SAS Brings New Product Portfolio to MarketSAS Brings New Product Portfolio to Market

VentanaMonitor™

Summary

SAS Institute’s recent announcement on the release of SAS Version 9.1 is yet another signal from the large privately-held enterprise software provider of its intention to move into the more conventional IT-centric business intelligence (BI) market. This release is a collection of inter-operable data integration tools, an information management platform, and analytic processing and reporting tools brought to market after years of new development and enhanced integration across SAS’s multitude of products. Ventana Research believes that this announcement is an evolutionary step for SAS, but it must establish further market credibility, gain trust from customers with large deployments, and improve its ability to sell and service global corporations.

Assessment

SAS Institute, a billion-dollar private company best known for its expertise in analytics and data processing language and systems, is focused on capturing a piece of the adjacent BI markets (i.e., data integration, information management, query and analysis, enterprise reporting and performance management) that it has not yet penetrated effectively. While SAS has engaged many companies beyond its analytic roots, it is seldom on organizations' long or short evaluation lists.

SAS first announced plans for version 9.1 a year ago with the idea that this would bring it into the BI market (see SAS Strives for BI). SAS fulfilled most of its promises on product development, but now must gain more customer adoption and proof points that go beyond its statistical and analytical roots. Some early SAS customers — CNAF, Codan/Trugg-Hansa and Keyspan — have begun to find value in SAS 9 within their BI deployments. Ventana Research expects SAS will continue to find steady growth in customer adoption but it will take many years before we find broad enterprise-wide deployments.

SAS has brought forward a larger enterprise framework called SAS Intelligence Value Chain. This framework brings together the broader set of products and processes into five categories called Plan, ETL (Extraction, Transformation, and Load), Intelligent Storage, Business Intelligence (BI), and Analytic Intelligence. These categories each have many products that bring together product capabilities like data quality with ETL and predictive and descriptive modeling with Analytic Intelligence.

Ventana Research sees SAS providing some product innovation with a more robust information management foundation through the SAS 9 platform and metadata management tools that will provide a common platform for enterprise deployments. SAS faces a challenge in educating potential customers — other than those in its past sweet spot of highly educated statisticians — about these innovations and its products. We expect this past focus on sophisticated statisticians will impede SAS’s transition into the broader BI market.

Market Impact

SAS is a successful provider of data mining and data processing languages and systems. It is optimistic about its ability to compete in the larger BI market. This major release of products now begins to address some of its historical product challenges, including usability, functionality and manageability for business and IT. With a large marketing investment, it is now better positioned to address a broader market. But many global corporations have already adopted Actuate, Business Objects, Cognos, MicroStrategy, Siebel, and others as an enterprise standard for reporting or BI. SAS must address its alliance, sales, and service limitations before it will be included in more evaluations for larger BI deployments.

Recommendation

SAS brought forward a major advancement with its product offering for the broader BI market. The SAS Intelligence Value Chain framework brings coherence to a broad set of previously loosely coupled products, but it will take time to mature enough to be fully adoptable by an enterprise. Ventana Research advises companies that have already selected key BI vendors to evaluate SAS in the individual product areas and not as a suite. We advise those few companies evaluating an entire suite of products for BI or performance management requirements to consider all the skill sets required to extend and integrate SAS, and evaluate its products for larger compliance with performance management.