So who’s left?

I posted earlier that given the current convergence what were the chance SAS would merge and with who.

Interesting post about the Microstratgy conference over at Cindi Howson’s BIScorecard blog

What took my interest was these comments:

“Another interesting take away from the conference in aftermath of recent consolidation was MicroStrategy’s dance partners. CTOs from Informatica (the market leader in ETL) and Teradata (a market leading database for data warehousing), and MicroStrategy united to discuss pervasive BI. These BI/datawarehouse independents all have a commonality in that they:

  • focus exclusively on only a portion of the BI market
  • don’t compete with one another
  • greatly complement each other”

Convergence in the past has tended to a two company dance (although Oracle often waits for one vendor to swallow a few others before swallowing them – aka JD Edwards and Peoplesoft).

So whats the chance that companies like Teradata, Informatica, Microstrategy would agree to merge all at once, and if they did that would they need SAS to round out the offering? I don’t think they would, SAS just has to many competing products for each to them, but adding SPSS to their mix would make sense.

So that would create the following powerhouses:

  1. IBM

  2. Oracle

  3. Microsoft

  4. SAP

  5. The Consortium

and that would leave SAS really out on a limb, making the HP/SAS merger far more likely.

(it would also provide an interesting grouping of vendores depending on how you look at their product offering, but I will post about that later)

Time will tell.

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Checking what is licensed on your SAS Server

If you ever want to know what is licensed on a SAS server you can run this little bit of code:

proc setinit;
run;

If you run it via a base SAS session. on the machine itself, it will display a list of licensed SAS product and their expiry dates in the log window.

If you are running this in SAS Enterprise Guide and don’t have show log automatically turned on, then you will need to view the log once the job has completed to see the details.

  • Process Flow screen
  • right click on the custom code node
  • open log

If you are running multiple SAS Servers and running this via SAS Enterprise Guide then you will need change the workspace server to point to each server before you run it, to see what is licensed on each server:

  • Process Flow screen
  • right click on custom code node
  • select server

And of course if your metadata server is on a separate server to your workspace servers then you can’t use SAS Enterprise Guide at all, so you will need to run it via a base SAS session on the machine itself.

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Purging (reducing the size of) your Metadata Repository

You may find that over time your SAS Metadata Repository seems to be getting bigger and bigger. The reason for this is that when you deleted an object in the Metadata Repository SAS doesn’t physically delete the object it just marks it ready for deletion.

To remove all the objects that have been flagged for deletion you need to purge the Metadata Repository. According to SAS help Purge:

“permanently removes all metadata items that have been marked for deletion in the selected repository”

You can purge the repository via SAS Management Console:

  • Metadata Manager > Active Server
  • Right click on the relevant Metadata Repository
  • Purge

You must have security rights (authorisation) to pause the server in order to perform this task.

Be careful not to click truncate or format by mistake and of course backup your Metadata Server before performing this task.

Out of interest SAS Help defines formating your Metadata repository as:

“formats the selected repository, which removes all metadata definitions in the repository.”

and truncating as:

“Deletes all of the metadata objects in the selected repository, but does not delete the object containers or remove the repository registration”

hence the warning about ensuring you have backed up and click the correct option.

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Vendor Convergence and SAS

There has been a large amount of vendor and product convergence other the last 10 to 15 years.

First we saw the convergence of business applications such as Financials, Procurement CRM and HR by the big boys at the time such as Oracle, Peoplesoft and SAP.

Then we saw the convergence of vendors with Oracle and Microsoft both buying a number of business application vendors such as Great Plains, Seibel, JD Edwards and Peoplesoft.

This phenomenon has also occurred in the Business Intelligence space, over the last couple of years as we saw the convergence of Data Warehousing, Data Quality Reporting and of late performance management solutions, again by the big boys such as Oracle, SAP and of course SAS.

In the last 12 months we have seen the business vendor acquisitions being replicated this time in the Business Intelligence space, with Oracle buying Hyperion, Microsoft buying Proclarity, SAP buying Business Objects and lastly IBM buying Cognos.

So where does that leaves SAS?

Well Dr Goodknight is not getting younger, but then again that’s no reason to sell/merge. But if SAS doesn’t ‘merge’ with another global player can they really survive in the constantly consolidating marketplace. If Business Performance Monitoring (BPM) becomes the next big thing can they develop fats enough to keep the big boys at bay and retain their market share?

If SAS was to merge who would it be with? My pick is either HP or Sun. HP have started their entry into the Business Intelligence space with the release of the NeoView data warehousing platform, they have the hardware side covered and the consulting side with their purchase of Knightsbridge. SAS would give them access to all solutions in all the Business Intelligence quadrants in one go.

Sun on the other hand is less likely but they do seem to be making a play to become a leading SAS Partner and if HP buys SAS, would that not relegate Sun to becoming nothing but a hardware vendor for all eternity?

Lots of questions, lets see who answers them and when.

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