Altair Monarch vs. SAS Visual Analytics

The product is especially useful when you have real-time and/or time series data to analyze. If you have more mundane, simpler requirements, other products might do the job you need for less money (there are even some decent open source visualization tools you can find.) I know the product is very widely used in capital markets applications to monitor and analyze risk and price and volume changes; if you're working in that area, I don't think there's a better tool to use.

Incentivized

I was in a meeting with the client and there I have to show them some analytic data to them. But I was confused about how I will manage to show big data to clients with accuracy. But then the SAS Visual Analytics software helps me in presenting accurate data at the moment and it was very presentable and through that, I got the deal for that business.

Incentivized

• Creating a basic model to extract data from a report is very easy.
• Advanced features like Calculated Fields and External Lookups allow you to augment the raw data.
• You can create a "project" to automate the data extraction. Combined with Datapump (a separate DW app), you can fully automate the process once the raw report is generated.

Incentivized

• Provides the flexibility to the end user to slice and dice the data.
• Anyone can make predictive models with the help of in-built algorithms without the need to write a single line of code or knowledge of what's under the hood of algorithms.
• The feature to simply ask a question related to data and getting a response in form of text, chart or graph is amazing.

Incentivized

• Recently, we had some major sticker-shock when we wanted to upgrade Data Pump. It is an exceptional product, but when the price jumped from $6,000 to over $60,000, it was impossible to get the funds approved internally for the upgrade.
• We also paid for yearly maintenance contracts which included Professional Services, but rarely found those services beneficial. However, we did receive all software upgrades for Datapump as part of the contract which we found to be very beneficial. However, with the new pricing, that is not longer the case.

Incentivized

• SAS is relatively expensive when compared to other BI tools and requires a large amount of upfront fee which becomes an issue for smaller organizations.
• UI for the dashboards looks a little date in comparison to competitors like Tableau and Microstrategy.
• Integration with other open source software like Python needs to be built in.

Incentivized

Even though we do not utilize it on a daily basis, I do hope my current company renews it's license. If not, I intend to purchase myself.

Incentivized

SAS really is the cutting edge in Business Intelligence. That is all they do! They are constantly coming out with new products, product upgrades, and their tech support is second to none. In addition, their support of Education has made our ability to acquire their product possible.

SAS BI is good for creating reports and dashboards and then sharing it with the users. It also has ability to manage access to the reports and dashboards but somehow with most of the world moving to open source languages R, Python and Julia, SAS BI feels to be archaic in terms of feature set and integrations it allow[s]. Also, comparing it with other Business Intelligence tools like Tableau and Microsoft BI, the functionality of SAS BI is very limited and doesn't justify the pricing.

Incentivized

When you call tech support, you are immediately routed to a person who can answer your question. Often they can answer on the spot. However, if they cannot, you are given a track number and then followed up with. There have been times when I have had multiple track numbers open and they will actually TRACK YOU DOWN to ensure that your problem has been resolved. Issues do not fall into black holes with SAS. They are also willing to do a WebEx with you to diagnose the problem by seeing your environment, which is always helpful.

Datawatch is very good value of money compared to QlikView; QlikView is really more of a BI tool and has a lot of functions that I didn't need. Datawatch is very strong in the real-time area where Tableau, Panorama, and Qlik don't do very well. If you need to set up a visual monitoring dashboard, Datawatch is the best product I've seen for that. if you want to do a lot of in depth statistical analysis of large databases, Tableau is probably a good option.

Incentivized

I have used Crystal Reports, Jaspersoft and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). I would recommended Business Intelligence over SSRS and Crystal Reports. SSRS is very SQL-centric and Crystal Reports is more of an end-user tool. I would recommend Jaspersoft over Business Intelligence for developing a seamless web-based reporting interface but I highly recommend Business Intelligence for end-user ad-hoc reporting.

Incentivized

• Data Pump reduces complexity of report solutions by offering a standardized approach for organizing and scheduling
• 97% service level for past 5 years for all of our jobs going through Data Pump

Incentivized

• SAS Visual Analytics licensing cost should be reduced to enable users to use it in mass scale.
• More statistical and mathematical equations and theories should be converted into SAS functions for reusing.
• Because of enriched ETL and reporting capabilities SAS Visual Analytics is most preferred by business users.

Incentivized