Comment on SAS under pressure from Pentaho by James

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Hi Dubyam,

Thanks for commenting. Your points are well considered and well presented.

Your first point is valid – but one sided. I agree that trending only ‘SAS Institute’ will lower their search volume. But only including ‘pentaho’ also lowers ours. Try comparing the search volumes of Weka (our machine learning software) vs Enterprise Miner (their equivalent product) – we eclipse them. Then you have to add in our ETL tool Kettle (again hard to separate from the noice), and Mondrian (our OLAP technology), etc. So both their search volume and ours were lowered in this chart – whether by the same amount or not is impossible to tell. Unfortunately Google trends does not allow the kind of analysis we would like to do here. But, regardless of relative comparisons, assuming the propensity to use any given search term remains constant over time, interest in ‘SAS Institute’ has been declining in absolute terms (according to Google) every year for the last 6 years.

To your second point – I agree that growth rates don’t compare well between us and them. But my main point is that the license revenue growth rate of the proprietary vendors is largely flat – in a market that is supposedly growing at 10% per year. In this environment the average growth rate should be 10%, not 0%.

Thank you for the light shower on my parade.

James



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