Thats right, you heard right, its not a typo folks. They just announced the offering of a limited free version. Hence, the reason for the quotes around the word free. So what do we get with the free version?

• 100 named users licenses of the reporting suite. Features included in this license can be found here
• 2 named licenses for development
• 2 named licenses for the full product suite

Architecture wise this includes the Intelligence Server and the Web Server, although it will be limited to windows only versions (not clear from the site). Additionally, you get free online support and some basic training videos.

The important features included in the 100 user license is drilling, sorting, exporting to excel and pdf, subscribing to history list, and switching view modes and a bit more. MicroStrategy includes other items as being features, but common, some of those things are just expected in this web 2.0 world. For instance ‘context sensitive right mouse click menus’, ‘print’, and my favorite ‘browse and view reports’. The last one is funny because the entire bundle is useless without it.

Yet again we see MicroStrategy continuing their frontal assult on departmental BI. With this announcement they’ve put Open Source providers on notice. Although I dont believe this move to be immediately accretive to license revenues, I think its a good move towards gaining long term marketshare and battling the triple threat of open source bi like Pentaho, market disrupters like QlikTech, and large stack vendors like IBM and SAP.

Update:  the free version is not limited to windows.  You can install the *nix versions if you want, although its limited to 1cpu.

ajo BI Industry, MicroStrategy features, free microstrategy