Likelihood to Recommend If you are a MS shop specifically, or have more generic data requirement needs from Microsoft sourced data this will work well. If you have a lot of disparate data across a number of unique platforms/cloud systems/3rd party hosted data warehouses then this product will have issues or a lack of documentation on the net. Performance-wise this product is equal to other R platforms out there.
Read full review SAS Enterprise Guide is good at taking various datasets and giving analyst/user ability to do some transformations without substantial amounts of code. Once the data is inside SAS, the memory of it is very efficient. Using SAS for data analysis can be helpful. It will give good statistics for you, and it has a robust set of functions that aid analysis.
Read full review Pros It allows distributed algorithm runs on Hadoop HDFS cluster It allows using different file formats such as SAS7BAT files or complex files in tab or comma delimited making data munging easier It provides scalable solutions by allowing users to re-use R scripts and distributing the computing over nodes through RHadoop Read full review I think the most useful aspect of SAS Enterprise Guide is the ability to use a point-and-click interface to create graphics, transform data, and perform statistics. The best part is that SAS Enterprise Guide creates base SAS code from the process, making it easy to reproduce analyses. SAS Enterprise Guide makes creating summary statistics about as easy as it gets. If one doesn't know proc means or proc tabulate, one can use SAS Enterprise Guide instead. The time-series forecasting procedures within SAS Enterprise Guide produce fairly good results. SAS Enterprise Guide makes time-series model comparisons relatively straight-forward. Read full review Cons Very steep learning curve... for such a quick and useful tool the learning curve is unacceptable. Very dangerous in the wrong hands. Because most add-ons are pre-written, you have to trust the community that malicious script is not used. Read full review SAS Studio has some great examples that can be implemented. Adding a filter to the output datasets for one. Some issues around having to enter my password every time I open it up. Some people are having this issue and others aren't. SAS admin is at a loss to work out why it's occurring. Read full review Likelihood to Renew In general, Revolution Analytics brings a lot of value to the organization. The renewal decision would be based on return on investment in terms of quantified actionable insights that are getting generated against the cost of the product. Additionally, market brand of the tool and reputation risk in terms of possible acquisition and its impact to overall organizational analytic strategy would be considered as well.
Read full review On account of current user experience and the organization-wide acceptance.
Read full review Usability It is good, easy to use, improvements are being made to the product and more info being shared in the community. It just needs some more time to become more integrated to other platforms and tools/data out there.
Read full review It's not all bad, but I don't believe that an enterprise purchase of SAS is worth the expense considering the widely available set of tools in the data analytics space at the moment. In my company, it's a good tool because others use it. Otherwise, I wouldn't purchase a new set of it because it doesn't have some of the better analytical functions in it.
Read full review Support Rating Generally support comes through the forums and user generated channels which are helpful, easy to access, quickly turned around and provided by knowledgeable users. However the support channels are not employees and the channels are often used as a way to learn quick difficult elements of R. Better design, users interface and tutorial options would alleviate the need for this sort of interaction.
Read full review I did not use the technical support of SAS EG. I can say that I have had hard time to find online tutorials or projects for SAS EG. For instance, it is hard to find completed researches or designed algorithms used with SAS EG. Sometimes it just depends on user's skill set and experience with databases and programming.
Read full review Implementation Rating I've not worked hands-on with the implementation team, but there were no escalations barring a few hiccups in the deployment due to change in requirement & adoption to our company's remote servers.
Read full review Alternatives Considered The two are different products for different purposes. But for someone who has little or no experience in R programming, Power BI would be better for starting with. Having said that, Microsoft R is built on R, thus allowing for customization of complex calculations not typically available otherwise.
Read full review Why I prefer SAS EG: Data processing speed is much faster than that R Studio. It can load any amount of data and any type of data like structured or unstructured or semi-structured. Its output delivery system by which we have the output in PDF file makes it very comfortable to use and share that file to clients very easily. Inbuilt functions are very powerful and plentiful. Facility of writing macros makes it far away from its competitors.
Read full review Return on Investment Helped save company money versus buying other stat software Read full review Positive (cost): SAS made a bundle that include unlimited usage of SAS/Enterprise Guide with a server solution. That by itself made the company save a lot of money by not having to pay individual licences anymore. Positive (insight): Data analysts in business units often need to crunch data and they don't have access to ETL tools to do it. Having access to SAS/EG gives them that power. Positive (time to market): Having the users develop components with SAS/EG allows for easier integration in a production environment (SAS batch job) as no code rework is required. Read full review ScreenShots