SAS Visual Analytics Reviews

The variety of graphs and charts make it easy to show the data in a way that's easy to interpret.

It has taken out the step of preparing the reports so it shortened our turnaround time. You only need to prepare the report once. Anytime an updated report is needed, you just need to upload an updated data mart.

There are a lot of technicalities in setting up the product. 

Setting it up will probably take a while.

Setting it up will probably take a while.

There have been no issues with its stability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

Coordinate with your IT department so they'll know the specific requirements of the product.

Interactive reporting with various statistical graphs. The company was able to see the 360 view of how the customers were consuming their services in terms of membership, events and educational purposes from a central data storage loaded in SAS which was very hard to achieve without the software.

It removes functional silos that departments have before. With the use of SAS Visual Analytics, the marketing department can actually see if their campaigns are actually working by looking at the data from the finance department. It also tightens the unnecessary access of data from other departments by restriction features in SAS.

It will be better if SAS can accomodate Survey data as some organisations are would like to load their survey results and analyse in SAS. Easier data cleaning features in SAS Enterprise would also help them clean data faster before loading into SAS VA.

For about 8 months.

I did not encounter any issues with the deployment. It all went well with ongoing support from SAS. The technical support team was very helpful.

I do not experience any. It all went well with the ongoing support from SAS. The technical support team was very helpful throughout.

No issues so far. I do not see any problems with larger data sets. SAS has the power to accomodate it. SAS technical support team can also provide advice on the issues with scalability.

The customer service provided was valuable. Customer Intelligence Manager and Support team closely interacts with the company to make sure deployment and utilising SAS as smooth as possible.

I would rate 9/10. The technical team has always been responsive and willing to provide the knowledge they have to resolve issues.

I did not use any solution before. We decided to use SAS straightaway. There wasn't any analytics solution we use before.

The set up was not very straightforward as our company using a remote server that is not hosted on the company so we had to contact the server company and SAS back and forth to make sure setup is stable and ready to use.

It was a mixed of vendor team and the server company we have offsite. The vendor team has high level of expertise and guided us through how to implement the whole system and ways to utilise it.

I work as Data Analyst and I am not allowed to disclose this. I do see that SAS can help in the company by customer retention and acquisition.

I think given the power of analytics and how it can improve your company, the price for licensing is worth it although it may be regarded as pricy for smaller organization.

We evaluate other softwares. We found that SAS can take data from other applications such as Salesforce and many other enterprise applications.

Overall, I think SAS VA is a great software for interactive reporting. It is also very user friendly and allows people with no statistical or computing background to learn quickly to analyse data across the company.

Since it is simply drag and drop it makes data inspection easy. It is the most complete in its fulfilment of the "vision". Mostly used for creating structured reports that can be replicated. It provides self-service for analytics where other systems are not so intuitive.

The advanced and predictive analytics where disparate time series dataset need to be combined based on irregular time and other, it was not the best tool. It was fairly structured in how it wanted the data. It was however good for visualisation of individual datasets and transformed datasets. Serves a specific purpose in making analytics more "self service". The more advanced calculations etc. are best done elsewhere, specifically time series.

I'd like to see the ability to use Python or other codes within the workflow. The helpdesk was not great. Part of the reason why we went back to open source Python was that their help desk could not solve our problems quickly enough.

We've had it for two months on a trial basis to assist with data visualisation and data quality control.

There were no issues with the deployment.

The LAZR server did not like some datasets being uploaded which was perfectly fine to visualise in something as simple as Excel. Could not figure it out.

3/10

Used Python and R, as well as Rapidminer for data exploration and visualisation. Tried SAS for two months and found it too slow and not flexible enough. Visual Analytics is recommended for a "production" environment and not development. We were heavily focused on development.

Simple to set up. No issues. Fairly intuitive.

Through the vendor. Make sure that the correct level of support is available to work though early issues. So that help desk tickets can be escalated.

