Google Cloud AI is a wonderful product for companies that are looking to offset AI and ML processing power to cloud APIs, and specific Machine Learning use cases to APIs as well. For companies that are looking for very specific, customized ML capabilities that require lots of fine-tuning, it may be better to do this sort of processing through open-source libraries locally, to offset the costs that your company might incur through this API usage.
SAS Advanced Analytics excels with projects that have at least 3 parts. The first part is the ability to address and compare different modeling types. Suppose you are an analyst interested in predicting home prices or whether an individual will reapply for unemployment insurance. There are lots of model types that could work for these two situations. SAS Advanced Analytics makes it easy (although not as easy as SAS Enterprise Miner) to compare the performance of different modeling types, such as comparing support vector machines with random forest models. A second scenario that SAS Advanced Analytics does a good job at is making the analysis reproducible. By showing the lineage of analyses, another analyst is able to follow the work of the previous analyst. This is a huge advantage for individuals working in corporations or governments. The third area SAS Advanced Analytics is useful is in text analytics. The field is huge now, and I haven't come across a software that makes text analytics as easy as SAS Advanced Analytics.
Complex Survey Analysis- SAS is a great resource if you need to analyze complex survey data. One can easily write code for this by inserting (survey) in front of the procedure with the weight, cluster, and strata variables. (ex: surveyfreq)
Modeling/ Graphing- SAS creates clean and easy to understand graphs and models which take visual data to the next level.
Support- There is a large SAS Advanced analytics online support in place. It is easy to find help on many procedures that you will use in this software.
Some of the build in/supported AI modules that can be deployed, for example Tensorflow, do not have up-to-date documentation so what is actually implemented in the latest rev is not what is mentioned in the documentation, resulting in a lot of debugging time.
Customization of existing modules and libraries is harder and it does need time and experience to learn.
Google Cloud AI can do a better job in providing better support for Python and other coding languages.
SAS Analytics does not have very good graphic capabilities. Their advanced graphics packages are expensive, and still not very appealing or intuitive to customize.
SAS Analytics is not as up-to-date when it comes to advanced analytical techniques as R or other open-source analytics packages.
We are extremely satisfied with the impact that this tool has made on our organization since we have practically moved from crawling to walking in the process of generating information for our main task to investigate in the field through interviews. With the audio to text translation tool there is a difference from heaven to earth in the time of feeding our internal data.
Not only does SAS become easier to use as the user gets more familiar with its capabilities, but the customer service is excellent. Any issues with SAS and their technical team is either contacting the user via email, chat, text, WebEx, or phone. They have power users that have years of experience with SAS there to help with any issue.
So far we have not had any problems with the application, it is extremely easy to use and it is also easy to install. It does not require much training since the instruction is quite clear for its execution and application in the procedures of the company. The team in charge of this application is very pleased to work with this app.
If SAS Enterprise Guide is utilized any beginning user will be able to shorten the learning curve. This is allow the user a plethora of basic capabilities until they can utilize coding to expand their needs in manipulating and presenting data. SAS is also dedicated to expanding this environment so it is ever growing.
SAS probably has the most market saturation out of all of the analytics software worldwide. They are in every industry and they are knowledgable about every industry. They are always available to take questions, solve issues, and discuss a company's needs. A company that buys SAS software has a dedicated representative that is there for all of their needs.
Although nothing is perfect, SAS is almost there. The software can handle billions of rows of data without a glitch and runs at a quick pace regardless of what the user wants to perform. SAS products are made to handle data so performance is of their utmost important. The software is created to run things as efficiently as SAS software can to maximize performance.
Every rep has been nice and helpful whenever I call for help. One of the systems froze and wouldn't start back up and with the help of our assigned rep we got everything back up in a timely manner. This helped us not lose customers and money.
SAS is generally known for good support that's one of the main reasons to justify the cost of having SAS licenses within our organization is knowing that customer support is just a quick phone call away. I've usually had good experiences with the SAS customer support team it's one of the ways in which the company stands out in my view.
SAS has regional and national conferences that are dedicated to expanding users' knowledge of the software and showing them what changes and additions they are making to the software. There are user groups in most of the major cities that also provide multi-day seminars that focus on specific topics for education. If online training isn't the best way for the user, there is ample in-person training available.
There are online videos, live classes, and resource material which makes training very easy to access. However, nothing is circumstantial so applying your training can get tricky if the user is performing complex tasks. When purchasing software, SAS will also allocate education credits so the user(s) can access classes and material online to help expand their knowledge.
In fact, you only need the basic tech knowledge to do a Google search. You need to know if your organization requires it or not,. our organization required it. And that is why we acquired it and solved a need that we had been suffering from. This is part of the modernization of an organization and part of its growth as a company.
Ask as many questions you can before the install to understand the process. Since a third party does the installation your company is sort of a passanger and it is easy to get lost in the process. It also helps to have all users and IT support involved in the install to help increase the knowledge as to how SAS runs and what it needs to perform correctly.
These are basic tools although useful, you can't simply ignore them or say they are not good. These tools also have their own values. But, Yes, Google is an advanced one, A king in the field of offering a wide range of tools, quality, speed, easy to use, automation, prebuild, and cost-effective make them a leader and differentiate them from others.
We had major use of SAS in forecasting where it doesn't require high level of coding knowledge and which has highly efficient models built in which can give good results on forecasts without lot of manual intervention. This tool was designed specifically for forecasting and hence was always a better choice compared to other tools.
It all depends on the type of SAS product the user has. Scaleability differs from product to product, and if the user has SAS Office Analytics the scaleability is quite robust. This software will satisfy the majority of the company's analytic needs for years to come. In addition, if SAS is not meeting the users needs the company can easily find SAS solutions that will.
Artificial intelligence and automation seems 'free' and draws the organization in, without seeming to spend a lot of funds. A positive impact, but who is actually tracking the cost?
We want our employees to use it, but many resist technology or are scared of it, so we need a way to make them feel more comfortable with the AI.
The ROI seems positive since we are full in with Google, and the tools come along with the functionality.
SAS Advanced Analytics is not the cheapest software on the market. The overall cost was weighed against free, open-source software tools. The overall return, I think, was quite positive because SAS Advanced Analytics saves enormous amounts of time compared to the open-source software tools.
At first, adopting SAS Advanced Analytics was a negative return because it took time for individuals to change their analytics habits and adjust to superior tools available at their discretion.
SAS Advanced Analytics has replaced the need to hire less expensive R or Python programmers. So, although the software requires an initial expensive upfront investment, the ease of use makes it so that other areas of expenditure save money.
