SAS Visual Analytics

Very powerful, flexible, and works with all third parties we need.

Comments: The ability to connect with all third parties (that we use) and merge their data together in one system then analyze the structured information in a consistent and reliable way makes SAS Business Intelligence a very powerful system. The ability to run code that we made 10 years ago is also very nice.

Pros:

The ability to connect with all third parties (that we use) and merge their data together in one system then analyze the structured information in a consistent and reliable way makes SAS Business Intelligence a very powerful system. The ability to run code that we made 10 years ago is also very nice.

Cons:

The complexity and inconstancy of the product is not always the most desirable. Often times doing similar things requires very different approaches. SAS Business Intelligence has been around for such a long time that different "procs", as they are called in their system, often have extreme variance in syntax.

SAS BI - Scalable and Comprehensive BI Tool

Pros:

It's Visual Data Exploration capabilities to visualize the data and find patterns quickly is amazing. The features such as heat maps helps us understand where most of the traffic for an advertiser is coming from and helps the advertiser to target the customers more effectively. Creating Dashboards doesn't require a lot of technical know how and anyone can start making dashboards. Also, these dashboards and reports simplifies collaboration as different people are able to share their comments by directly commenting on the visuals or charts. Another feature which interests me is that it allows to integrate with other open source platforms like R.

Cons:

Such a comprehensive set of features with a brand like SAS obviously comes with a price but I find the price to be over the top for the small and medium organizations. Only a few open source platforms are supported and lot of common ones used by a lot of smaller organizations have been left out. Further, user interface looks dated and needs a facelift to match other players like Tableau.

SAS Misrepresentative Sales Team

Comments: We love the software, however our experience with the sales team and return on our price point has been very negative.

Pros:

The software itself is very versatile and is extremely equipped for Cloud Based setup and use.

Cons:

We are a women and minority owned small business who were extremely excited to become SAS software users in 2021. In spite of the high upfront cost to our small business (we paid $14,000+ for a year or use), we received a notification our software would be expiring less than five months after we had been connected to our technical setup representatives and had the software for less than six months. This was after we had let the sales representative [SENSITIVE CONTENT] know that we were not ready to sign on until Q4. However, [SENSITIVE CONTENT] and his colleague [SENSITIVE CONTENT] stated we would lose our discounts and pressured us to sign stating we would be really helping out SAS' Q3 Closing sales. We started early in good faith only to find out the people to help us get ready for setup weren't even provided to us until just before December. The SAS team stated our original technical onboarding person had an illness or emergency and then we didn't hear back with a new contact [SENSITIVE CONTENT] until about a month later.  Sending an early licensing termination to us for software that the SAS company failed to provide a technical setup contact for until well past the first 60 days is fraudulent.  In spite of our good faith sign up in Q3 based on the SAS sales teams statements, we were left post signing with no support from a technical setup representatives provided to us until two months later.

Alternatives Considered: Microsoft Visual Studio, Tableau and AWS IoT Analytics

Reasons for Switching to SAS Visual Analytics: Good Cloud Based Setup

SAS for data wrangling

Comments: I am working as a full-time SAS developer in my current organization. SAS is easy to use and good for data wrangling purposes. If your primary goal if to work on model development I would prefer other languages like python and R which has numerous libraries and free to use.

Pros:

I worked as a Data wrangler and data scientist in my current organization. I like the ecosystem and customer support of SAS. It is easy to learn if you have basics SQL knowledge. It is faster than python/R. Preferred over open source if data privacy is a concern.

Cons:

The user community is not so great as compared with another open-source. SAS is pretty expensive so companies are now switching to open sources like python and R.

Powerful but dated

Comments: Good stuff. Dated but works.
Nothing to brag about, but checks all the right boxes

Pros:

SAS is what started the party. It's so much faster than the legacy of Cobol and mainframe based packages. Love the advanced features and the power.

Cons:

Licences are expensive. If you are using SQL you miss Moss of the raw power. SAS procs arenot the most I tuitive. And most importantly, newer packages re after 10x or more quicker. Eg. IBM aginity netezza