David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

I am happy to offer some insights on SAS drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect the breadth of the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal (RFP) and vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated SAS and 14 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and data derived from our benchmark research on analytics and business intelligence.

SAS products offer both broad and deep analytics capabilities. They excel at some of the more advanced analytics we measure such as forecasting and predictive analytics. The products have a highly scalable architecture and can be configured to load data into a SAS database or can access data directly from several high-performance commercial database products.

The company’s highest rankings are in the Adaptability and Validation categories, where it ranks third, and Reliability, where it is fifth.The products offer a number of development and configuration options. They are also adaptable to many corporate processes and systems. SAS provides good information to assess performance and manage the scalability of its implementations. SAS’s highest score, in Validation, is due to its long standing in the market and its overall focus on analytics.

The company has recently been investing in improving usability for the Visual Analytics portion of its product line, but other portions of the product still lag in this important area. Better collaboration support would also help improve its Capability score.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of analytics and business intelligence software in the industry. You can learn more about SAS and others using our Value Index as an effective vendor selection and RFI/RFP tool; read the report here.

Regards,
David Menninger
SVP & Research Director