SAS Visual Analytics Reviews

Majorly, SAS is a statistical analysis tool and the statistics incorporated within the VA/VS of a business intelligence tool is quite sufficient. It enables the users to generate insightful reports rather than just descriptive reports. Automated mechanisms of dissemination of reports to business users on emails doesn’t require them to login to the portal to view the reports. The alert generation feature also helps in sending out ad hoc messages to the business users if business thresholds have been crossed. Reports for administrators help customers to follow up on the usage of SAS VA/VS and can also contribute in understanding how to improvise the usage of the tool. The licensing policy of SAS VA is not user-based, but it’s based on the volume of data to be loaded on SAS VA.

I cannot comment on this since I belong to an organisation who sells and implements this tool, but our customers are satisfied with this tool.

• Colours used on report objects
• Look and feel
• Nested calculations

I’ve used this solution for approximately two years.

No.

No, as I mentioned earlier the licensing policy for SAS VA is flexible according to data volumes and concurrency of development, and it isn’t user-based.

Good.

No.

That depends on the environment. There are two different setups: Distributed and Non-distributed deployment. I cannot comment on the complexity of the installation and configuration.

Know your data volumes needed for reporting, and project your data growth for at least five years to size your servers right!

I sell and implement this tool. The evaluation is always at the customer end.

Go ahead and do it! It’s the best tool for insightful and analytical dashboard development and reporting.

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.

• 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.

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.