European Space Agency sees out of this world potential in MicroStrategy BI tool

Salim Ansari, head of technical IT services at ESA, tells Computing how the organisation harnesses MicroStrategy's business intelligence solution and how they can push it further

The European Space Agency (ESA) has dramatically improved its reporting on procurement through the use of MicroStrategy's business intelligence tools and the organisation is so impressed with the results, it could use the solution to analyse scientific data from space missions.

That's what Salim Ansari, head of technical IT services at ESA, told Computing during an interview at the MicroStrategy World 2014 conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Ansari explained how MicroStrategy benefits the ESA, which he described as operating in a way which sees "each programme as kind of a standalone silo with its own organisation and structure" by allowing the IT department to simplify covering requests from the various sectors. Ansari described how MicroStrategy enables the management of data from many platforms but with the minimum amount of effort required.

"One of the most important factors is that MicroStrategy is a multiplatform business intelligence and business analytics tool that allows us - without having to change much in the different systems we use internally - to be able to pull the information together from various sources to better manage our service-level agreements with our internal customers," he said.

Ansari told Computing that the ESA has been using MicroStrategy for about two years, with the organisation deciding to opt for the Virginia-headquartered vendor following a rigorous tendering process.

"In this particular case we ran an evaluation on various tools that were on the market and tried to figure which was the most extensive in terms of functionality and in terms of producing the flexible reports that we need. Those were the driving factors for having chosen MicroStrategy as a viable tool upon which we could build our reporting capabilities," he said.

The adoption of MicroStrategy, Ansari explained, has benefitted the ESA by enabling it to easily extract and analyse data from various sources.

"The main benefit is being able to very quickly pull information from things such as Excel, Oracle databases and SAP, independently without it actually touching those systems.

"Basically, analysing logs, analysing the data we get from those systems, seamlessly pulling all those together, producing reports and keeping them up to date over a longer period of time," he said, before going on to describe the MicroStrategy platform as "one of the most sophisticated I've seen implemented on the web."

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European Space Agency sees out of this world potential in MicroStrategy BI tool

Salim Ansari, head of technical IT services at ESA, tells Computing how the organisation harnesses MicroStrategy's business intelligence solution and how they can push it further

Ansari described how the solution has enabled the IT department to greatly improve how it monitors management of devices and procurement across the ESA

"In the IT department we have an ordering system for all the desktops, laptops and Macs we have across the agency - anyone who requests a tool goes through that system.

"That system has a price on every item in a catalogue and the catalogue itself is within MicroStrategy where we can fix pricing; we can do a cost analysis. Then everyone who requests those tools in the various sectors can be tracked," he said

Ansari continued, describing how MicroStrategy's business intelligence solution also enables the ESA to properly monitor and assess data it gathers from various warehouse sources.

"Then we've got all the licensing, the procurement we do is centralised for various packages such as Matlab, Oracle, Red Hat and VMware. We can pull together all those packages and do a charge back through the SLA using MicroStrategy," said Ansari, who described how impressed he is by the live nature of service-level agreement reporting made possible through the tool.

"I can actually do live SLA reporting at any moment, any time, and all my customers can see exactly what they're spending and what's left in terms of budget."

While MicroStrategy is mainly used to manage administrative tasks at the ESA, Ansari told Computing that he's confident the tool could be used in ways which benefit the organisation's missions in outer space.

"There are areas in ESA that are using MicroStrategy in very different ways, such as reporting on our mission data. All the data products that we create across the world via our spacecraft are also being reported in terms of statistics - how often they're being used, what kind of users they are and so on.

"Then all that information is pulled into dynamic reports which are then passed on to our delegations and member states."

And that's not the only area in which Ansari believes MicroStrategy could be deployed to the benefit of the ESA.

"One of the things we'll venture into eventually is seeing if we can use MicroStrategy for actual scientific data analysis," he said.