Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Strategy Analyzer

I got to review one of the SSAS reporting application called Strategy Analyzer. Strategy Analyzer was developed to provide reporting capabilities on SSAS 2005 / 2008 with a very good User Interface. I would say it is a great product for generating OLAP reports. Mainly for Adhoc analysis and to create good looking Dashboards.
This product is available in 3 modes.
1) On-premise version
2) SaaS version
3) OEM/Web Services version

Those who are looking for buying a OLAP client within their corporate and use it for reporting, this is a good option. Those who do not want to spend the upfront cost & manage the Infrastructure then SaaS option is better. For the vendors who are looking to integrate this application in their application (Involves programming) , OEM version is better.

Usually we do not find the applications, which offer Dashboard setup & rendering in the same version of the application. Mostly Dashboard setup is available in desktop versions and rendering is provided in web version. But they have an excellent UI to do perform both the steps.

They are supporting 5 report types
1.Pivot table (Abilty to generate Charts on top of it)
2. KPI Report (KPI Viewer to see SSAS KPIs)
3. Intelligent Map ( Map based reports along with its performance shown in indicators)
4. External web link can be added to its dashboard and get the output Ex: company stock news.
5. External Reporting services link to render the reporting services report in Dashboard.
6. Process Diagram to attach KPIS in a scorecard.

Other technical highlights are:

1. Support to Load Balancing (Uses Sticky session to ensure tha same server is contacted)

2. Support for Multi-language: It supports around 10 languages now.

3. Read SSAS 2005 functionality such as Perspectives, Measure groups and KPIs

4. Authentication (Anonymous or Basic or Integrated authentication).

5. Attach documents to KPIS.

Thanks,
Ashok

1 comment:

Narendra Reddy.Bandi said...

Thanks Ashok,
This is very helpful to me.