Kepion Planning vs. SAS Visual Analytics

The solution works extremely well for companies in complicated operations or with the ambition to forecast their operations on a driver based way or wanting to have the ability to create different scenarios based on external or internal drivers. It is a perfect piece of an existing analytical infrastructure (DWH/BI) lacking a planning solution on top.

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

• Budgeting and Forecasting: Kepion provides all budgeting, forecasting and actuals information in one, collaborative environment.
• Analysis: It is easy to traverse across your entire budgeting and forecasting spectrum in Kepion, unearthing insights that would be hidden from you in other tools.
• Workflow: Kepion's workflow management is simple and clear.

• 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

• Silverlight functionality is outdated which makes the front end solution a little bit old compared to latest UI. They will be tackling it in Q2 2018, but it leaves users wanting for more.
• Reporting functionalities: Are not state of the art, we recommend users creating official reports within Kepion, but focusing on Tableau or PowerBI for reporting purposes as this is not and will never be Kepion strengths compared to the likes of Tableau.
• Being customizable is great, however, the solution is not an out-of-the-box solution and does require a little integration to work. For smaller companies (under 5M USD) I would still recommend Excel.

• 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

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.

Kepion is in a unique position in that it has all of the enterprise-grade functionality and scalability of a tool like Cognos, but it is available at a lower price point, with much more engaged support.

SAS Business Intelligence is not the cream of the crop for business intelligence applications, but it is not far behind. The software is generally easier to apply than most other business intelligence software. Additionally, SAS Business Intelligence runs smoothly in the background when making real-time updates. With that said, the software is not as efficient of many of the other business intelligence software applications that have been on the market for longer than this one.

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