The most valuable feature is you have native access to the external databases.

You can run user applications on the Oracle database with these Access tools with complete transparency, without knowing that you have an Oracle system below that.

The most valuable part of SAS/ACCESS is what it is made for: connecting to remote systems that are not part of your physical SAS environment. The whole point of the product is to provide access to various different data stores. For example, with SAS/ACCESS you can connect to two different Oracle databases. We were connecting to Db2 on the mainframe. We were connecting to Netezza on an MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) appliance and Informix. We were using SAS/ACCESS for its main purpose, but most of the business customers would not know how to administer that or set that up. Once the access is created it is easy for the business users to directly access what they need.  

The SAS/ACCESS ability to connect creates an elegant simplicity. All your administrator has to do is set up the connection between SAS and this or that database with the proper permissions and that is it. From then on it is up to the user to go get the data. They are going directly to the data source; you do not have to have somebody writing code or exporting data files and then shipping them around the network. There are no additional people involved and it is completely self-serve from that point on.  

Creating this kind of solution is stuff I had been doing and that I had done before at other places, but the company I introduced SAS/ACCESS to did not even have a true SAS administrator. They did not have anybody who knew how to do this kind of thing. I used the most valuable feature of SAS/ACCESS to make the process of accessing data easier. That ability to create direct access is why it is a valuable tool.  

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the ease of access to the data in those databases.

It's pretty basic. You just install and then you can use it to access the databases with usernames and passwords and things like that.