SAS Visual Analytics Reviews

I'm an implementation partner of SAS Institute. I implement SAS solutions for the customers. I implement planning and business intelligence suites based on the SAS Institute's software range. SAS Financial Management, SAS Corporate Performance Management, and SAS Visual Analytics are some of the products that I implement. Currently, I am implementing a SAS product for two of my customers with my people.

SAS Visual Analytics is used for visual BI or analytics. It is currently available on-premises and on the cloud. SAS Institute plans to have it preferably on the cloud in the future, but they have a very large existing customer base that is used to working with the on-prem version. SAS provides their own cloud space, and they also support some well-known cloud platforms.

What I really love about the software is that I have never struggled in implementing it for complex business requirements. It is good for highly sophisticated and specialized statistics in the areas that some people tend to call artificial intelligence. It is used for everything that involves visual presentation and analysis of highly sophisticated statistics for forecasting and other purposes.

There are a few little things that are predefined and can be done out of the box immediately. There is no business intelligence application that is predefined, which is something some customers or prospects would love to have. Small and mid-sized companies would struggle with it because they prefer something standard that has been predefined by somebody else.
For instance the system does not come with a pre-defined accounting, budgeting or planning model for a particular industry. Some competitors come with such a model (e.g. for retail companies) which makes the implementation of course easier if the customer can comproise with this predefined model.
SAS does not provide such models but does not demand customers to comply with a foreign business model.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is highly stable, but it also depends on the complexity of the environment.

It is highly scalable. It is a great tool for big organizations. By big organizations, I don't mean a multi-multi-billion international company. One of my favorite customers is a big, independent car dealer in Germany. The company is not huge, but they have an annual turnover of one and a half billion euros. A company of this size would have special requirements that you will never get in any precooked or out-of-the-box solution. Small and mid-sized companies would struggle with it because they prefer something predefined or precooked.

For everything technical, they do a very good job. For anything related to the business area that requires more business knowledge, it can be difficult because they are more technology-oriented. From my experience, this is the case with everybody in this field. Too many people who implement such systems tend to focus on the technology and on the tools rather than on the business.

It is a visual analytics product. It used to be quite complex, but it has changed in the past years. It's getting easier and easier. Like every product that has a long-lasting history and with a supplier who is aiming at long-lasting customer relationships—meaning that a customer can rely on the software irrespective of the age of the software and will always get something new—it is something that is going to be complex in an existing environment. In newer environments or for new customers, it's easier and cheaper.

For its implementation, sometimes, we collaborate with SAS Institute, and sometimes, we do it on our own. Sometimes, we have also been hired by SAS Institute. They hire us because we are a consulting company with high knowledge of the business that the customers are doing.

Usually, between 0.5 to 2 people are enough for its implementation. Once the system is set up, it doesn't require many people for maintenance.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

I use Visual Analytics for all the typical use cases except text mining. I used it to analyze data and monitor statistics, not text mining. I also use it for data visualization as well as creating interactive dashboards and infographics.

Visual Analytics is very easy to use. 

Visual Analytics doesn't allow machine learning and predictive analysis. You have to license another product from SAS for this. This was an issue because I had to pay extra to buy other products to get these capabilities. It can mainly be used for data analysis and visualization, but I can't do machine learning and creative analysis without buying an additional product.

I would like it if SAS could provide Visual Analytics as a SaaS, so  I don't need to install it and I could use it as a service on their servers, like Salesforce or Tableau.

We started using Visual Analytics about a year ago. 

Visual Analytics is stable if you deploy it correctly, but it's completely unstable if there is an error in deployment.

SAS technical support is magnificent.

The deployment isn't smooth. Deploying Visual Analytics on the cloud takes a lot of work, or you can use some providers that give you SAS as a service. For example, there is a provider called SaasNow. They host SAS Visual Analytics and the license. You can buy the license and deploy it there without the hassle of installation because deploying the software isn't easy.

I deployed Visual Analytics twice. The first time I used SaasNow. That was too expensive, so I deployed it myself on Amazon Web Services. I used some instructions about a container that I can use to deploy it on Amazon Web Services. SAS provided the container, making life easier for me when I deployed it on Amazon Web Services. That made it easier to implement instead of implementing myself from scratch.

I don't think the return on investment is high when I factor in the cost of additional components like text mining and machine learning. I can get similar benefits in other products like Tableau or Zoho Analytic. It's mainly used for data visualization and data analytics, so I can use Tableau in this case for a fraction of the price or Zoho Analytics. 

Visual Analytics is expensive for a small company like mine. You also need to deploy it on a server or cloud, so you pay for the license as well as the cost of the cloud or the server that you will deploy on. 

Moreover, it doesn't include all capabilities out of the box. You have to buy other plugins or components to use some features. For example, you have to buy SAS Visual Text Analytics if you want to use text mining, and you have to purchase another component if you want to use predictive mining with machine learning.