Reasonable for what you get. Very good production/operations tool to enable self services of analytics. Not good for development.

Make sure you know your functional requirements up front. It is a great visualisation tool however if it does not support the tasks and objectives it may not work out for you.

The features I found most valuable were the quick visualizations and the ease with which one could explore data sets. This gives the user a fast-moving and robust way to wade through data and find the important points or trends.

It created efficiencies in reporting and data visualization. I still resorted to Enterprise Guide and SQL for some of my work, but for quick visualizations without trying to reinvent the wheel, VA was fast and powerful. Given more time to learn and implement (and with a few bug fixes), VA could have greatly improved the way reporting was handled.

The product as used was a little unintuitive and required some workarounds for tasks that should have been easy e.g. automating a query for populating a data table. The problems that I was having were supposedly fixed in newer versions.

From memory, table joins and custom queries could have been a little more user friendly. I was also dealing with simple problems such as not being able to print dashboards or reports that I think were to be addressed in the next release.

I used it for six month.

There were no big issues with the deployment.

A few problems were had with tables randomly dropping out of LASR, but no big issues that I can remember that were solely caused by the software.

There were no issues with the scalability.

Excellent. From installation to implementation, if there wasn’t a SAS consultant on site helping us work through the problem, they were very easy to get in touch with and very willing to help.

Before Visual Analytics, Enterprise Guide was used in conjunction with Information Map Studio and a couple of other products to meet reporting needs. Visual Analytics was chosen as a single software solution, and to improve reporting and visualization speed and presentation.

It was complex in that it took some troubleshooting and brainstorming sessions to combine all environments that we needed combined and to make all needed data available.

• Fast interactive dashboard designer
• Visual data explorer (network analysis, sankey, model segmentation)
• Inclusion of a really good predictive modelling visual interface

• Exposure of full population transactional data to customer facing roles with ability to analyse trends and patterns
• Empowers our citizen data scientists to answer their own business questions regarding customer trends and to forecast future trends

• Random forest modelling in visual statistics
• Ability to select category for display in data object from control such as drop down list

I've used it for 18 months.

There were no issues encountered with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues encountered while scaling it.

Excellent service as usual from SAS.

SAS Visual Analytics was been chosen by my employer as one of two applications for strategic data visualisation. Tableau has been adopted for general purposes, whilst SAS Visual Analytics and Visual Studio are deployed for data visualisation where analytics are the focus as opposed to regular dashboarding.

Pricing is excellent and beats a lot of the competition, especially when scaling.

• Forecasting
• Word clouds
• Distributed flavour

After implementation of SAS Visual Analytics, we overcome the prediction of future business and we were able to plan the future business, who are our premium customers, where we can cross-sell our products more, etc.

If there could be 100% feasibility of forecasting feature available then we could be more accurate as it's currently 95%.

I've used it for one year.

There have been no issues deploying it.

We have issues with the non-distributed flavour sometimes, as the LASR performs slow due to huge amount of data, so we need to fix it by performing a server restart.

Though the LASR has in-memory feature, but due to heavy load and computed columns in the project logic, sometimes the is performance slow, but at the same time in Distributed flavour with Hadoop the performance is always optimum.

There have been no issues scaling it.

8/10

8/10

I used SAS BI as well. Infomap Studio, Web Report Studio, and Information Delivery Portals(IDP), which does almost the same as this does, but much slower, and there is no dynamic look and feel, and no graphs or charts options available. Also, in SAS Visual Analytics we can prepare data exploration and reports in one platform.

It was a completely new installation on a Unix server, so it was interesting and challenging, but if you have the installation documentation such the prerequisites and post-validation then you can replicate the installation in different environments.

We have implemented both ways at client side as well as in-house, but I recommend that if you implement it in-house then you should have lot of projects with you otherwise it could cost you a lot for the yearly license.

The next release of SAS Visual Analytics, v10, will be cloud based, so pricing and licensing will cost you less.

