General

WPS – What the …….

Feb
01

Got an unsolicited email from Serus Software Zolutions who are it seems a WPS reseller in Australia.

As you maybe aware WPS provide a set of software that is positioned as being able to natively run SAS code, for a fraction of the license/renewal fees SAS charge.

As you can imagine SAS haven’t been happy about this offering and have engaged in a legal challenge which depending who you believe they lost or won, SAS view here, WPS view here.

From my point of view I can see the market WPS are trying to target and good on them for seeing an opportunity and trying to exploit it.

But what I would say to a customer who asks my opinion would be consider:

- You either get an adequate return on investment (ROI) from the SAS Software or you dont, if you don’t, don’t buy it, why would you?

- If your ROI diminishes over time, stop paying the renewals and stop using the SAS software

- If you purchase WPS you will no longer get SAS support or upgrades, which is what your SAS renewals pay for.

But as I said I can see the value proposition they are offering. (yip im sitting on the fence, hedging my bets, placing a bet each way ;-)

As an aside the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI 2011 states that SAS is seen as one of the highest cost BI platforms and has this to say about the cost of SAS:

“So far, most users deem the opportunity cost of creating custom code for similar functionality or sourcing from elsewhere as a nonstarter — only 5% report they are planning or considering discontinuing their use of the product. As competition intensifies, SAS needs to continue providing value to justify customer costs.”

The real interesting thing to me though was the email from Serus Software Zolutions was sent to an email account I have at a customers site, rather than my normal email account.  My customer related email address is not generally publicly known and isn’t displayed when searched in google.

As far as I know I have not provided Serus Software Zolutions with permission to contact me at this email address.

It also seems that I wasn’t the only one at the customer site (or other SAS customer sites it seems) that received the solicitation email.

So on a personal note would I engage with a company that doesn’t even subscribe to the basics of permission based maketing, thats a nope!

And i’m still wondering where they acquired the list of email addresses from …….

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Gartner BI Magic Quadrant 2011 and SAS

Gartner BI Magic Quadrant 2011 and SAS
Feb
01
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I see Gartner have released the 2011 magic quadrant for 2011 on 27 Jan 2011.

The opening paragraph states:

“In 2010, business users had greater influence over BI buying, often choosing data discovery vendors as an alternative to traditional BI tools. But megavendors continued to hold the majority of BI market share, despite ongoing customer dissatisfaction, by selling the stack into their installed base.”

Which obviously mirrors what we have being seeing in the BI market with the emergence of Mega BI Vendors via the acquisition and consolidation of BI vendors and products over the last few years.

They also state that a lot of the Mega Vendor value statements are around the “Stack” rather than functionality or ease of use, boy does that remind me of my Oracle days some 13 odd years ago when we pushed the “Oracle Apps Stack” hard!

The Quadrant this year looks like:

What is amazing to me os the rise of Microsoft, from entering the market in 2000 they have risen to the top of the quadrant, almost google-esk!  Again Gartner states:

“ In the Magic Quadrant customer survey, more Microsoft customers cited TCO as the No. 1 reason for selecting Microsoft as a BI vendor, while cost was cited less frequently as a limitation to wider deployment for Microsoft than most other vendors in the survey.”

So goes to show that the cost of BI software really does enter into the purchasing decision, not a surprise really I suppose.

I remember when Google purchased the Urchin Web Analytics product and made it free as a hosted Google Analytics offering, effectively killing a large number of previously profitable Web Analytics companies in one foul swoop.

Imagine if Google brought an up and coming BI vendor and did that to the BI market?

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How to install a loopback adapter on Windows 2003

Jan
22

A loopback adapter can be very useful for testing networking features on a server that doesn’t have a network adapter already installed, and Microsoft provides this feature in Windows Server 2003.

