Blogging about all things SAS

Every now and again when I get some spare time I troll through the SAS forum papers to see what gems I can find.

Robert Meekings posted a comment on my blog post about the Thotwave Administration paper I liked, highlighting it was very similar to a paper they did at SF 2008.

So that got me thinking how many other great papers are there hiding in the SAS Forum archive, that I (and others) have never seen?

So a question to anybody who cares to respond, post a comment linking to your favorite SAS Forum paper and a short description why it is your favorite. Lets see what gems are hiding out there.

(And a note to all the comment spammers out there, neither I or other SAS users are interested in little blue pills or other such things, and comments are not automatically posted, so don’t bother – can’t believe how many Spam comments people waste their time entering.)

(in fact here is a suggestion to the blog spammers out there (well a polite one anyway I cant post my other suggestions) go out and buy the how to use SAS Enterprise Guide book, read it, learn the tool and then work with customers who need help getting insight from their data, you will earn more and have a much more enjoyable life!)

Interesting note over on the SAS Support site here:

http://support.sas.com/techsup/pcn/index.html

At the bottom it says:

Platform Suite for SAS (LSFSUITE)

June 2009 Effective September 1, 2009 Platform Suite for SAS (“LSFSUITE”) will no longer be included in the price of previously licensed SAS solution or technology packages. Customers who wish to continue use of LSFSUITE, will have until 90 days from the expiration date of their SAS solution or technology package to license this product at then-current renewal fees. This will be accomplished by executing the necessary licensing documents for LSFSUITE and paying the applicable then-current renewal fees (“migration plan”). Please call 1-800-727-0025 to initiate the process of establishing a license for LSFSUITE prior to expiration of the migration plan. No further action is required for those customers who do not wish to take advantage of this migration plan.

So as I read this if you have LSF in one of your bundles that you currently pay renewals for, then you need to use the “migrate plan” and pay the LSF portion of the renewals to Platform Computing.

No mention on what happens to your SAS renewals though.

Let me know if you find out.

So IBM is buying SPSS to give it analytics capability and to allow it to better compete with Oracle and Microsoft.

Although I have never thought of Oracle or SAP providing true Analtytical capability, so I would say this gives IBM a one up.

Although Although, Oracle brought Thinking Machines ages ago which had a credible Data Mining capability/tool but then swallowed them up and delivered nothing that customers really used (well not in NZ anyway)

So will IBM leverage SPSS to provide a compelling message or lose it in its already massive product stack?

Also SAP/BO and SPSS were already partnering and playing nicely, so is this a first foray into the rumoured IBM buyout of SAP?

And as always where does this leave SAS, HP and Teradata?

So many questions and only time well tell I suppose.

But one thing that is a fact is the big boys are getting bigger, and there are fewer companies out on their own.

I am trying to remember the days of Mainframe Accounting Systems (McCormack & Dodge, CA Mastermind etc) and see if there is a parallel, but that was more death by new entrant (SAP, Peoplesoft, Oracle Apps etc)

So can you remember a time where massive vendor consolidation happened and the companies left out survived, let me know if you can.

Ps, I am undecided if I will add Sybase to my SAS/HP/Teradata mix as I cant see how they can survive in the BI market (Sybase IQ etc) but then they still have a credible Relational Database.

Don’t know when it happened (haven’t been visiting it as much as I used to) but SAS.com looks like it got a make over on its product/sales pages.

If you look at the Enterprise Miner page here:

http://www.sas.com/technologies/analytics/datamining/miner/

And compare it with an archive version from 2008 here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080115152249/http://www.sas.com/technologies/analytics/datamining/miner/

You will some sexy tabs have appreared, providing better seperation of benefits and futrures and better use of screenshots.

Nice work!

Wonder what they use to power the website?

I did noticed that they do use google analytic’s, I hope they also use the SAS Web Analytic’s stuff as well (always had a soft spot for that product, unfortunately not many customers in NZ bigger enough to justify it).

Chris Hemedinger commented on my last article that EM6.1 is now released (thanks Chris)

You can see whats new in the latest release over at:

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/whatsnew/62435/HTML/default/emwhatsnew61.htm

Ive done a little bit of playing with EM, but leave the real work to the experts (to much stats hurts my head, although I now know what the answer should have been when I asked my stats teacher at school when would I ever use this in the ‘real world’ Doh!)

Anyway from an architecture point of view it is good to see Enterprise Miner is now an integral part of the SAS 9 architecture, rather than just an integrated component.

I like the fact it uses the SAS Metadata server and content repository for EM projects.

I also like the fact there is a direct upgrade path from 5.3 and a conversion path from 4.3. Should make upgrades much easier! ( I still remember the EM 4.1/4.3 to 5.1 days which werent so good)

We have been doing a little bit of work with SAS Marketing Automation over the last 12 months.

