Blogging about all things SAS

So IBM is buying SPSS to give it analytics capability and to allow it to better compete with Oracle and Microsoft.

Although I have never thought of Oracle or SAP providing true Analtytical capability, so I would say this gives IBM a one up.

Although Although, Oracle brought Thinking Machines ages ago which had a credible Data Mining capability/tool but then swallowed them up and delivered nothing that customers really used (well not in NZ anyway)

So will IBM leverage SPSS to provide a compelling message or lose it in its already massive product stack?

Also SAP/BO and SPSS were already partnering and playing nicely, so is this a first foray into the rumoured IBM buyout of SAP?

And as always where does this leave SAS, HP and Teradata?

So many questions and only time well tell I suppose.

But one thing that is a fact is the big boys are getting bigger, and there are fewer companies out on their own.

I am trying to remember the days of Mainframe Accounting Systems (McCormack & Dodge, CA Mastermind etc) and see if there is a parallel, but that was more death by new entrant (SAP, Peoplesoft, Oracle Apps etc)

So can you remember a time where massive vendor consolidation happened and the companies left out survived, let me know if you can.

Ps, I am undecided if I will add Sybase to my SAS/HP/Teradata mix as I cant see how they can survive in the BI market (Sybase IQ etc) but then they still have a credible Relational Database.

Don’t know when it happened (haven’t been visiting it as much as I used to) but SAS.com looks like it got a make over on its product/sales pages.

If you look at the Enterprise Miner page here:

http://www.sas.com/technologies/analytics/datamining/miner/

And compare it with an archive version from 2008 here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080115152249/http://www.sas.com/technologies/analytics/datamining/miner/

You will some sexy tabs have appreared, providing better seperation of benefits and futrures and better use of screenshots.

Nice work!

Wonder what they use to power the website?

I did noticed that they do use google analytic’s, I hope they also use the SAS Web Analytic’s stuff as well (always had a soft spot for that product, unfortunately not many customers in NZ bigger enough to justify it).

Chris Hemedinger commented on my last article that EM6.1 is now released (thanks Chris)

You can see whats new in the latest release over at:

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/whatsnew/62435/HTML/default/emwhatsnew61.htm

Ive done a little bit of playing with EM, but leave the real work to the experts (to much stats hurts my head, although I now know what the answer should have been when I asked my stats teacher at school when would I ever use this in the ‘real world’ Doh!)

Anyway from an architecture point of view it is good to see Enterprise Miner is now an integral part of the SAS 9 architecture, rather than just an integrated component.

I like the fact it uses the SAS Metadata server and content repository for EM projects.

I also like the fact there is a direct upgrade path from 5.3 and a conversion path from 4.3. Should make upgrades much easier! ( I still remember the EM 4.1/4.3 to 5.1 days which werent so good)

We have been doing a little bit of work with SAS Marketing Automation over the last 12 months.

Found the 2009 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Campaign Management over here:

Magic Quadrant for CRM Multichannel Campaign Management – 2009

Interesting to see SAS has moved to the left of the leaders quadrant compared to the Magic Quadrant for CRM Multichannel Campaign Management – 2008 and Teradata has moved up the leaders quadrant.

I still think Teradata and SAS need to stop competing and merge before they get swallowed by the behemoths of Oracle, IBM, SAP and Microsoft. I that note heard a rumour that IBM was about to buy SAP, thenover the next coffee heard Oracle were goign to buy SAP (cant see them getting commerce commision approval for that).

Anyway when it comes to SAS Marketing Automation I like it as a product. Things I like:

• It uses SAS DI to load data
• Data can be stored in multiple RDBMS using SAS/Access
• Its integrated with SAS Enterprise Miner to give powerfull embedded analytics
• Information Maps are used to expose data to business users
• It uses Web Report Studio/Viewer and SAS Portal to deliver information

I think of all these the integration with Enterprise Miner is the most powerful feature. The ability to create a campaign based on a statistical based Segmentation, Churn, Upsell, Cross Sell or Retention model makes it able to dliver positive return on investment (ROI) relatively quickly.

Its also interesting to note Gartner mentions SAS is offering a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering for M, which combined with the Enterprise Guide, K12 and Strike Iron data quality hosted services means SAS is finally moving into the SaaS space.

Given the large data center they are building in Carey (not to mention the solar panels to power it) im guessing SAS OnDemand is becoming a stronger strategy for the future (as it is for the other behemoths)
Will be interesting how this will work from a revenue point of view, because although SAS has a large renewals revenue stream, there is still a very strong focus on first year license sales to fuel growth, which SaaS may canabalise. But then again on the positive side SAS donat have a large partner base who are reliant on resale margin like some vendors so SaaS should be less of an issue for them.

Now that was a few topics in one post, should probably run EM across it to do a cluster analysis, but then I might wait till EM 9.2 is available…

If you ever need to deploy WRS to the Web Server after an install (or wondered how SAS did it for you) there is a great SAS Support Tech Note that explains the process.

It covers deploying to Web Logic, Websphere and Tomcat.

Find it on the SAS Support site here:

Configuring and Deploying SAS^® Web Report Studio

If you create a SAS OLAP cube in 9.1.x and their is some some sparsity in the values (when is there not) then you will end up with lots of .’s when no values exist for an intersection.

This is not really a problem till you use Web Report Studio to report off the cube and then the user exports the report to excel in a non formatted format.

When they do this the . is passed to excel and then Excel refuses to apply formulas nicely when creating them on these cells (funnily enough the Excel sum formula does work for these).

So in this case you want to force WRS to show .’s as 0 and then they export as 0′s and excel is happy (or you can force the users to manually search and replace them each time they export if you are so inclined).

So the work around for us was to create a custom measure in the information map that changed all the .’s to 0′s. the MDX for this was:

IIF(<<Measures.Cost>>.Value = null , 0 , <<Measures.Cost>>)

Of course the down side of this is that the OLAP server has to do the calc each time it renders the values rather than a look up.

In hindsight we could have created a custom measure in the OLAP cube that did this and it would be calculated during the cube build rather than during the report rendering.