To install the Microsoft Loopback Adapter, follow these steps:

  1. Go to Start | Control Panel | Add Hardware.
  2. In the introductory dialog box, click Next.
  3. Select Yes, I Have Already Connected The Hardware, and click Next.
  4. Scroll to the bottom of the Installed Hardware list box, select Add A New Hardware Device, and click Next.
  5. Select the Install The Hardware That I Manually Select From A List (Advanced) option, and click Next.
  6. Under Hardware Types, select Network Adapters, and click Next.
  7. Under Manufacturer, select Microsoft.
  8. Under Network Adapter, select Microsoft Loopback Adapter.
  9. Click Next twice, and click Finish.

Unless there are already existing adapters, Windows will install the loopback adapter with the name Local Area Connection. If other adapters exist, Windows will name it Local Area Connection <next number>.

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Which one is your BI Architetcure

Which one is your BI Architetcure
Jan
21
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Got an email with this classic cartoon attached.

Its sooooooo true!

(Makes me wonder when Google and Apple will attempt to provide enterprise BI tools, or then again do they already?)

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Top 10 posts by views for 2010

Jan
12

So over the last 12 months the ranking for post views looked like (according to wordpress site stats, rather than google analytics):

Post Views
Home page 11,532
SAS BI Clients 4.3 and SAS 9.3 673
SAS EG 4.3 is here (but its hiding with Elvis) 533
SAS Articles 508
SAS Portlets for Sale 380
Making Libnames read/write in Enterprise Guide 273
SAS 9.3 and 9.4 and 9……… 271
SAS 9.2 Platform Changes 269
SAS 9.2 Office Addin and Excel – Undo doesnt (undo that is) 253
Summary of SAS 9.2 Migration Course Tweets 239
Process Explorer – Enhanced Task Manager for Windows Servers 235

And then the sad news, the amount of spam comment entries, I really dont know why these guys bother (well ok I do its all about money right!)

Historical Stats

Spam detected Ham detected Missed spam False positives
2011-01 1,688 4 0 0
2010-12 3,636 0 5 0
2010-11 2,724 16 0 0
2010-10 2,924 4 4 0
2010-09 2,224 8 4 0
2010-08 1,364 0 0 0
2010-07 724 4 4 0
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Guest 64bit operating system on VM Server 2.x on Dell Optiplex 755

Dec
27

In the BIOS you need to change the following settings

  • Security > Execute Disable (set to On)
  • Performance > Virtualization (set to On)
  • Performance > VT for Direct I/O Access (set to On)
  • Performance > Trusted Execution (set to Off)

Save and exit the BIOS, then power the computer down. You must power it down for the settings to take affect.

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Data Management Maturity Models

Nov
22

I am a great fan of Maturity Models.

I find them an excellent way of articulating to a business user where their organisation is at in terms of technology, governance or business processes and what we need to do to improve them.

There are a quite a few Maturity Models out there now, from Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, Analytics, Campaign Management, ……

There are also quite a few organisations that produce and publish maturity models, analysts such as Gartner, specialty software companies such as Dataflux and even behemoths such as Oracle and IBM.

I found this great presentation (Data Governance Part II: Maturity Models – A Path to Progress) over at http://www.nascio.org/.

It puts a number of Data Management maturity models into one pack, so you can peruse and choose your favourite (or create your own of course)

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SAS BI Clients 4.3 are they still coming?

Nov
08

Well as far as I know the new SAS BI Clients are still due for release this month.

And SAS New Zealand have sent out invites for a seminar to show case then in December.

Has anybody heard anything different?

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Capturing Screenshots on a Mac

Nov
06

Because I always forget!

