The primary way that this product can be improved is by adjusting their pricing model. Their product is a little expensive. It is sometimes hard for people to justify it. It does give you access to multiple platforms of data and it is good at what it does. But the problem is that you have to purchase the full access package for each platform. So, for example, if you want to connect to SQL Server and your SAS is on a Unix box, then you have to purchase their connection package for that scenario. The price point is where I find most companies balk at the product more than anything. The customers simply do not want to spend the money. Every time they have got a new database they want to connect to and it is a different flavor, they do not want to spend the money on a new connection package. When you go through the access module, you have to have an ODBC driver manager. If you are not on a Windows platform, you do not get a driver manager, so you have got to go find one and that costs. You either pay SAS for their product or you go manage it yourself manually. It is one or the other and I have been down both roads. SAS is far more efficient. From a price-point perspective, it would be nicer, in my opinion, if SAS/ACCESS had a fixed price structure. They package up the solutions, charge a little more, and it is a fixed price no matter what platform you are on or what size your platform is. That way you do not have to keep going back to SAS when you need something else. But that is just not the way it is priced right now. I can not really think of any features that the product would need that it is missing. It is a pretty self-contained solution and having worked with it quite a lot, there is not anything else I need.
