Comment on SAS under pressure from Pentaho by Kobus Bronn

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Hi James,

I am a user of SAS, but also very pro open source, so I read your article with some interest. I am also a user of Pentaho, and I think it is very good software. There are a couple of points to mention from the SAS perspective. Firstly the company is an analytics company. Any company claiming to be able to compete with SAS on analytics except for SPSS would be stating an outright lie. SAP has claimed to do quite a bit of analytics, and even though they have credible analytics in the operational area, it is not true analytics or near to the level that SAS does it.

Furthermore SAS’ BI and DI offerings were created to compliment the analytical offerings, and as such are not core offerings. If their clients are analytical clients, or use one of their industry solutions, the BI and DI portion becomes fairly cheap. The advantage though, is that you can use one platform straight from source through DI to BI or analytics, and in my experience this has had a tremendous cost saving in terms of total cost of ownership. On income generated, especially in the light of the biggest ROI not being created in the BI or DI environments, but in analytics, this is another advantage of SAS.

When considering Total Cost of Ownership, SAS is leased software, not proprietary, and as such new software releases, support, warranties etc. are included. Your support business model seems to be very much the same as Red Hat or Ubuntu’s. So in a way even though your software is open source, the services that allow for enterprise deployment and stability is not that different form SAS’.

Looking forward to your reply.

Regards,

Kobus Brönn



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