In January, MicroStrategy[1] announced something pretty radical: supported connectors for its core BI platform for popular self-service BI front-end tools, specifically Tableau[2], Microsoft Power BI[3] and Qlik[4].
Also read: Enterprise, self-service BI hook up: MicroStrategy releases connectors for Power BI, Tableau, Qlik[5]
That announcement convinced some people that MicroStrategy was ceding the front-end to the self-service BI holy trinity. Were you one of them? I'll admit I was wondering too. Well, it seems those concerns were perhaps unfounded. Because today, MicroStrategy is announcing its 10.11 release and -- guess what -- it's all about the client.
New Visualizations
To begin with, MicroStrategy is adding new visualizations -- and new first-party vizzes are not something that happens to established BI platforms every day.
MicroStrategy will now offer waterfall visualizations, histograms and box plots. In its press release, the company describes waterfall visualizations as good for quantitative analysis; the histogram as helpful to data scientists for understanding the distribution of a variable and the box plot as "critical for visually displaying possible outliers."
Geospatial services
Plain old visualization not good enough for you? Then how about an entire new mapping component powered by MapBox[6]? Yup, MicroStrategy 10.11 has that too.
MapBox maps in MicroStrategy are vector-based and provide global coverage of all U.S. zip codes and postal codes for more than 150 countries. The MapBox technology will join the ESRI[7]-based mapping facilities that were already in the product.
MapBox is a very popular GIS platform, for BI and Big Data vendors alike. The open source nature of its core platform has helped it establish a strong ecosystem upon which many paid/commercial are