Stories about SAS Visual Analytics are among the most widely read posts on this blog. In the last two years I’ve received many queries from readers who complain that it’s hard to get clear answers about the software from SAS. In software procurement, the customer has bargaining power until the deal closes; after that, power shifts to the vendor.
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This week, Spark Summit East produced a deluge of news and analysis on Apache Spark and Databricks. Also in the news: a couple of ventures landed funding, SAP released software and SAS soft-launched something new for SAS Visual Analytics. Analytic Startups Venture Capital Dispatch on WSJ.D reports that Andreeson Horowitz has invested $7.5 million in AMPLab spinout Tachyon Nexus. Tachyon
Read moreAt the beginning of 2014, SAS EVP and CMO Jim Davis predicted double-digit revenue growth for 2014; in October, CEO Jim Goodnight walked that back to 5%, citing a challenging business climate in Europe. Today, SAS announced 2014 revenue of $3.09 Billion, up 2.3%. Meanwhile, IBM reported growth in analytics revenue of 7% in Q4. The challenge for SAS is that the US
Read moreSAS supports several different products that run “inside” Hadoop based on two different in-memory architectures: (1) The SAS High Performance Analytics suite, originally designed to run in dedicated Teradata and Greenplum appliances, includes five modules: Statistics, Data Mining, Text Mining, Econometrics and Optimization. (2) A second set of products — SAS Visual Analytics, SAS Visual Statistics and SAS In-Memory Statistics for Hadoop
Read moreToday, SAS announced 2013 revenue of $3.02 billion, up 5.2% from 2012. Reported revenue from “cloud-based” solutions grew by 20%; most of this revenue comes from SAS Solutions On Demand, a private hosting service. SAS claims more than 1,400 “sites” for SAS Visual Analytics, an impressive figure but well short of SAS’ goal of 2,000 licenses in 2013. (In SAS
Read moreHere is a quick review of the capabilities for advanced analytics in Hadoop for five vendors at the recent Strata NYC conference: 0xData Alpine Data Labs Oracle SAS Skytree 0XData Product(s) H20 (open source project) h2o (R package) Description Smart people from Stanford with VC backing and a social media program. Services business model with open source software. H20 is an
Read moreSAS and SAP announced a “strategic partnership” today at the SAP TechEd show. According to SAS’ press release, SAP and SAS will partner closely to create a joint technology and product roadmap designed to leverage the SAP HANA® platform and SAS analytics capabilities. By incorporating the in-memory SAP HANA platform into SAS applications and enabling SAS’ industry-proven advanced analytics algorithms
Read moreSAS’ recent announcement of an alliance with Hortonworks marks a good opportunity to summarize SAS’ Hadoop capabilities. Analytic enterprises are increasingly serious about using Hadoop as an analytics platform; organizations with significant “sunk” investment in SAS are naturally interested in understanding SAS’ ability to work with Hadoop. Prior to January, 2012, a search for the words “Hadoop” or “MapReduce”
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SAS charged its sales force with selling 2,000 licenses for Visual Analytics in 2013; the jury is still out on whether they met this target. There’s lots of marketing action lately from SAS about this product, so here’s an FAQ. Update: SAS recently announced 1,400 sites licensed for Visual Analytics. In SAS lingo, a site corresponds roughly to one machine,
Read moreMichael Kinsley wrote: It used to be, there was truth and there was falsehood. Now there is spin and there are gaffes. Spin is often thought to be synonymous with falsehood or lying, but more accurately it is indifference to the truth. A politician engaged in spin is saying what he or she wishes were true, and sometimes, by coincidence,
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