SAS Visual Analytics Reviews

It's an interesting platform for the front-end.

It can be deployed both on-premise and on the cloud. Our customers prefer to use the on-premise version for their financial institution.

SAS Visual Analytics is an excellent platform. The user interface is good, it has a good look and feel. It is simple to use. It integrates well with SAS, making it simple and quick for developers.

It does not require a high level of skill, but rather a medium level. It is very easy, and fast to learn. It is not a problem. I have people who don't know the product but can work in a very autonomous manner after one week.

It is not as mature as competitors such as Tableau and QlikView.

It is expensive, and not really easy to install.

SAS Visual Analytics is extremely scalable.

One of our clients is an Italian bank. One of their installations serves 12,000 people at the same time across Europe.

Tableau and QlikView, in my opinion, would have difficulty doing this, whereas SAS Visual Analytics can do it easily.

Power BI by Microsoft is currently growing rapidly in Italy, but I believe this is due to the fact that it is much less expensive than its main competitor. It's inexpensive, which is the primary reason, it is rapidly expanding in the Italian market at the moment, and we are working with it.

SAS Visual Analytics is not easy to install.

This is a platform issue, but from what I understand with the SAS competitor, other on-premises installations have the same problems. These problems may be linked when we use a cloud solution. This could be the difference. This is yet another reason why Power BI over Azure is gaining popularity and is growing quickly.

SAS Visual Analytics is expensive, as is the rest of the platform.

I would rate SAS Visual Analytics a nine out of ten.

We usually use SAS more from an ETL perspective.

We implement projects with these technologies, however, at the end of the day, the client is purchasing those technologies. We do not purchase these technologies, we just use them in projects.

We are all always end-users. Although we are not using it, we are implementing it for the end-users. We are using the tools.

Essentially we use the product a lot for ETL, for extracting, transforming, and loading data from one data structure to the others. We also use it a lot for reporting purposes.

The solution is very stable.

The scalability is good.

The usability is quite good. It's quite easy to learn and to progress with SAS from an end-user perspective. 

Regarding performance, they have some issues. They have always had some issues there. They are better, however, still, there are some issues around performance.

The installation process can be a bit complex. 

I've been using the solution for more than ten years at this point. It's been over a decade. We've used it for a while. 

The solution is very stable. However, the performance is something that needs to be looked at.

SAS is the kind of platform that if you are a power user and you know how to use, it's good and most probably you'll just bypass these performance issues. However, as SAS is used quite a lot by business users, at the end of the day, they don't do it as it should be done from a technical perspective, and then they just have some performance issues there. 

I would say most probably the problem is more about the end-user who is using the platform, however, at the end of the day, there are bottlenecks.

The scalability of the product is very good.

In our organization, we have at least ten to 20 consultants that have some knowledge of SAS. We have more than ten customers that use SAS.

The technical support is good enough. I don't think it's excellent, however, it is good enough. 

SAS has a lot of clients here in Portugal. Oracle does as well. Those are two good platforms here.

In terms of deployment, it is not quite a straightforward installation. It's still a little bit complex to install SAS.

That said, from a support perspective, at least, we don't have complaints. They are there and they support us throughout the process if we need assistance.  

I'm not so technical that I could comment in detail about the deployment itself. It depends on the solution that you are using from SAS. If you are just installing, for instance, the SAS Enterprise Guide or Data Integration Studio, it does not take more than one week and you are good to go. If you are installing other packages, more complex packages like Data Management and so on, it could be longer. SAS is quite a big landscape. It's difficult to comment on SAS as they are quite a generic provider. They have everything from data to campaign management. We used them a lot in the past. It's quite a big portfolio that you can install from this platform. Therefore, to properly calculate deployment times you need to find out which package you are trying to use from SAS and if there are different challenges within those implementations based on your business.

How big of a team you need for deployment also depends on the project, as we always look at it from, if we are a service provider once again, the size of the project. In a very big utility company, we need a lot of technical team members. If we are implementing SAS just for doing some ETL stuff in a small insurance company, we just need one guy, probably. It's difficult to calculate without parameters o base an estimate on.

Customers do have to pay for a license, as well as for Enterprise Guide, Data Integrations Studio, and so on. I do not recall any project without paying for some sort of SAS solution unless you are just implementing a small POC. That can happen. Once the POC is over and the company goes into the production environment, they need to pay. 

Usually, we use the on-premises deployment, however, it can also be deployed in the cloud as far as I know.

I would recommend the solution to others. It's a platform that I really enjoy. We, from a company perspective, always recommend SAS. It has quite an interesting portfolio.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We are a non-profit educational organization and the primary use case is for building dashboards and reports to display basic post-secondary data that we either collect for ourselves or that is publicly available. In-house data is in a database and the publicly available data is on spreadsheets with dashboards based on those spreadsheets. We are customers of SAS and I'm the director of data services. 

It's an easy to use solution, it's relatively simple to create basic dashboards and reports. It's also a very powerful solution, although I haven't accessed all the features. With regard to dashboards, it's pretty easy to pick up and use the basic functioning. We built a database and we wanted to be able to use the dashboards for that, and it worked very smoothly. This solution looks like other visual analytics software and from what I've seen, it looks and feels very similar to Power BI or Tableau. If you're transferring from one software application to another, it should be fairly easy.

