Posts Tagged ‘ SAS ’

SAS, Oracle Weblogic, VMWare – Do not want to play nicely!

Apr
21

We have been looking to upgrade a client to SAS 9.2 and at the same time move to the clients corporate IT standard of virtualising the environments.

The client has standardised on vSphere and I thought great SAS 9.2 supports vSphere (as much as the following SAS support page say’s SAS supports virtualisation)

SAS® Product Support for Virtualization Environments

But after talking to Oracle about Weblogic support on VMware the answer is no, Oracle do not support any Oracle product on VMWare.

To quote from Oracle Metalink note: 249212.1 (found on a comment in response to another blog) :

“Oracle has not certified any of its products on VMware virtualized environments. Oracle Support will assist customers running Oracle products on VMware in the following manner: Oracle will only provide support for issues that either are known to occur on the native OS, or can be demonstrated not to be as a result of running on VMware. ”

“If a problem is a known Oracle issue, Oracle support will recommend the appropriate solution on the native OS. If that solution does not work in the VMware virtualized environment, the customer will be referred to VMware
for support. When the customer can demonstrate that the Oracle solution does not work when running on the native OS, Oracle will resume support, including logging a bug with Oracle Development for investigation if required.”

So what does Oracle Weblogic support in terms of virtualisation?  OVM of course.  Does SAS support OVM, of course not! (well actually this doesn’t seem to be true more on that later)

If we look at  SAS Supported UNIX Operating Environments we see that Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) is not on the list. If we look at  SAS Support for Alternative Operating Systems we see that OEL is not support but SAS will offer “best efforts” support.

The question is does OVM require OEL?

Well the answer is no, according to this Oracle VM Server for x86 FAQ OVM support Red Hat Linux (REHL).  So in theory we can run Weblogic on REHL in a OVM environment.

Is this supported by Oracle, yes it seems from all the links above.

Is it supported by SAS, well waiting to here back officially, but remember this SAS® Product Support for Virtualization Environments states that they support any virtualisation (but have the same get out of jail free card as Oracle), so that should be a yes, SAS should support the use of OVM!

Now the real issue if after installing SAS eBI, using Oracle Weblogic on RHEL 5 within a Oracle VM environment we strike a problem, who the heck do we ring first?  (you know its going to be SAS Support right ;-)

 

 

 

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WPS – What the …….

Feb
01

Got an unsolicited email from Serus Software Zolutions who are it seems a WPS reseller in Australia.

As you maybe aware WPS provide a set of software that is positioned as being able to natively run SAS code, for a fraction of the license/renewal fees SAS charge.

As you can imagine SAS haven’t been happy about this offering and have engaged in a legal challenge which depending who you believe they lost or won, SAS view here, WPS view here.

From my point of view I can see the market WPS are trying to target and good on them for seeing an opportunity and trying to exploit it.

But what I would say to a customer who asks my opinion would be consider:

- You either get an adequate return on investment (ROI) from the SAS Software or you dont, if you don’t, don’t buy it, why would you?

- If your ROI diminishes over time, stop paying the renewals and stop using the SAS software

- If you purchase WPS you will no longer get SAS support or upgrades, which is what your SAS renewals pay for.

But as I said I can see the value proposition they are offering. (yip im sitting on the fence, hedging my bets, placing a bet each way ;-)

As an aside the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI 2011 states that SAS is seen as one of the highest cost BI platforms and has this to say about the cost of SAS:

“So far, most users deem the opportunity cost of creating custom code for similar functionality or sourcing from elsewhere as a nonstarter — only 5% report they are planning or considering discontinuing their use of the product. As competition intensifies, SAS needs to continue providing value to justify customer costs.”

The real interesting thing to me though was the email from Serus Software Zolutions was sent to an email account I have at a customers site, rather than my normal email account.  My customer related email address is not generally publicly known and isn’t displayed when searched in google.

As far as I know I have not provided Serus Software Zolutions with permission to contact me at this email address.

It also seems that I wasn’t the only one at the customer site (or other SAS customer sites it seems) that received the solicitation email.

So on a personal note would I engage with a company that doesn’t even subscribe to the basics of permission based maketing, thats a nope!

And i’m still wondering where they acquired the list of email addresses from …….

