SAS Platform
[The BI & Analytics Survey 22 results, not included in The BI & Analytics Survey 23] SAS’s traditional business intelligence offering is called Enterprise BI Server. For end users, the Enterprise BI Server includes web clients such as Web Report Studio (WRS), BI Dashboard and a series of Windows clients including Enterprise Guide (EG) and OLAP Cube Studio. Additionally, SAS Visual Analytics was released back in 2012 with the goal of migrating SAS customers to a new, modern in-memory platform.
SAS, founded in 1976, is privately held, one of the oldest software companies and a well-known brand in the BI and analytics market. The vendor has specialized in data management, business intelligence, data visualization, advanced analytics and industry-specific analytic applications for decades. SAS has also focused for a long time on the finance industry, for which it offers many predefined applications (e.g., for regulatory risk management). Today, the company has a much broader focus, but the majority of our sample of SAS customers still comes from the finance sector (58 percent).
SAS’s traditional BI offering, SAS Enterprise BI Server, covers dashboarding, OLAP and reporting through clients such as SAS Web Report Studio and SAS Enterprise Guide. SAS also offers a variety of analytic applications to address different industries and application domains.
SAS has always been a specialist analytics vendor. For many years, it offered BI functionality with its well known SAS Enterprise BI Server platform. Today, the vendor offers different analytics solutions focused on various user types and bundled into SAS Platform. For instance, the SAS Visual Analytics and SAS Visual Statistics modules provide an intuitive self-service environment for business users (end users and business analysts) to perform statistical analysis and data exploration, as well as to create reports, analyses and simple dashboards.
User & Use Cases
This year, the SAS Platform is used in mid-sized and large enterprises in mid-sized to large scenarios for ad hoc query and data analysis. Although the platform is not as business user friendly as the newer product SAS Visual Analytics it serves power users from business departments with needed data insights. Customers seem to use tools such as Enterprise Guide to prepare and model data. In fact, SAS’s customer rates of modeling and enriching data are almost twice as high as The BI & Analytics Survey 22 average.
53 percent of respondents currently use the solution for its original purpose: advanced analytics. The low percentage of employees using the platform underlines its strong focus on this usage scenario. However, the products evaluated with SAS Platform already show customers orientation towards more business user oriented solutions which are not only reserved for specifically educated business power users. SAS wants to close this gap with the SAS Visual Analytics products available on the SAS Viya Platform.
Current vs. planned use
N=31
5 products most often evaluated in competition with SAS Platform
N=29
Percentage of employees using SAS Platform
N=32
Number of users using SAS Platform
N=32
Tasks carried out with SAS Platform by business users
N=31
Company size (number of employees)
N=32
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