Proving ROI from BI Applications
Through MicroStrategy Enterprise Manager, system architects can easily determine statistics such as report usage, most often run reports, user login times and resource utilization. This data, when combined with other relevant information, can be used to present a convincing ROI case study to executive sponsors. Many MicroStrategy customers have successfully used Enterprise Manager to prove the success of their BI applications. For Extranet deployments, customers also use Enterprise Manager to bill external users for data access.

Optimizing and Tuning BI Systems
BI applications are constantly evolving with addition of new reports, users and data. In order to optimize and tune an evolving BI system, MicroStrategy Enterprise Manager provides a vital tool for system administrators. Enterprise Manager lets administrators tune the caching strategy to optimize report execution, as well as smooth out spikes in hardware resource demands to optimize hardware usage.

Compliance Management with Secure Auditing
Many BI applications deal with sensitive data such as customer personal information, financial transactions and healthcare data. In order to prevent unauthorized access and use of this data, BI applications must be secured against external access. In addition, there are several regulations that require that organizations keep track of users accessing such data in order to have an audit trail available for later analysis. By logging every single user request and tracking the machines from which such reports were executed, administrators can be assured that secure and comprehensive audit trails are maintained for all BI applications.

Impact Analysis Ensures Smooth System Upgrades
Object Manager's comprehensive search and conflict resolution features allow administrators to conduct thorough impact analysis of all objects in a BI system, automatically taking into account all dependents of the report.

Version Control For Application Backup and Recovery
For backup and recovery purposes, as well as to compare new reports against existing reports, administrators need to maintain multiple versions of a single object or project. With other BI tools, this involves clumsy duplications at the database level of the entire application. MicroStrategy Administrator and Object Manager provide a simple methodology to automate and maintain multiple versions of a single report or other object. These can easily be recovered if needed to replace newer versions which may not have worked as expected.

Seamless Deployments in All Languages
As BI applications expand in scope, many applications need to be simultaneously maintained in multiple languages for users across different geographies access these systems. The internationalization must be integrated at several levels including interface translations, metadata object translations, formatting variations (currency, units etc.) and data translations. Object Manager allows reports and other analyses to be moved from a master project into multiple other projects for other languages by simply updating the definitions of new and modified objects without changing names and other internationalized settings. Combining the locale-aware functionality of MicroStrategy Web with the internationalization features in Object Manager allows for seamless multi-language deployments of BI applications.

Lower Total Cost of Ownership through Automation
Administrators can use Command Manager to schedule bulk administration tasks on a time-driven schedule, as well as automatically trigger event-driven schedules based on meeting predefined thresholds. Command Manager complements MicroStrategy Intelligence Server's industry leading feature set for rock-solid operations (clustering, hot failover and caching), allowing system administrators to automate many tasks based on predefined events. Integrating these tasks with system management tools such as Tivoli ensure that the BI environment can dependably operate under changing user and system loads, as well as account for data changes automatically without any manual intervention. The level of automation that Command Manager can provide reduces the administrative resources required and improves system reliability and manageability, significantly lowering total cost of ownership.