAP engine when drilling to more details.
- Drill Anywhere -- Easy-to-use data access technologies that let business users “surf” through a data warehouse to find the data they need, view summary- to detail-level data, and access the entire breadth and depth of data contained in a database. MicroStrategy enables this “drill anywhere” feature by combining Intelligent Cube echnology with multi-pass SQL generation.
