Is the usage of SAS in business increasing or decreasing?

Question

When you look at the Business Intelligence arena, there are many big players, including SAS. In my time in this space I am noticing more big players moving to a more user friendly tool that doesn't require coding skill sets.

Also, I am aware that SAS is trying to protect their market share by introducing tools that are more point and click (EGUide, DI studio, etc). But lets face it, these tools without coding knowledge are not a valid option for most users.

Do you believe that the use of SAS as a Business Intelligence tool is increasing or decreasing?

Answer 1

SAS has had fairly consistent growth since inception. Usage in specific functional areas may wax and wane but overall they seem to me to still be growing (don't know how this translates to market share, but any growth in these economic times is probably good).

Answer 2

You need to understand that coding is the ultimate way to flexibility. Anything that is GUI is just a monument, the foundation is the underlying coding. If you can create a monument flexible enough, thats great then! But I don't see any product out there that offers that much flexibility yet. Also, for BI/Analytics purposes, I feel that it is tough to come up with a rock solid mold to fit everything in since it is such an evolving area.

Hence, SAS retains it's coding ALONG WITH a GUI (EG, etc) which I feel is a perfect mix for evolving analytics and BI purposes.

So to answer your question: Every one has their own needs when it comes to BI/analytics. Some prefer coding to GUI. So to each his/her own. SAS has a solid user base and it doesn't look like decreasing anytime soon and certainly NOT "slowly dying" as the respondent before me said.

Peace.

Answer 3

My guess would be that SAS is slowly dying. To me the good things about SAS are (1) how much more powerful SAS-L is in processing and combining data than eg. SQL or any other tool I've used and (2) that it's interpreted, which makes ad hoc stuff easy.

I don't know how SAS is used around the world, but if the majority of users mostly code, the biggest threat might not be the GUI-oriented tools but more flexible languages. For example, to me a big problem is that SAS doesn't integrate that well to relational databases.

Perhaps F#, being an interpreted language, could some day become useful for tasks SAS is used for these days - or maybe that's just my dream :)