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Gartner BI Magic Quadrant 2011 and SAS

Gartner BI Magic Quadrant 2011 and SAS
Feb
01
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I see Gartner have released the 2011 magic quadrant for 2011 on 27 Jan 2011.

The opening paragraph states:

“In 2010, business users had greater influence over BI buying, often choosing data discovery vendors as an alternative to traditional BI tools. But megavendors continued to hold the majority of BI market share, despite ongoing customer dissatisfaction, by selling the stack into their installed base.”

Which obviously mirrors what we have being seeing in the BI market with the emergence of Mega BI Vendors via the acquisition and consolidation of BI vendors and products over the last few years.

They also state that a lot of the Mega Vendor value statements are around the “Stack” rather than functionality or ease of use, boy does that remind me of my Oracle days some 13 odd years ago when we pushed the “Oracle Apps Stack” hard!

The Quadrant this year looks like:

What is amazing to me os the rise of Microsoft, from entering the market in 2000 they have risen to the top of the quadrant, almost google-esk!  Again Gartner states:

“ In the Magic Quadrant customer survey, more Microsoft customers cited TCO as the No. 1 reason for selecting Microsoft as a BI vendor, while cost was cited less frequently as a limitation to wider deployment for Microsoft than most other vendors in the survey.”

So goes to show that the cost of BI software really does enter into the purchasing decision, not a surprise really I suppose.

I remember when Google purchased the Urchin Web Analytics product and made it free as a hosted Google Analytics offering, effectively killing a large number of previously profitable Web Analytics companies in one foul swoop.

Imagine if Google brought an up and coming BI vendor and did that to the BI market?

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Boom Boom Boom, Another one bites the dust yeah! (IBM to buy SPSS)

Jul
29

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.

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Sun and Oracle marry, SAP & Teradata get engaged, is SAS going to be a spinster?

May
02

So my theory that Sun was going to merge with HP or SAP is shot now that Oracle have brought them (ok how about a shotgun marriage then ;-)

Then I noticed this blog SAP and Teradata Punch Back at Oracle announcing Teradata and SAP working closer together.

So will SAP buy Teradata?

And where does this leave SAS?

Are we moving towards 3 mega companies that provide Hardware, Software, and Services?

Does that mean Microsoft will need to buy Dell for hardware, and a somebody else for services.

What about HP (EDS) merging with Microsoft? It would give Microsoft Hardware and Services to add to their Opertaing Systems, Data base and BI tools. Which product would win out NeoView or Sql Server?

So many questions so few answers.

(well at least I can answer the NeoView vs Sql Server one ;-)

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SAS and Sharepoint

Apr
11

Following on from developing our MediaWiki plugin that dynamically exposes SAS Metadata within the Wiki, I have been researching whether we should build a Microsoft Sharepoint Web Part to enable customers to stream SAS Metadata dynamically within Sharepoint.

I came across this paper “Paper 390-2009: Henderson, David; Alexandre, Sean - Integrating SAS® Business Intelligence with Microsoft SharePoint” from SAS Forum 2009, that outlines how SAS provides integrations/web parts for BI Dashboards and Stored processes already.

Cool!

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SAS/SAP or SAS/Teradata or SAP/Teradata or SAP/SAS/Teradata?

Feb
12

Well I have been saying that SAP, HP, SAS or Teradata have to merge for a while now, or they will get a hiding from the big boys of Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.

HP have brought EDS, they are still flogging Neoview and I am dropping them off my list of merger candidates for 2009.

So that leaves SAP/SAS/Teradata.

SAP have a partnership with SPSS, via BO so it would make sense for them to purchase SPSS to give them the embedded analytics pedegree they need.

SAS and Teradata are playing very nicely at the moment, given Teradata;s new inDB oferring with SAS. (There is talkof an Oracle version of this arriving soon, wonder how that will effect the relationship)

Oracle brought Thinking Machines (an analytical/data mining company) ages ago so they won’t be looking to buy SAS (but then who would think the would buy JDE, Peoplesoft and Siebel).

So a prediction for 2009, SAP will buy Teradata and then form a partnership with SAS, which will enable them to buy SAS in 2010/2011.

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SAP, Business Objects and SPSS – a trifecta

Jul
13

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 ;-)

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