One obvious beneficiary of the rush to embrace enterprise analytics and "Big Data" is the SAS Institute Inc (or just plain SAS – rhymes with "pass"), the granddaddy of statistical analysis software. But it can be argued that SAS doesn’t really need the analytics boom; they’ve been doing quite nicely up until now without it, …

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Friday 11th November 2011 19:28 GMT mric

Rhymes with "pass"?

I think it rhymes with "gas", not the long A of "pass".

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1. Friday 11th November 2011 21:36 GMT Chris Miller
  
  Rhymes with "pass"?
  
  Yes it does - if you speak Merkin, or were born north of Watford Gap.
  
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Friday 11th November 2011 19:29 GMT Anonymous Coward

Well, I suppose somebody's got to make money...

... on lies, damn lies, and statistics.

(Guy Fawkes, because I ... ^^^------- don't want to become one.)

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Friday 11th November 2011 21:36 GMT Anonymous Coward

Excellent licensing model

SAS is the only company I work with who charge for licensing based on the number of CPU cores in the machine running SAS. If that doesn't sound like a big deal, consider the last time you were able to buy a single-core system. Now consider the rise of virtualization. Want to run SAS in a VM farm? Better buy a number of licenses equal to the physical machine running SAS, NOT the VM! And forget about using dynamic load-balancing technologies such as DRS, because that's a license violation!

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Friday 11th November 2011 23:43 GMT Antti Roppola

Cores

Nearly all our blue label number crunching software has been charged on power units, CPUs, cores and sockets. All of them have had to change to some degree to accommodate VM farms and clouds. The responsiveness seems (to me) have been driven by just how close their nearest competition is.

What's also interesting is the number of stats grads coming out of university pre-loaded with R. A quick browse around also shows a lot of work to link R with things like Hadoop.

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1. Sunday 13th November 2011 23:00 GMT Penguin herder
  
  In a word, R
  
  R is free and very powerful. Problem solved.
  
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Monday 14th November 2011 08:56 GMT elreg subscriber

Just a matter of time till SAS crashes and burns.

Penguin herder got it right.

There are FOSS alternatives that are greatly superior: R and Octave (matlab clone) to name two.

Those enterprises who keep paying for the expensive annual support contracts and getting inferior software for it, are cases of plain inertia not much different than paying millions per year for Oracle databases.

The up and comers; the younger companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. don't use this expensive, proprietary and restricting stuff. They started from scratch, with the much better free options, which is part of why they are more successful.

This 2.5B behemoth is near its peak. IMHO.

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1. Monday 14th November 2011 15:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  re: Just a matter of time till SAS crashes and burns
  
  R & Octave - Greatly superior? In what sense?
  
  I think you ought to qualify a bland statement like that. Do you mean that it's free?
  
  What about usability:
  
  http://www.r-project.org/screenshots/RAqua-scrshot1.jpg
  
  http://www.sas.com/resources/screenshot/Enterprise-Guide.jpg
  
  - scalability?
  
  - wide platform support?
  
  - integration with other products?
  
  - security?
  
  the list goes on...
  
  People and enterprise chose their software based on all the above. I 'm a big fan of Linux, Open Office and have/do use both personally and in the enterprise. etc but the tired old FOSS is better by default is almost religious faith rather than a considered opinion. Just like the arguments about Windows, Linux, UNIX etc.
  
  Horses for courses.....
  
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