It doesn't matter if the data is live or historical, if you have visualization and analytics skills, then Visual Analytics is the best way to project the visualization of data to vendors and clients. Because the one time you invest and gain throughout the year, there are so many other tools suchas R, Matlab, Tableau, amd Qlikview available on the market, but there are certain limitations in those.

I would suggest that you always keep it simple and keep documenting what you do. Before working for any vendor, it is always better to train a certain number of people in-house, so at the client side things will be hassle free.

The way how data is shown in the tool – using predefined views (statistical methods) is very helpful for understanding data/patterns – with such help I’m able to focus only on a specific area within my data set much easier than in other tools.

Handling of large volumes of data is much easier here, even with the fact that we’re using various data tools. I’m working mostly with ITIL core processes data (incident management, problem management, configuration management etc.). What this means is a lot of data on a daily basis, so one of the advantages of this tool is that I can analyze data without date limitations and I that I can do it within seconds.

Extension to more statistical functions, rest is quite OK. We always need to have in mind is that this is not a data mining tool, but an analytics tool for data exploring and for big data handling, which main advantage is in way how output is shown. It's easy to understand, nicely shown dynamic results for quick, but data-based decisions.

I've used it for a maximum of one year. I’m experienced SAP Business Objects developer. Unfortunately, SAP BO is not capable to work with that large volumes of data in that short time as SAS VA is. Also the main purpose of SAS Visual Analytics is not reporting, but data exploring. I also have experience with other business intelligence/data mining tools, but I’m using mostly SAP Business Objects and SAS Visual Analytics on a daily basis.

I wasn't involved in the deployment.

I've not experienced any issues with the stability.

I've not experienced any issues with the scalability.

I'm an experienced SAP Business Objects report developer, I have also experience with IBM SPSS, SQL Developer, with an overview of SAS Enterprise Miner, MS Excel, and other tools. The advantage of this tool  is its big data handling in seconds and its predefined statistical methods for better data evaluation and understanding.

It’s not a full data mining tool such as SAS Enterprise Miner, but it's a very powerful analytics tool, with useful statistical options. I especially appreciate dynamic way of visualizing data, mostly used for exploring patterns in the data. And also user friendly interface – user doesn’t really need to be data scientist to use potential of this tool.

If you’re looking for advanced tool for data analysis, but you do not have enough experience for SAS Enterprise Miner, or other data mining tools, this is a good first step for you due to user friendly interface and useful options. Always keep in mind that SAS Visual Analytics is not reporting tool so it shouldn't be its substitute.

• Reporting capability
• Rapid data processing
• Seamless
• User-friendly report access and view control
• Forecasting capabilities

All these features blend in very well together. Users from the most non-technical backgrounds can use this tool to pull out valuable insights from their data.

We implemented this product for our client as a BI/reporting tool. It has been key to addressing some major bottlenecks in our client’s CAPEX/OPEX planning.

SAS Visual Analytics was often prone to crashing. Modules with barely 20 to 30 GB datasets took a lot of time to load even after satisfying necessary software specifications (RAM, etc.).

I've used it for roughly four months. I used this tool for reporting purposes when I was in KPMG India.

There was no issues with the deployment.

The tool was subject to frequent crashes/errors with incremental data.

There's been no issues with the scalability.

4/10 - customer support experience has been quite poor. Perhaps this is to do with the fact that SAS India outsources its support function.

Implementation of SAS is a very complex process. In fact, SAS employs a technician at the time of implementation and it takes about 1-2 days. There are several controls/firewalls layered throughout the process.

All the technical help was provided by SAS. We were responsible for operational/post-implementation activities.

In terms of ROI, our client was able to chart out a viable savings plan using the insights we drew using SAS Visual Analytics.

SAS products/licensing fees are generally higher than industry standards.

Please ensure you go through the implementation process with a SAS team member. There are a series of access/authority barriers that require SAS technical help.