I have mentioned before that SAS are releasing an upgraded set of BI Clients/Capabilities under the 4.3 banner this year.  SAS Enterprise Guide and Office Addin 4.3 are already out.

I saw a demo of the new SAS BI Dashboards 4.3 this week.  I was blown away!

As a bit of background its interesting to note how the BI Dashboards came about.

When I worked for SAS ( a few years ago now) I was around when SAS 9.1 was released.  It was a major change for SAS and they released some great functionality, Web Report Studio, Information Maps, Office addin etc.

It really enabled us in pre-sales to step up and demo solutions that could compete against Business Objects, Cognos etc who were leaders at the time.  If you added the true single integrated metadata platform SAS released as the foundation of SAS 9.1 it was a great competitive offering.

But in the 6 years between SAS 9.1 and SAS 9.2 the other BI vendors of course innovated and we started to see the release of powerful dashboarding capabilities, especially with products such as Business Objects Xcelsius.

Now we had SPM and tricky ways of putting Stored Processes into portal pages but to put it politely when we came up against these tools and the major focus of the customer was delivering dashboards we got our backsides whomped.

Then one of the SAS consultants built a dashboarding capability and released it in the SAS Toolpool (an internal area for SAS code that can be used on consulting engagements but aren’t supported if used at a customer site).  The difference with this tool pool entry was rather than being a simple piece of SAS code or capability it was a full dashboarding solution and had great documentation.

The downside was as it was written very quickly and by one person ( I think) so it had a few unplanned features.

The next step was SAS included it as a supported addin (for SAS 9.1).  So same code base but just supported by Tech Support.  So a good step but still had a few issues, one of which pretty much made it unusable for large scale implementations.

Then in SAS 9.2 / 4.2 they tidied it up quote a bit, included it int he base install, but still it was a little clumsy.

Now with the imminent 4.3 release they have pretty much nailed it.  Things I think rock:

• Flash interface with a very nice UI
• Great drag and drop capability
• Built in comment management
• Built in alerting
• Ranging capabilities that remind me of SPM(STM), which I have always loved.
• Integration with Microsoft Outlook
• Embedded in AMO
• Great variety of widgets, including Spark Lines, and automated history/time series play back

As always still a few extra things I would love to see included, but enough for them included in the new product to recommend it to most of my customers.

It fills that gap of interactive dashboarding that SAS has always struggled to provide and so many middle management and executives are now demanding.

As an aside I do wonder where this leaves STM, as apart from Strategy maps, I don’t see a lot else missing between STM and BI Dashboards.

Only downside is you need to license eBI Server to get the BI Dashboards, not BI, but then again it allows you to leverage the full BI capability of SAS so why wouldnt you.

There is an overview of the SAS BI Dash-boards 4.3 in a SA Fourm paper from 2010 titled “Interactive Dashboards: Powered by Flash and the SAS Programmer”.

Can’t wait to get hold of it when it is production (next month maybe?