Cloud Personal BI

The MicroStrategy company started a free cloud service of visualization and data analysis of Cloud Personal BI. The main target audience of new service – users of Microsoft Excel.

MicroStrategy made the decision to bring BI to masses and developed the solution which will give the chance to these users of Microsoft Excel to estimate advantages of a full-fledged system of the business analysis. A new system is called Cloud Personal and is provided free of charge.

The beta which appeared this week allows to send data to data center of MicroStrategy where they are processed afterwards by a number of virtual tools. The result can be shared for other users by e-mail or social networks, said in the official statement of vendor.

Cloud Personal works with the Microsoft Excel files which are providing data in a tabular format and having only one level of headings. "So far we do not support cross-tabular data and files of other format", said in the FAQ of service. The Cloud Personal service can also work with public data which can be found on websites of the government, such as Data.gov, MicroStrategy stated.

Security settings give to users of service the chance to solve who can get access to reports. Also the rights of individual users can be cancelled using a control panel at any time. Service works completely in the browser, another software does not need to be set, however, its correct work requires support of Flash technology.

Microstrategy also urges users of service to send the best visualization to the website where they will be available to everyone. 20 examples such there are already available.

Cloud Personal not the first service of BI, such in the market. For example, not so long ago date visualization offered Tableau the free version of the means. The essence of such services comes down to giving the chance to potential clients to work with BI tools, and then to bring them to need of purchase of paid solutions.

MicroStrategy also actively implements the strategy of "self-service" according to which the company creates BI tools which can easily be used by business without the aid of IT services.