SAS Enterprise Miner Reviews

We primarily use the solution for data mining and machine learning.

It helps the organization to build the DS part easily.

The data processing of the solution is very good, easy to use, both for enterprise and personal use.

The solution needs a language integration like Python for the user with more efficiency programming; SAS is kind of a powerful tool in past years that focus in SAS environment. but Python is more open and popular, which will be more acceptable in today's data science area.

I've been using the solution for about ten years.

The stability isn't perfect. We have issues with accuracy. In some AI forecasting areas, and the accuracy is not as good as the clients need it to be.

The solution is scalable.

The technical support for the solution is okay.

The initial setup is not so easy. Not many clients know much about the AI, so it's difficult to educate our clients on AI tech in order to make them feel comfortable using the product once it's implemented. Deployment takes about three to six months.

We use the cloud deployment model.

Our clients want to use more popular and more open-source tools, so SAS isn't so popular in our region.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. I'd rate the solution higher if it was easier to use. Right now, it requires too much effort to explain the tool to clients.

We primarily use the solution for modeling and a lot of business processes with lots of data.

The solution is very good for data mining or any mining issues.

We are using a very old version of SAS Miner, so I'm not sure if my opinions would be relevant for many people as they may be out-of-date.

From my point of view, a useful feature that we need from this tool is a history of development. When a user develops a model, each step of development requires new steps, and we want to be able to audit all these steps due to our regulatory requirements in model development. In SAS, we just copy via a screenshot from the system and put it in some document that covers the relevant stage. I know other systems have a feature to audit all steps to show what the user has done through the entire process of developing a model. It would be a time saver for us.

The preparation of both the mining and modeling process could be improved. The solution requires data and will reflect data, but the preparation of the data is not useful for end-users. We ended up having to do the preparation in another tool.

I've been using the solution for ten years.

The solution is very stable, but we do have some problems with discrepancies involving SAS not matching with the latest Java versions. It's not stable in cases where SAS tries to run on a different version because SAS doesn't connect with the latest Java update. Once a month we need to restart systems from scratch.

I've never contacted SAS technical support as I'm not part of the technical department team. There's another department in our company that handles this.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. You just have to install it on the server and the users can connect to the server to access it.

We handled the implementation ourselves.

We were using the on-premises deployment model, however recently we switched solutions and now we are using FICO instead of SAS.

I'd recommend an open-source product over SAS, as I believe them to be the future.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

I primarily use the solution for text mining.

Normally I use the SAS 6 Miner, it's a component of SAS Enterprise Miner. It's very useful.

The user interface of the solution needs improvement. It needs to be more visual.

The stability of the solution, especially 14.3, is very good.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support has been good. At the start of using the product, I had issues. I called them and they were very helpful. I'd rate them five out of five.

The setup is straightforward. Deployment doesn't take more than 30 minutes.

For me, the pricing is $3000 monthly for the license. There aren't any additional costs.

Currently, I am using the desktop version of the solution, but I do plan to move to the cloud.

In terms of advice, I'd tell other organizations to be specific about their use case as there are many components that can be used.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

It enables statistical modeling of data using Base SAS (another product from the same vendor) as the backbone. One can create visual models to see the steps involved in modelling of data.

Using Base SAS, one can do statistical analysis of data. However, Base SAS is completely code driven (doesn't have any GUI). This is a big limitation as statisticians, often, are not so good at programming. SAS Enterprise Miner extends GUI capability and visual appeal to Base SAS, to a good extent.

The product is still not as intuitive as one would like it to be. For example, a competing product, IBM SPSS Modeler is nearly completely GUI driven, while SAS Enterprise Miner lacks some features. Plus it is prohibitively expensive and is not available with perpetual licensing.

Over seven years.

Not many.

It gets painfully slow with raw data in excess of 50GB and one has to go for multi-socket server based licensing that gets prohibitively expensive.

Email based support has a turnaround time of about 24 hours which is not good.

We use multiple solutions simultaneously.

Initial setup was OK. Not too complex, not too simple.

It has an annual licensing policy with an annual renewal of almost 35%. The initial cost (and therefore renewals) are extremely expensive. One can possibly invest that much in hardware and possibly go in for products like R that are very cheap in terms of total cost of ownership.

For clarity, R is an open source tool but with the limitation that it's an in-memory tool. When dealing with large datasets, RAM becomes an issue. R is much more flexible. So, rather that investing in a SAS license, we prefer to invest in high RAM hardware (256/512GB RAM) and use R.

Another issue with R is that native version is a single core product. Even if you have a multi-core CPU, it uses a single core. However, Microsoft R, a free version from Microsoft, does away with that limitation. There is also a multi-core (paid) version of R available through Microsoft which does away with in-memory limitation and works out to be much cheaper than SAS Enterprise Miner.

IBM SPSS Modeler, RapidMiner, R.

Be sure of your needs. In most scenarios, the pricing of SAS Enterprise Miner is not justified by the value it adds.

• Quantity models for data mining
• Performance is excellent

• Helps one of the banks where I've worked (CGD at Portugal) to have more knowledge of their clients
• Helps us obtain better campaign results (credit cards, etc).

• Price of the product
• Graphing functionalities