|
Blogging about all things SAS |
SAS ANZ ran a forum in Sydney this month, and had a great turn out with over 1,000 attendies. I didn’t manage to make it but heard it was a great event.
SAS ANZ have put up copies of the papers over on the SAS Forum Australia and New Zealand 2008 conference web site, check them out, there is some good info and highlights on whats comming in 9.2!
Well our developers have been chugging along building our SAS Portlets (and I have been much less efficient in creating the required documentation for them).
I have created the install guides for Tomcat and BEA Weblogic environments, but I don’t have access to a IBM Websphere environment, so if you have said environment and you are willing to swap some documentation and screenshots for a free copy of one of our portlets, send me a note!
Carrying on from my earlier post, there is an interesting post by the founder of DATAllegro on his blog here, stating that now Microsoft have purchased DATAllegro they will be migrating their appliance from Ingres/Linux to SQL Server/Windows.
Over on the Microsoft BI Blog there is a post lauding how they have rave reviews for DATAllegro warehouses with data volumes over 200+ TB and amasing query response times.
So what will the move to Widows and SQL Server bring?
What will the migration path be like?
How will customers feel about the requirement to constantly apply windows patches to their “appliance”?
How many 200TB SQL Server/Windowswrehouse sites are out there at the moment?
Given the move from one technology stack to another is always fraught with difficult (just think SAS FM, SPM and ABM) then I would hate to be a DATAllegro customer with a 200TB warehouse at the moment.
Over on Richard Hackathorns blog he ends with “So, is Netezza next to be acquired? …by Oracle?”
Well that would be interesting, that would leave Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and HP at the DW appliance forefront (although I see IBM’s offering as nothing more than a server with DB2 installed on it compared to appliances like HP’s Neoview)
That would leave SAP/BO out of the pack. I think it would also put more pressure on HP to buy SAS, and I have posted before about why this is likely to happen.
The BI Consolidatin is getting broader and broader (although not faster and faster), as is conolidation in general.
We have seen Applications such as:
BI Tools such as:
Application Servers:
Data Integration and Data Quality such as:
Activity Based Management, Budget and Planning, Consolidation, Scorecarding:
So DW appliances are happening now, I wonder what is next.
(as an aside I have always been surprised that database vendor consolidation never really happened, apart from Oracle buying RDB that is)
So my prediction ….
Well I hope it is the big vendors buying up Saas Web 2.0 products, so they can move into Software as Service and Web 2.0 design led interfaces.
But more likely it will be hard core analytic’s with HP buying SAS and SAP buying SPSS.
After that it will be consolidation of companies near the top tier, rather than additional capability. Past examples:
Now which shares to buy, if anybody has a SAS Enterprise Miner model on the effect on shareprice for the purchasor and purchasee flick it my way!
Found another cool visualisation techique while surfing.
It interactive visualisation of baby names ranking over the last 100 hundred years over at NameVoyarger
I have added a new article to our resources area, so that I can periodically add any more dashboards or visulaisation techniques that appeal.
You can can find them at:
I posted earlier about a blog outlining presentations from a series of BI vendors.
One of the interesting posts was titled “IAP: Business Objects, an SAP company, but why SAP?” (right near the bottom), which mentions that Business Objects has an OEM agreement with SAS to provide analytics capability. I believe that is a typo and BO have actually partnered with SPSS.
The interesting thing is whether this is a first move before SAP purchases SPSS. It would certainly round out their BI stable and make them a credible end-to-end player.
Will be an interesting partnership to watch.
(0r was this an intentional typo and SAP is actually going to buy SAS? That would reduce a lot of mistakes in company recognition given the similarity in names 
An interesting blog by Richard Hackathorn over on b.eye. It seems Richard sat through 18 - 1 hour pitches by a number of BI vendors, (interestingly SAS and IBM/Cognos were missing from the role call) and blogged his thoughts in real-time during the presentations.
After skim reading the blogs (and ignoring the blog cloud, interesting how often Teradata was mentioned) two key things stood out for me:
1) In terms of Data Integration real-time (or near real-time at least) is going to be the next wave, predominately on the back of DW “Appliances”
2) In terms of BI Front ends, mashups is going to be the buzz word for a while.
I think real-time data integration has been talked about for long enough that the capability now exists in the DI products in some form or other, and that the driver towards real time reporting from large ERP systems (think Oracle and SAP), means that this wave will actually start happening in the real world.
This is especially true with the pre-dominance of DW “Appliances” hitting the market.
As for mashups I am not so convinced. Orginally Portals were going to deliver this nirvana, then the introduction of JSR 168 would supposedly allow all portals and BI tools to talk to each other. Mashups just seem to web 2.0 for the BI vendors (who lets face it are still way behind the SaaS wave) to actually deliver with their current 1-2 yearly release cycles.
Will be interesting to see who from the big BI vendors starts talking mashups first, and who actually delivers. My guess is the new tier BI vendors will lead the way with this one.
Excuse the rant but I am really hanging out for SAS 9.2
And by SAS 9.2 I don”t mean the current release which is little more than an upgrade to a few Proc’s (to me any way). I mean:
The more I research at it it is looking like 2009 before we will see it. That means it will be 5 years between major releases.
Compare this to software as a service delivery models (but that should probably be a blog post for another time)
Peek-a-boo 9.2 I really want to see you.
Interesting blog over at the SAS Blogs, about a Kiwi called David McNamara who has worked for SAS development for a while, returning home to sunny NZ and working remotely.
http://blogs.sas.com/sascom/index.php?/archives/295-Five-questions-with-David-McNamara.html
I have always thought that would be nirvana, live in Nelson, work remotely, get paid in USD!
However reading about Dave’s hours (1am - 9am) now Im not so sure. I think the idea of having lunch at 5am would kill it for me.
Over at Data Doghouse there is an interesting article about the pervasiveness of software suites vs standalone tools. They use the example of Microsoft Office as proof of its effectiveness in gaining market share, and I have blogged before about how the convergence of Business Intelligence vendors is mirroring that of ERP vendors in the past.
I don’t agree with their statement that Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is the main reason niche players still flourish. In my experiences with both ERP and BI solutions, TCO is much higher when you have to integrate a number of different tools and technologies. However as most companies don’t track the cost of internal resources on projects (who typically do the integration) let alone TCO, the perception is that cost of these niche solutions is lower (well the license fee’s are anyway).
If we took the cost of replacing the niche products in a couple of years when they are brought out by the the big boys into consideration the TCO would be even worse.
What surprised me though was the positioning of SAS as a niche tools player and not a provider of Data Integration, Business Intelligence and Data Analytics suites.
If they were comparing vendors who had Database, Middleware and Business Intelligence offerings (i.e. Oracle, IBM, Microsoft) to niche players then yes SAS is a nicheplayer. But in terms of BI suites I don’t think so.
Just goes to show SAS is still one of the worlds best kept secret.