Blogging about all things SAS

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…