I would rate SAS Visual Analytics seven out of 10. I have to be careful when I rate. If I'm rating purely based on features, I would give it a nine. However, if I'm factoring in cost and return on investment, I have to lower this to seven overall.

We are a non-profit educational organization and the primary use case is for building dashboards and reports to display basic post-secondary data that we either collect for ourselves or that is publicly available. In-house data is in a database and the publicly available data is on spreadsheets with dashboards based on those spreadsheets. We are customers of SAS and I'm the director of data services. 

It's an easy to use solution, it's relatively simple to create basic dashboards and reports. It's also a very powerful solution, although I haven't accessed all the features. With regard to dashboards, it's pretty easy to pick up and use the basic functioning. We built a database and we wanted to be able to use the dashboards for that, and it worked very smoothly. This solution looks like other visual analytics software and from what I've seen, it looks and feels very similar to Power BI or Tableau. If you're transferring from one software application to another, it should be fairly easy.

The powerful nature of SAS can sometimes work to its detriment, because there is a need for coding when it comes to digital reporting and that's a little overwhelming or intimidating for some of my coworkers. They're features that not all solutions have. Our biggest frustration with the solution is not being able to easily embed things on our website. That's become more important for us and we're trying to work with SAS support to be able to do that. There's a lot of back and forth, but they're willing to help. Adoption of the software has been difficult because people automatically assume that it's going to be more difficult than it is. People want to be able to create dashboards very quickly and get them on the website as fast as possible so they'll do it with Tableau, and SAS doesn't work that way. SAS deals more with those wanting to create dashboards based on a database. 

We've been using this solution in our organization for the past six years. 

The technical support is good. 

I wasn't around for the initial setup but we recently went through an upgrade. I expressed our need to do this quickly and efficiently, and that we had no time to waste because we were trying to get something out, and SAS assigned us a team to move things forward quickly. 

We pay a little over $10,000 for an annual enterprise license. It gives us an unlimited number of users but we're questioning whether it's worth the cost if we can't get users on board. There is some tech support included in that, but it's minimal. If we require upgrading or we're having some specific troubleshooting issues like embedding the analytics, we get charged for it. 

We've done some cost comparisons and informally gathering information with regard to SAS Viya, Power BI and Tableau. They would all cost us around $100,000. With Tableau we would probably need the server, which means we would have to buy servers so it's quite a big price difference. 

If it suits your needs, I would recommend taking a look at SAS, particularly if you're working with sensitive data. We've developed some dashboards and reports, but we haven't used SAS to its fullest potential.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

It's a powerful tool, and we are using it for statistics and dashboards.

The product has helped us take internal information sources like complaints, warrants, and criminal cases and integrate them into visual analytics to create dynamic reports based on dates, geographical spaces, states, and types of criminalization.

The flexibility of the configuration is valuable to me. We can integrate many objects.

The solution should improve its graphics. It uses more 3D graphics. It will be better if the solution adds more 2D graphics.

I have been using the solution for six months. We started using it in January.

I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability an eight out of ten.

The deployment is kind of complex because we need to install many servers and establish a relationship between the servers and the database. The database part is standard, but the implementation is complex.

We are a government institution. We don't have a return on investment. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution data warehousing and business intelligence.

The best feature is that SAS is not a single BI tool. Rather, it is part of an ecosystem of tools, such as tools that help a user to develop artificial intelligence, algorithms, and so on. SAS is an ecosystem. It's an ecosystem of products.

We've found the product to be stable and reliable.

The scalability is good.

The web part could be better in terms of the interface. If we compare SAS with Power BI, Power BI is a long step far from SAS on the web tool, web interface. It's easier to develop a dashboard with Power BI for the web, than SAS for the web. It's some steps behind Power BI, from this point of view.

The preliminary setup is complex. 

The licensing ends up being more expensive than other options.

From a technical point of view, they should improve the list of data stores supported. A lot of new data stores, new, innovative data stores, such as Hive, HBase, Druid, and so on, are not directly supported by SAS.

We've used SAS in not more than three projects so far. It's difficult for us as we don't use it for low tier. We'll use it for a project, then, perhaps one year later, for another project, and so on. 

It would be quite impossible for me to answer how long we use it as it's sporadic, according to projects. We respond to our customers with the tool that they use, not that we use. If they use SAS, we use SAS.

The stability is quite good. There are no bugs or glitches. It's reliable. It doesn't suddenly crash or freeze. 

Scalability isn't an issue. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so.

We've never used technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are.

We developed a lot of projects about business intelligence on Power BI for our customers. Power BI is easier to use on the web and it's easier to develop dashboards with it.

Microsoft BI, from a licensing point of view, is easier. It's a per-user license. Power BI is the right tool for companies that want a small time to market, a shorter time to market approach to business intelligence.

The initial setup could be improved. It's complex to use, it's not an easy-to-approach tool.

The product is expensive. From our point of view, from a consultant's point of view, it's quite expensive due to the fact that, compared to other products, such as Power BI, it's a more complex license model and it's more expensive in the end.

