Well apart from SAS 9.3 (ill post more on that later) I am guessing SAS will be publicly announcing their new BI capability due out at the end of this year.
There has been a rumor round for a while that SAS HO wasn’t happy with the latest Gartner BI Magic Quadrant.
So a decision was made to put some immediate focus on improving the BI reporting capability and to improve its market share and positioning.
Cindi Howson has posted on her blog some details making them public http://biscorecard.typepad.com/biscorecard/2011/03/sas-wants-to-be-the-best-in-bi-really.html
Some highlights from her post:
“Dr. Jim Goodnight, CEO and founder of SAS, says, “I want my BI to be better than anyone else’s.””
“Looking ahead, SAS plans to release a new version of its BI suite in fall 2011.”
“The company has reorganized over 300 developers to dramatically improve the user interface, a move that affects not only the BI suite, but also the presentation layer of its industry analytic applications (SAS Solutions).”
So im glad there is some focus on the BI layer to make sure SAS doesn’t lose its ability to compete against the Oracle, IBM and Microsoft “stack plays” or the up and coming BI vendors like QlikTech.
But I do wonder if it is wise to (and in fact whether they will) focus on look and feel and no doubt add a whole raft of new wizzy widgets and functions.
When SAS 9.1 was released I believe SAS got a jump on the BI market by being the first large vendor to release the first integrated BI Suite that used a single Metadata repository. But with the 5 year gap between 9.1 and 9.2 they lost a lot of that lead. They obviously feel they need to now play catchup, but in my experience with SAS and other BI tools they aren’t that different (yes there are always things other vendors do better).
So where would I put my money if it was me, well I would create a metadata access layer that allowed SAS to read the other BI vendors semantic layers (i.e Oracle BMM, BO Universes etc). Open up those vendors semantic layer as a data source for SAS (and its BI layer) would be a game changer.
Of course im guessing they won’t so maybe that should be the next SaasInct project?
Hi, Shane,
Interesting SAS Global Forum speculation. SAS 9.3 itself offers exciting improvements, but as you stated, the reorganization portends an exciting new direction for SAS Business Intelligence.
As to your idea about the metadata access layer, have you considered submitting it in the SASWare Ballot: http://support.sas.com/community/ballot/ ?
If you are coming to SAS Global Forum, look me up. After 7 years in R&D, I moved to BI marketing in the fall.