I came close to hitting the “spam” button on this, since it’s really a sales pitch rather than a comment, but since you’re presales for Microstrategy rather than marketing, I’ll chalk it up to enthusiasm for your product, which I have no problem with, and thank you for your thoughts.

One big thing you got wrong, though: RoamBI does indeed connect scalably to enterprise sources, via back ends like SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos, and Microsoft. I’m not sure where you got your supposed emphasis on Excel from: it’s an option to use it with Excel, and a useful one at that, rather than a requirement.

To be fair to Microstrategy, the company has a long history of promoting mobile BI, with a long-since-disappeared product called narrowcast server, launched 13 years ago, that was well ahead of the market need, and the “create an app” approach is different from the competition.

I’m following with interest the “all mobile, all the time” messaging. I completely agree that current tablets like the iPad are much better adapted for BI consumption than a PC screen, and more “environment aware” in ways that will be very useful.

But the division between “mobile” and “laptop” has already started blurring and will continue to do so (e.g. PCs with GPS, multi-touch pads, etc.), there’s a long list of rapidly-changing mobile platforms to potentially support, and all the major vendors (and most of the minor ones) now have credible mobile BI products.

There have always been happy Microstrategy customers, and I’m sure there will be happy customers of its mobile products — but I don’t think it’s going to fundamentally change the market dynamics.

Microstrategy’s mobile BI app is also on the app store, and unlike their BI platform competitors, it isn’t just a copy of the existing platform forced to fit into the diminutive real estate of the mobile world. It was tooled with mobile in mind, therefore offering the ability to both design on the device ( better suited to the iPad) as well as present. Its interface is just as rich as RoamBI as well. In fact, MicroStrategy has paired with Apple Corp to create new trademark swipe like movements geared towards how BI users interact with data. For example, drill down is no longer check boxes or standard list selectors. Instead, it is a wheel which slides up and down to allow for ease of drilling up or down. They also offer the ability to ‘drill anywhere’ using IN-MEMORY cubes which do not take a rocket scientist like Essbase or Analysis Services to create or worse, to performance tune. I used to be a SSAS developer and can attest to this fact that slow cubes will kill front end BI tools because users what rapid response to queries or they lose interest and focus. All in all, RoamBI has its place. It is great for PoCs or internal demos that need to be created on the fly. But for scalability, security and long term reductions on TCO, look at MicroStrategy. It takes anywhere from 3 days to 10 days to create Apps, which meet the enterprise needs better than RoamBI. In the business world, what is the difference between a 1-2 day time to complete ( a roamBi, not fully substantiated statement, meaning substantiated by true enterprise grade (over $1 B in annual revenue) enterprises) vs. a 3 -10 day time to complete ( multiple fortune 1000 companies have provided positive testimonials about MicroStrategy’s mobile product) – In the business world, either completion time is shorter and faster than most decisions that are made. So why not go with the player that will cost less over time and meet the needs better of an organization? Just wanted to pose something more provocative than just agreeing with the rest of the quorum. I enjoyed reading your blog !

[...] for iPhone, which I reviewed last year, has long been the best-looking mobile BI application available in the market. Now the folks at [...]

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For more information on best practices for using RoamBi and implementing data visualization on mobile devices, check out this new website- http://mobiledatavisualization.com.