BI Software - SAS Institute

SAS Institute - Business Intelligence Solutions

SAS offers the most comprehensive BI platform in the industry, with no other vendor in the Magic Quadrant matching its advanced analysis capabilities. Moreover, SAS consistently demonstrates strong customer support, vendor viability and vertical domain knowledge. SAS's large, globally distributed and BI-focused direct sales force has been selling Enterprise BI Server successfully to Global 500 corporations since early 2005. In August 2006, it launched a reseller initiative targeting midsize businesses. As a result of all these factors, SAS has the highest score for completeness of vision of all the competitors in the BI platform market. SAS's major hurdle in the BI platform market is the perception that it lacks usability and has strict licensing policies. Customer inquiries suggest that many of SAS's BI and analytics products, such as Enterprise Guide and Enterprise Miner, are sophisticated and require a great deal of training. As a result, they are not well suited for the broader user population. In response, SAS's more recent products, such as Web Report Studio and Forecast Server, use wizard-based graphical user interfaces to deliver more self-service capabilities. From a licensing perspective, customers do complain about SAS's strict licensing policies. However, the company has been more flexible with its Enterprise BI Server offering, which is priced comparably to other leading BI platforms.

To remain in the Leaders quadrant, SAS needs to continue winning deals outside its sweet spot of advanced analysis. This includes getting customers to standardize on SAS for enterprise reporting, dashboards, ad hoc query, OLAP, scorecards and, most importantly, BI metadata. SAS needs to remain price competitive with the other leading BI pure plays that are softening their pricing policies, due to competition from large enterprise application and infrastructure vendors.

Finally, SAS needs to execute on its vision to integrate its advanced analysis capabilities, along with its extensive data integration capabilities, into operational applications and performance management activities.

Source: http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/oracle/145507.html