SAS Visual Analytics Reviews

• Visual analytics
• Reporting
• Predictions features

We have detected a high margin group of customers with very little work.

Data preparation, and data management need work, as without Enterprise Guide, if you use SAS/VA alone (not SAS/VA pro), it will be hard to do the data preparation.

Forecasting is a very easy tool to use, and you don't need a great background on statistics. However, if you need to do forecasting with many groups of data in an industrialized way, then SAS/VA is not a suitable solution, because forecasting in SAS/VA is easy, but it needs a lot of manual work.

I've used it for one year, alongside other SAP products such as SAS/Enterprise Guide.

Data preparation problems, as SAS/VA needs a big, aggregated (all columns) table to work well. We didn't know the importance of data preparation.

We work in the cloud, and therefore it was quick and easy to implement.

I would rate them high as they're good and quick.

I would rate them high as they're good and quick.

I knew Business Objects and QlikView. I started with SAS/VA because the client needed prediction and forecasting features.

I used a vendor team whose expertise was high. There was also a third party consulting team, with high-medium expertise

The initial cost is just for the licenses, and the day-to-day cost is the consulting services.

We also looked at Qlikview. It was good at visualization, but poor about prediction and forecasting features, so we chose SAS Visual Analytics.

It's important to have a data preparation tool like SAS/Enterprise Guide if your data model is complex or your volume of data high.

I use Visual Analytics for enterprise reporting.

A bit more flexibility in the temperatization will be helpful.

I've been using SAS Visual Analytics since it was launched in 2013.

SAS Visual Analytics is stable. 

SAS Visual Analytics is scalable.

SAS support is good. I rate it eight out of 10.

Positive

Setting up SAS Visual Analytics is straightforward.

The price is good.

I rate SAS Visual Analytics eight out of 10. I recommend it. It's a good product. Some temperatization flexibility would be helpful, and I would rate it 10 out of 10 if they improved that.

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.

• Reporting capability
• Rapid data processing
• Seamless
• User-friendly report access and view control
• Forecasting capabilities

All these features blend in very well together. Users from the most non-technical backgrounds can use this tool to pull out valuable insights from their data.

We implemented this product for our client as a BI/reporting tool. It has been key to addressing some major bottlenecks in our client’s CAPEX/OPEX planning.

SAS Visual Analytics was often prone to crashing. Modules with barely 20 to 30 GB datasets took a lot of time to load even after satisfying necessary software specifications (RAM, etc.).

I've used it for roughly four months. I used this tool for reporting purposes when I was in KPMG India.

There was no issues with the deployment.

The tool was subject to frequent crashes/errors with incremental data.

There's been no issues with the scalability.

4/10 - customer support experience has been quite poor. Perhaps this is to do with the fact that SAS India outsources its support function.

Implementation of SAS is a very complex process. In fact, SAS employs a technician at the time of implementation and it takes about 1-2 days. There are several controls/firewalls layered throughout the process.

All the technical help was provided by SAS. We were responsible for operational/post-implementation activities.

In terms of ROI, our client was able to chart out a viable savings plan using the insights we drew using SAS Visual Analytics.

SAS products/licensing fees are generally higher than industry standards.

Please ensure you go through the implementation process with a SAS team member. There are a series of access/authority barriers that require SAS technical help.

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.