We are a consultant company and therefore we use many tools for our customers in order to achieve the final project result, however, we do not use this kind of software internally. We always have professional services on, for example, Microsoft Power BI and so on.

While we have a partnership relationship with Microsoft, we don't have any relation with SAS.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten overall.

We are using an on-premise version of SAS Visual Analytics and we soon are moving to the cloud.

I'm in the insurance sector, and there are lots of use cases for SAS Visual Analytics. The reporting tool can be used for multiple use cases. We are using it extensively.

If you are monitoring the sales in a daily manner, by using SAS Visual Analytics it would have improved. It's a reporting tool, and the tool will give you insights into where you are going wrong and where you are right. It gives you the information to where you can improve. It is very good for the reporting process.

Data handling is one of the best features of SAS Visual Analytics.

You have the flexibility to design your data models and overall it is a good tool.

The visualization should be better in SAS Visual Analytics. It is easy to use but when compared to other solutions it is lacking and the support is not very good.

The updates of the system take too much time and they charge a fee to upgrade.

In terms of visualization, SAS Visual Analytics it's stronger than Tableau and Microsoft BI, but they should improve their objects, the custom graphs, and the support. They don't have any object create case support from the SAS Visual Analytics. If you work with Microsoft BI, they have different solutions, they have different teams for support on the object. If you want to see different objects, you can request them, they can create and they can send them to the library. It's a very good thing for the Microsoft BI, but not for the SAS Visual Analytics.

I have used SAS Visual Analytics for approximately six years.

I have found the solution stable.

SAS Visual Analytics is scalable for users. However, the cost is a little high to justify it.

We have approximately 300 users using the solution. We have internal team members, sales members, and management using it.

I have used Microsoft BI and Tableau.

The implementation has many sections. The administrator section is very complex. The data management, it's very good, but the visualization is not good. The only complexity is the management. 

The full process took approximately five days.

We used a consultant that does the implementation of the solution. They were very good and had five years of experience.

We have an internal team that manages this solution. I have a large team to design the reports. There are four to five people who are developing, two people for the requirement gathering, and two people for the deployment.

The cost of the solution can be expensive. There is an additional cost for users.

You will mainly focus on the data transformation layer in SAS Visual Analytics. You have to work a lot on the data transformation, during this activity you will learn a lot about the data itself. This was a very good thing for me that I learned with SAS Visual Analytics.

I rate SAS Visual Analytics an eight out of ten.

It was helpful for creating KPI dashboards to report the status of the operations of the entire company to the management.

It provided the capability to visualize a bunch of data in an organized way.

In Brazil, there are few documents, courses, and other resources for studying and implementing the tool.

I used it for about two years at a previous company. 

It was very stable.

It is very scalable. We implemented it for many clients. We had about 200 clients.

In my experience, we didn't use technical support at any time.

We didn't use any other solution previously.

It seemed straightforward. Its implementation took about three to six months.

It was implemented by our consultants. We had about four to six people. After implementing it, the clients handled the operations and took care of its maintenance.

We didn't calculate ROI for implementations.

It was licensed for corporate use, and its licensing was on a yearly basis.

I would advise planning very well before implementing it. You should map the primary data very well.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use the product for reporting. When we do reporting, we start with the data collection and also integrate that data into one source, the different packets of data. Then, we have one dashboard and have reports for different data sources.

We also do analysis. 

It doesn't require human intervention. When you were designing your databases, if you've designed them in a correct manner, everything is automated and you don't have to worry about anything.

Everything we want out of this solution we get in terms of the user requirements, and features. Everything is available to us. 

It's also user-friendly.

The product is stable, reliable, and scalable. 

Technical support is very quick to respond when we need their help.

If the cost could be a bit lower, we'd give it perfect marks. The reason we haven't rolled it out across the board is due to the fact that the licensing is so expensive.

We started using the solution in 2020, however, it was a pilot. The full use started in 2021.

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable and the performance is good.

The solution can scale well. It's not an issue. 

We have less than 20 people licensing on the solution due to the licensing implications. They're a mix of IT and business people. 

Technical support is great. They are fast. This is due to the fact that we have a service level agreement with the SAS team.

Positive

We had a proof of concept and evaluated it against other solutions. This was the one that met our business requirements. That's why it was chosen.

The initial setup took us about six weeks. We had capacity issues. The people dealing with it had limited resources in terms of dealing with the setup. We only had so many people that were skilled. 

I'm not sure if the process was easy or difficult, however. I never asked my colleagues for their opinion. I wasn't part of the initial implementation process. 

While I don't have exact licensing details. I do understand that we pay an annual licensing fee. 

We are a customer and end-user. 

Our IT mostly handles the solution and therefore I'm not sure which version we're on. I assume it is the latest and is automatically updated. We're on an enterprise version. 

I'd advise potential new users to first pilot it and also ensure that you are clear about your business requirements before starting out. It will help make things go more smoothly.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten due to its agility and also in terms of its effectiveness. It's not a complicated app to use.