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MicroStrategy and Couchbase ready cloud-savvy releases

Whether with enterprise BI or NoSQL database as a service (DBaaS), companies with a data-driven credo have lots of new tech to play with. And it's all about the cloud.
Written by Andrew Brust, Contributor
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MicroStrategy 2020 HyperIntelligence, for Outlook and mobile

Credit: MicroStrategy

In Orlando today, MicroStrategy announced its new release, covering both its core platform and its HyperIntelligence technology. This follows yesterday's announcement of Couchbase Cloud, to launch this summer, with early access registration open now.  MicroStrategy can run on-premises or in the cloud, and can integrate with cloud-based Web applications, regardless. Couchbase's announcement has a hybrid flavor of its own, with its control plane running in the public cloud and its data plane running in the customer's virtual private cloud.

New year, new MicroStrategy platform

In its press release, MicroStrategy reminds us it is the largest independent publicly-traded business intelligence company. And it's been around for a while, affording it enterprise hardening and readiness, even as its core platform continues to modernize. At its MicroStrategy World event this morning, the company will announce the new release, MicroStrategy 2020, adds numerous new features, including a new free-form canvas for its Dossier facility, allowing compound grids, custom-shaped geographies and dossier-to-dossier linking. It's also providing connectors to Jupyter and RStudio, which the company says are specifically deisgned to facilitate data scientists bringing data from MicroStrategy into their predictive analytics projects. On the data source side, MicroStrategy says it's added support for 17 new cloud applications.

MicroStrategy is also enhancing its HyperIntelligence platform, originally announced as part of MicroStrategy 2019, and reported by me at that time. HyperIntelligence embeds so-called "cards" into desktop applications like Outlook; Web browsers Chrome and Microsoft Edge; on iPhone and iPad, as well Android phones and tablets. The cards, in turn, can launch application-specific actions.

Also read: MicroStrategy 2019 introduces "HyperIntelligence" contextual BI

If the support for Outlook and Edge didn't tip you off, MicroStrategy is pretty friendly to enterprise Microsoft shops. But if that support isn't enough for you, the company's also announcing integration with Microsoft InTune and availability of MicroStrategy Cloud on nine Azure regions across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Though, as you might suspect, it's also available on AWS.

Cloud surfing, from the couch(base)

And speaking of Azure and AWS, Couchbase says its new Couchbase Cloud service will be available when it launches this summer on those two clouds as well, with support for Google Cloud to follow  (at a point left unspecified). While a fully-managed database as a service (DBaaS) offering, the company says customers can run everything on cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) machines and take advantage of reserved instance pricing. Couchbase Cloud will also offer on-demand hourly pricing and "Couchbase Credits," that can be used over a one-year period.

Since control and data planes are decoupled, customers can deploy across multiple clouds and control everything together.  Couchbase's cross datacenter replication (XDCR) capability (a feature I covered when it was first announced in 2012 and again when it was enhanced in 2015) facilitates this mode of operation. And since, like so much other data technology these days, Couchbase Cloud leverages Kubernetes, its control plane lets users manage and deploy clusters across multiple clouds. It also provides for user management, cluster management, monitoring, and billing, all from a single interface.

Also read: Couchbase 2.0 released; implements JSON document store
Also read: Couchbase 4.0 released, adds multi dimensional scaling and more

Companies that want to be data-driven have to be multi-cloud ready, too. They also need their operational database and analytics systems integrated with their applications. MicroStrategy and Couchbase are each riding these waves, as they gird to compete with the big cloud providers, each of whom have BI and NoSQL offerings if their own.

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