  • To capture the entire desktop, press Command-Shift-3. The screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop.
  • To copy the entire desktop, press Command-Control-Shift-3. The screen shot will be placed on your clipboard for you to paste into another program.
  • To capture a portion of the desktop, press Command-Shift-4. A cross-hair cursor will appear and you can click and drag to select the area you wish to capture. When you release the mouse button, the screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop. (The file is saved as PDF in Mac OS 10.3 and earlier.)
  • To capture a specific application window, press Command-Shift-4, then press the Spacebar. The cursor will change to a camera, and you can move it around the screen. As you move the cursor over an application window, the window will be highlighted. The entire window does not need to be visible for you to capture it. When you have the cursor over a window you want to capture, just click the mouse button and the screen shot will be saved as a PNG file on your desktop. (The file is saved as PDF in Mac OS 10.3 and earlier.)
  • Add Control to the two shortcuts above to place the screen shot on the clipboard instead of saving it to the desktop.
  • Another method for capturing screen shots in Mac OS X is by using the bundled Apple utility, Grab, located in the Applications > Utilities folder. Grab is useful if you need to include a cursor or a menu in your screen shot, or if you want to save your screen shot to TIFF format. To include a cursor, first go to Grab Preferences and select the cursor icon you wish to have in your screen shot. To capture the screen with Grab, run Grab, then choose of the capture modes from the “Capture” menu: Selection, Window, Screen, Timed Screen.
  • When you choose the Selection mode in Grab, you can capture a specific region of the screen by dragging around it. Grab will display a tooltip showing the size of the region you have selected and the screen shot will open in a window when you release the mouse button. The cursor will not be included.
  • When you choose the Window mode in Grab, an instruction window will appear asking you to select the window you wish to capture, then click the “Choose Window” button. When you click the button, the instructions will disappear and the window you click ill be captured, including the mouse cursor at the position where you click (if a cursor was selected in Preferences).
  • When you choose the Screen mode in Grab, an instruction window will appear asking you to click the screen when you are ready to capture. The mouse cursor will be included in your screen shot at the position where you click (if a cursor was selected in Preferences).
  • When you choose the Timed Screen mode in Grab, an instruction window will appear, allowing you to prepare your screen for capture. When you are ready, press the “Start Timer” button and you will have ten seconds before the screen is captured. This allows you to open menus and sub-menus, if necessary. After ten seconds the entire screen will be captured. The mouse cursor will be included in your screen shot if a cursor was selected in Preferences.
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    A new take on indexing SAS Articles and Papers (and one I hope is helpfull)

    Sep
    10

    I seem to spend a fair bit of time searching for and finding SAS Articles and Papers to assist for projects we are on, whether it be how to reduce the size of your metadata repository or what does the SAS Grid capabilities provide.

    When I first started the saasinct.com website one of my goals was to index these articles there so I could easily find them again.

    I started out with a bang and a hiss but then of course I got busy and the bang whimpered and the hiss fizzled.

    I have spent a little time lately setting off the gun powder again.

    When I sat back and looked at what I needed, I worked out that sites like SAS Support.com and Lex Jansen have great capabilities in terms of storing all these articles and making them searchable.

    But what they lacked for me was the context, and when im looking or more precisely browsing (because when im looking im searching using google)  I often don’t know exactly what im looking for.  So for example I might look for a list of articles on SAS Grid, or to do with SAS Administration.

    So I have reorganised the way I catalogue the articles and papers, to do this by three components:

    • SAS Role (i.e Administrator, Business Intelligence Developer)
    • SAS Product (i.e Data Integration Server, Enterprise Guide, Metadata Server)
    • Source (i.e SAS Forum, User Group, Blog)

    And then added these as pull down menus throughout the site so people can navigate the articles in these components easily.  I have also added tag clouds to again make finding information easier if you are browsing, as well as the usual search function.

    To make it manageable I also split it out to a sub-site http://sasarticles.saasinct.com/ rather than have it embedded in the SaasInct.com main site (which made it hard to manage).

    Unfortunately I don’t have time to add and index all the articles and papers available in one go, but as I find them I will add them).  (Of course if there si anybody out there willing to help with the task let me know, many hands make light work and all that ;-)

    And of course any comments of how to make it more usefull feel free to jot them down and leave a comment.

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