well from my experience, working with OLAP Cubes, Microsoft is normally used when cost saving is important, its considered cheaper than competition. And the development tools are so easy to use, non-programmers can be trained to create and customize cubes.
On the front end, they only have excel, which is good, really good, but other tools have much simpler and in my opinion better clients, for example Cognos and BO
Excel is very familiar to many business users, and SSAS + Excel makes a powerful combo.
Currently I am working with a combination of PostgreSQL and Tableau, and find it a nicer environment to work with (coming from a MSSQL shop). I do not have the same automated aggregation engine supplied by SSAS, but Tableau in part makes up for that with visualization tools that require no coding on the UI side. I can focus my efforts on the data layer.
Comments
well from my experience, working with OLAP Cubes, Microsoft is normally used when cost saving is important, its considered cheaper than competition. And the development tools are so easy to use, non-programmers can be trained to create and customize cubes.
On the front end, they only have excel, which is good, really good, but other tools have much simpler and in my opinion better clients, for example Cognos and BO
You might want to look at OSS options like Pentaho, Jasper and Palo.
Palo (a competitor to Cognos TM1), in particular, is really nice. The other two leave a little to be desired on the UI side.
Excel is very familiar to many business users, and SSAS + Excel makes a powerful combo.
Currently I am working with a combination of PostgreSQL and Tableau, and find it a nicer environment to work with (coming from a MSSQL shop). I do not have the same automated aggregation engine supplied by SSAS, but Tableau in part makes up for that with visualization tools that require no coding on the UI side. I can focus my efforts on the data layer.