The powerful nature of SAS can sometimes work to its detriment, because there is a need for coding when it comes to digital reporting and that's a little overwhelming or intimidating for some of my coworkers. They're features that not all solutions have. Our biggest frustration with the solution is not being able to easily embed things on our website. That's become more important for us and we're trying to work with SAS support to be able to do that. There's a lot of back and forth, but they're willing to help. Adoption of the software has been difficult because people automatically assume that it's going to be more difficult than it is. People want to be able to create dashboards very quickly and get them on the website as fast as possible so they'll do it with Tableau, and SAS doesn't work that way. SAS deals more with those wanting to create dashboards based on a database. 

We've been using this solution in our organization for the past six years. 

The technical support is good. 

I wasn't around for the initial setup but we recently went through an upgrade. I expressed our need to do this quickly and efficiently, and that we had no time to waste because we were trying to get something out, and SAS assigned us a team to move things forward quickly. 

We pay a little over $10,000 for an annual enterprise license. It gives us an unlimited number of users but we're questioning whether it's worth the cost if we can't get users on board. There is some tech support included in that, but it's minimal. If we require upgrading or we're having some specific troubleshooting issues like embedding the analytics, we get charged for it. 

We've done some cost comparisons and informally gathering information with regard to SAS Viya, Power BI and Tableau. They would all cost us around $100,000. With Tableau we would probably need the server, which means we would have to buy servers so it's quite a big price difference. 

If it suits your needs, I would recommend taking a look at SAS, particularly if you're working with sensitive data. We've developed some dashboards and reports, but we haven't used SAS to its fullest potential.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

The product has all the essential features.

SAS Visual Analytics could be more user-friendly. There could be more integration with different computer languages. Additionally, there needs to be more API features.

I have been using SAS Visual Analytics for more than five years.

I rate the platform's stability an eight out of ten.

It is easier to scale the product. We have small businesses as our customers for it.

The technical support services are good.

The initial setup process is quite easy.

The product is expensive.

I rate SAS Visual Analytics a nine out of ten.

I use Visual Analytics for enterprise reporting.

A bit more flexibility in the temperatization will be helpful.

I've been using SAS Visual Analytics since it was launched in 2013.

SAS Visual Analytics is stable. 

SAS Visual Analytics is scalable.

SAS support is good. I rate it eight out of 10.

Positive

Setting up SAS Visual Analytics is straightforward.

The price is good.

I rate SAS Visual Analytics eight out of 10. I recommend it. It's a good product. Some temperatization flexibility would be helpful, and I would rate it 10 out of 10 if they improved that.

Quick deployment to dashboards and analytics features (using SAS Visual Statistics and Enterprise Guide). Easy to create a simple forecast and discover business insights using segmentation tools.

Agility in dashboard creation and evaluating statistics with simple models.

• Connectivity with other data origins
• Visualization is poor
• Create KPIs directly

Normally it is stable, if the hardware is correct.

There are scalability issues. It depends on the data volume and number of end-users. VA requires a lot of hardware resources to move volumes of data.

Seven out of 10 for the SAS Support home page and direct support.

QlikView and Qlik Sense, IBM Cognos suite.

The straightforward part: Create a dashboard and calculate attributes. You don’t need programming experience using SAS Visual Analytics. You can export to Excel or PDF directly. The complex part: Creating a relationship between tables.

Compare pricing online with other vendors; licensing type is simple.

Qlik, IBM Cognos, MicroStrategy, and others.

We use Base SAS to extract IIS logs and prepare them for analysis. Then, we load them in SAS Visual Analytics to feed the reports that we made (tables and charts). We use dynamics dropdown lists to add interactivity (such as year/month).

Simplifies report designs and quickly displays tables and graphs. Time is not wasted thinking about what I want, then waiting for 30 minutes before seeing the display was not it.

The speed to display charts and react to users' choices is great. We use different  charts and they added some new ones since the last version which are great to display what we have to show.

The charts and tables could use better sorting, primarily using other variables than the ones on the figure. If they could implement views like in the older version (previous to Viya), it would be very nice.

Majorly, SAS is a statistical analysis tool and the statistics incorporated within the VA/VS of a business intelligence tool is quite sufficient. It enables the users to generate insightful reports rather than just descriptive reports. Automated mechanisms of dissemination of reports to business users on emails doesn’t require them to login to the portal to view the reports. The alert generation feature also helps in sending out ad hoc messages to the business users if business thresholds have been crossed. Reports for administrators help customers to follow up on the usage of SAS VA/VS and can also contribute in understanding how to improvise the usage of the tool. The licensing policy of SAS VA is not user-based, but it’s based on the volume of data to be loaded on SAS VA.

I cannot comment on this since I belong to an organisation who sells and implements this tool, but our customers are satisfied with this tool.

• Colours used on report objects
• Look and feel
• Nested calculations

I’ve used this solution for approximately two years.

No.

No, as I mentioned earlier the licensing policy for SAS VA is flexible according to data volumes and concurrency of development, and it isn’t user-based.

Good.

No.

That depends on the environment. There are two different setups: Distributed and Non-distributed deployment. I cannot comment on the complexity of the installation and configuration.

Know your data volumes needed for reporting, and project your data growth for at least five years to size your servers right!

I sell and implement this tool. The evaluation is always at the customer end.

Go ahead and do it! It’s the best tool for insightful and analytical dashboard development and reporting.