SAS Visual Analytics Reviews

Right now at the company, we have a few projects in Visual Analytics. We have more in Qlik, however, gradually, we will change to SAS Visual Analytics.

It's very good. Very good. For our use, it is better than Qlik. It's easier to use than other competitors.

It's easy to set up for the most part.

It's a stable, reliable product. 

The solution can scale. 

Technical support has been great in general.

I haven't come across any missing features.

While I've used SAS for about seven months, I've worked with data science for about three years.

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

The solution can scale. It's not a problem.

We have 50 people on it right now, approximately. I'm not sure if we have plans to increase usage.

Technical support has been excellent. We are very happy with how helpful and responsive they have been.

We are also familiar with Qlik, however, this solution is better for us in general. We've also worked with Tableau. We've found the integrations with SAS better.

We haven't found the initial setup too difficult. I'd rate it three out of five. So far, the deployment has taken about two months. 

We have two or three people working on the deployment and maintenance. 

We handled the implementation in-house. 

While I can't speak to the exact price, likely after one year a company would begin to see an ROI.

I don't directly deal with licensing. I can't speak to the exact price of the product. 

We did evaluate other options. We did look at SAP, however, we focused on SAS in the end.

I'd recommend the solution to others. I would rate it ten out of ten. It's been great.

It's an interesting platform for the front-end.

It can be deployed both on-premise and on the cloud. Our customers prefer to use the on-premise version for their financial institution.

SAS Visual Analytics is an excellent platform. The user interface is good, it has a good look and feel. It is simple to use. It integrates well with SAS, making it simple and quick for developers.

It does not require a high level of skill, but rather a medium level. It is very easy, and fast to learn. It is not a problem. I have people who don't know the product but can work in a very autonomous manner after one week.

It is not as mature as competitors such as Tableau and QlikView.

It is expensive, and not really easy to install.

SAS Visual Analytics is extremely scalable.

One of our clients is an Italian bank. One of their installations serves 12,000 people at the same time across Europe.

Tableau and QlikView, in my opinion, would have difficulty doing this, whereas SAS Visual Analytics can do it easily.

Power BI by Microsoft is currently growing rapidly in Italy, but I believe this is due to the fact that it is much less expensive than its main competitor. It's inexpensive, which is the primary reason, it is rapidly expanding in the Italian market at the moment, and we are working with it.

SAS Visual Analytics is not easy to install.

This is a platform issue, but from what I understand with the SAS competitor, other on-premises installations have the same problems. These problems may be linked when we use a cloud solution. This could be the difference. This is yet another reason why Power BI over Azure is gaining popularity and is growing quickly.

SAS Visual Analytics is expensive, as is the rest of the platform.

I would rate SAS Visual Analytics a nine out of ten.

Quick deployment to dashboards and analytics features (using SAS Visual Statistics and Enterprise Guide). Easy to create a simple forecast and discover business insights using segmentation tools.

Agility in dashboard creation and evaluating statistics with simple models.

• Connectivity with other data origins
• Visualization is poor
• Create KPIs directly

Normally it is stable, if the hardware is correct.

There are scalability issues. It depends on the data volume and number of end-users. VA requires a lot of hardware resources to move volumes of data.

Seven out of 10 for the SAS Support home page and direct support.

QlikView and Qlik Sense, IBM Cognos suite.

The straightforward part: Create a dashboard and calculate attributes. You don’t need programming experience using SAS Visual Analytics. You can export to Excel or PDF directly. The complex part: Creating a relationship between tables.

Compare pricing online with other vendors; licensing type is simple.

Qlik, IBM Cognos, MicroStrategy, and others.

We use Base SAS to extract IIS logs and prepare them for analysis. Then, we load them in SAS Visual Analytics to feed the reports that we made (tables and charts). We use dynamics dropdown lists to add interactivity (such as year/month).

Simplifies report designs and quickly displays tables and graphs. Time is not wasted thinking about what I want, then waiting for 30 minutes before seeing the display was not it.

The speed to display charts and react to users' choices is great. We use different  charts and they added some new ones since the last version which are great to display what we have to show.

The charts and tables could use better sorting, primarily using other variables than the ones on the figure. If they could implement views like in the older version (previous to Viya), it would be very nice.

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.

The variety of graphs and charts make it easy to show the data in a way that's easy to interpret.

It has taken out the step of preparing the reports so it shortened our turnaround time. You only need to prepare the report once. Anytime an updated report is needed, you just need to upload an updated data mart.

There are a lot of technicalities in setting up the product. 

Setting it up will probably take a while.

Setting it up will probably take a while.

There have been no issues with its stability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

Coordinate with your IT department so they'll know the specific requirements of the product.

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.

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.

• Fast interactive dashboard designer
• Visual data explorer (network analysis, sankey, model segmentation)
• Inclusion of a really good predictive modelling visual interface

• Exposure of full population transactional data to customer facing roles with ability to analyse trends and patterns
• Empowers our citizen data scientists to answer their own business questions regarding customer trends and to forecast future trends

• Random forest modelling in visual statistics
• Ability to select category for display in data object from control such as drop down list

I've used it for 18 months.

There were no issues encountered with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues encountered while scaling it.

Excellent service as usual from SAS.

SAS Visual Analytics was been chosen by my employer as one of two applications for strategic data visualisation. Tableau has been adopted for general purposes, whilst SAS Visual Analytics and Visual Studio are deployed for data visualisation where analytics are the focus as opposed to regular dashboarding.

Pricing is excellent and beats a lot of the competition, especially when scaling.