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.
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Topics:
Data Science,
SAS,
Mobile Technology,
Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Cloud Computing,
Collaboration,
Digital Technology
I recently attended the SAS Analyst Summit in Steamboat Springs, Colo. (Twitter Hashtag #SASSB) The event offers an occasion for the company to discuss its direction and to assess its strengths and potential weaknesses. SAS is privately held, so customers and prospects cannot subject its performance to the same level of scrutiny as public companies, and thus events like this one provide a valuable source of additional information.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Predictive Analytics,
SAS,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Uncategorized,
Visualization
I want to share my observations from the recent annual SAS analyst briefing. SAS is a huge software company with a unique culture and a history of success. Being privately held SAS is not required to make the same financial disclosures as publicly held organizations, it released enough information to suggest another successful year, with more than $2.7 billion in revenue and 10 percent growth in its core analytics and data management businesses. Smaller segments showed even higher growth rates. With only selective information disclosed, it’s hard to dissect the numbers to spot specific areas of weakness, but the top-line figures suggest SAS is in good health.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Predictive Analytics,
SAS,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Strata+Hadoop
In various forms, business intelligence (BI) – as queries, reporting, dashboards and online analytical processing (OLAP) – is being used increasingly widely. And as basic BI capabilities spread to more organizations, innovative ones increasingly are exploring how to take advantage of the next step in the strategic use of BI: predictive analytics. The trend in Web searches for the phrase “predictive analytics” gives one indication of the rise in interest in this area. From 2004 through 2008, the number of Web search was relatively steady. Beginning in 2009, the number of searches rose significantly and has continued to rise.
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Topics:
Predictive Analytics,
Predixion,
R,
Revolution Analtyics,
Sales,
Sales Performance,
SAS,
Social Media,
Supply Chain Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Mobility,
Business Performance,
Business Technology,
CIO,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
IBM SPSS,
Information Builders,
Information Technology,
KXEN,
Netezza,
Oracle,
Workforce Performance
I recently attended SAS Institute’s annual analyst conference. My colleague covered the multibillion-dollar company’s strategy and the event. Now I want to look into some of the details of SAS’s products for business analytics and how they are supported with business intelligence (BI), and information management. Although SAS is not a publicly traded company and therefore is not required to make the financial disclosures that others are, the company revealed numerous financial statistics. Business intelligence represents over $200 million in license revenue to SAS. That’s a significant figure, larger than publicly traded BI vendors QlikTech (NASDAQ: QLIK) and Actuate (NASDAQ: BIRT) have and smaller than but still in the same order of magnitude as MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) and Information Builders. These figures are consistent with results in our benchmark research on business intelligence and performance management: 18% of our research respondents reported using SAS products, which places it in the middle of the pack.
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Topics:
SAS,
Social Media,
Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Business Technology,
CIO,
Collaboration,
Enterprise Software,
Information Management,
Information Technology,
Mobility,
Operational Intelligence,
IT Performance Management (ITPM)
There has been a spate of acquisitions in the data warehousing and business analytics market in recent months. In May 2010 SAP announced an agreement to acquire Sybase, primarily for its mobility technology and had already been advancing its efforts with SAP HANA and BI. In July 2010 EMC agreed to acquire data warehouse appliance vendor Greenplum. In September 2010 IBM countered by acquiring Netezza, a competitor of Greenplum. In February 2011 HP announced after giving up on its original focus with HP Neoview and now has acquired analytics vendor Vertica that had been advancing its efforts efficiently. Even Microsoft shipped in 2010 its new release of SQL Server database and appliance efforts. Now, less than one month later, Teradata has announced its intent to acquire Aster Data for analytics and data management. Teradata bought an 11% stake in Aster Data in September, so its purchase of the rest of the company shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. My colleague had raised the question if Aster Data could be the new Teradata but now is part of them.
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Topics:
Data Warehousing,
Microsoft,
RDBMS,
SAS,
Teradata,
Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Cloud Computing,
Data Management,
HP,
IBM,
Information Management,
Oracle,
IT Performance Management (ITPM)