Found the 2009 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Campaign Management over here:

Magic Quadrant for CRM Multichannel Campaign Management – 2009

Interesting to see SAS has moved to the left of the leaders quadrant compared to the Magic Quadrant for CRM Multichannel Campaign Management – 2008 and Teradata has moved up the leaders quadrant.

I still think Teradata and SAS need to stop competing and merge before they get swallowed by the behemoths of Oracle, IBM, SAP and Microsoft. I that note heard a rumour that IBM was about to buy SAP, thenover the next coffee heard Oracle were goign to buy SAP (cant see them getting commerce commision approval for that).

Anyway when it comes to SAS Marketing Automation I like it as a product. Things I like:

• It uses SAS DI to load data
• Data can be stored in multiple RDBMS using SAS/Access
• Its integrated with SAS Enterprise Miner to give powerfull embedded analytics
• Information Maps are used to expose data to business users
• It uses Web Report Studio/Viewer and SAS Portal to deliver information

I think of all these the integration with Enterprise Miner is the most powerful feature. The ability to create a campaign based on a statistical based Segmentation, Churn, Upsell, Cross Sell or Retention model makes it able to dliver positive return on investment (ROI) relatively quickly.

Its also interesting to note Gartner mentions SAS is offering a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering for M, which combined with the Enterprise Guide, K12 and Strike Iron data quality hosted services means SAS is finally moving into the SaaS space.

Given the large data center they are building in Carey (not to mention the solar panels to power it) im guessing SAS OnDemand is becoming a stronger strategy for the future (as it is for the other behemoths)
Will be interesting how this will work from a revenue point of view, because although SAS has a large renewals revenue stream, there is still a very strong focus on first year license sales to fuel growth, which SaaS may canabalise. But then again on the positive side SAS donat have a large partner base who are reliant on resale margin like some vendors so SaaS should be less of an issue for them.

Now that was a few topics in one post, should probably run EM across it to do a cluster analysis, but then I might wait till EM 9.2 is available…

Following my post about SAS and the free sharepoint webparts SAS have posted a blog with a lot of great details here:

http://blogs.sas.com/sasdummy/index.php?/archives/103-SAS-Web-Parts-for-Microsoft-Sharepoint.html#extended

Enjoy!

A lot of companies are moving towards centralising SAS on servers and moving uses to Enterprise Guide as the front end.

On e of the issues with this apporach is that users are anable to save or open SAS Datasets on their local PC, because the SAS engine is in the Server.

So you have to copy or ftp the files to the server before you can use them, which is a hassle (or worse if the server is locked down)

While I was downloading the SAS Sharepoint Webparts that Iven provided a link to (thanks Iven) I went for a bit of a browse in the SAS Downloads area to see if there were any new toys.

I stumbled across a new task for EG called:

Upload/Download SAS Data Sets — Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide

which you can dlownload from here:

http://www.sas.com/apps/demosdownloads/webparts_PROD_1.1_sysdep.jsp?packageID=000563

It solves this issue for you.

Ps. as I typed the word stumbled in this post my head was filled with the words “stumble trip, stumble trip”. If you have small kids then I highly recomend the book “we are going on a bear hunt” , it obvioulsy sticks

ABCtech (who created Oros and who SAS brought a few years ago) created a tool called Easy API that enables you to automatically submit a Import. Export or Calc in ABM.

The utility is a visual basic script (.vbs) that requires a few parameters in a txt file.

One of those parameters is ABM server, but unfortunately nowhere does it describe what this connection string should be. Well in case you wanted to know this worked for us:

http://hostname/SasSolutions/ABM/Services/AutomationService.asmx

and how could you not know that you would ask …..

We have been doing a bit of research on whether we should develop some easy to use !sasInct dashboarding capability to sit on top of SAS.

We are thinking along the lines of:

- Access any SAS data (i.e Infomaps, Datasets, SAS Access/blah, Stored Processes, Web Services)

- Display in mulitple delivery frameworks (i.e SAS Portal/Portlets, Desktop widgets, external widgets to integrate with third party intranets etc)

- Sexy graphs (i.e somehting that will knock your sox off)

So we have been researching OEM graphing engines vs build our own, and we have been researching what other vendors do for dashboards.

Found these interesting examples from Corda:

US Dept of Health and Human Services
Bank Call Center
CenterView How To
Corda Call Center
Financial Services
Healthcare Dashboards
Help Desk Call Center
Project Tracking
Quickbooks Reporting
Shipping and Transportation
Financial Reporting
National Gas Prices
Financial Scoreboard
Marketing Dashboard
Retail Sales
Supply Chain Management
Project Management
Sales Dashboard – based on a design from Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few
Salesforce Demo
Services & Support
Human Capital Management

(and of course if you are in the market for dashboards on top of SAS and have some unique requirements let us know! – Contact Us )