SAS BI - Not so great Business Intelligence software
SAS Business Intelligence is mainly used by the analytics teams across organizations in order to create interactive reports and …
SAS Business Intelligence
SAS Business Intelligence
Overview
Recent Reviews
Popular Features
View all 28 featuresPixel Perfect reports (5)
7.1
71%
Customizable dashboards (5)
7.1
71%
Report Formatting Templates (5)
6.1
61%
Drill-down analysis (5)
5.2
52%
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Pricing
View all pricingEntry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
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Alternatives Pricing
What is IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson?
IBM Cognos is a full-featured business intelligence suite by IBM, designed for larger deployments. It comprises Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search, and dashboards.
What is Microsoft BI (MSBI)?
Microsoft BI is a business intelligence product used for data analysis and generating reports on server-based data. It features unlimited data analysis capacity with its reporting engine, SQL Server Reporting Services alongside ETL, master data management, and data cleansing.
Features Scorecard
BI Standard Reporting
6.7
67%
Ad-hoc Reporting
7.0
70%
Report Output and Scheduling
9.5
95%
Data Discovery and Visualization
8.6
86%
Access Control and Security
9.9
99%
Mobile Capabilities
5.8
58%
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
7.3
73%
Product Details
What is SAS Business Intelligence?
SAS Business Intelligence Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
 (52)
Reviews
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SAS Business Intelligence is mainly used by the analytics teams across organizations in order to create interactive reports and dashboards. The employees are not dependent [on] clunky Excel reports and dashboard[s] anymore and are able to have access to reports, dashboards, and insights on the go with the help of mobile apps. Also, lot of features are inbuilt to do predictive analysis as well instead of just descriptive analysis.
- 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.
- SAS Business Intelligence is very expensive.
- There is a steep learning curve to be proficient at using SAS Business Intelligence even for people experienced with BASE SAS.
- Limited functionality as it doesn't integrate with open source tools like Julia, Python or R.
December 09, 2020
SAS Business Intelligence is good at many things, but be prepared to wait for your models to run
SAS Business Intelligence is used in the department for creating user-friendly, nice-looking graphics that are easy to follow and automatically update or require minimal effort to update. SAS Business Intelligence solves the problem of offering simple real-time analytics and data visualization for users that are not technically oriented.
- SAS Business Intelligence is very easy to set up and automate. Very easy.
- SAS Business Intelligence graphics are above average, and the user interactivity is generally better than others in the industry.
- SAS Business Intelligence makes doing advanced calculations much easier than other tools. That may be because the software uses SAS programming behind the scenes, and users that know SAS programming will find it easier to create business intelligence charts.
- SAS Business Intelligence is generally slower than other business intelligence platforms. This surprised me because I've been a SAS user for 15 years and have found base SAS to be the most responsive and fastest processing tools around. Not sure why the SAS Business Intelligence is behind the other tools for processing speed.
- Although SAS Business Intelligence offers many default graphics, rearranging things is not as easy as other business intelligence tools.
- SAS Business Intelligence needs to work on improving the drill-down capability of the business intelligence charts. The software is behind other business intelligence tools that have been in the market for much longer.
February 28, 2018
Business Intelligence for your reporting needs!
SAS Business Intelligence provides a valuable and powerful way to allow our end-users to query our data on an ad-hoc basis. Business Intelligence allows us to present the data to our users with pre-defined joins and available data elements assisting the users in designing and executing queries without requiring additional technical assistance. This provides both a cost and time savings to our technical teams.
- Presentation of complex data in an easy-to-understand layout
- Self-service querying of data on both mobile and desktop devices
- Business Objects allows users to save report layouts for use in future queries
- Business Objects should provide a more consistent mobile/desktop interface so operation between the two is seamless
- Business Objects needs to make it easier to query across disparate data sets such as Oracle to SQL to Mongo DB
- Our installation of Business Objects does not natively allow the export of XLSX documents, only XLS
February 22, 2018
A great product
SAS Business Intelligence is being used primarily in our Research and Analytics departments to evaluate program changes that we might make going forward. It really is only used by a few departments by company employees who are considered subject matter experts. Other departments use the outputs that we generate to make their business decisions. Another major use is for math intensive tasks.
- I use SAS daily to not only analyze data, producing reports and other outputs, but also to replicate our entire financial system to verify/duplicate calculations.
- Using SAS we are able to duplicate all business logic and system calculations on our local desktop.
- When there is odd behavior (a bug) in our financial calculations my SAS programs, which are entirely external to our core system, are often used to help identify what/where the problems occurred.
- The cost for SAS Business Intelligence con prove to be a little bit prohibitive.
- The training for SAS Business Intelligence is often difficult to arrange and has often been canceled due to not enough people enrolled.
- Support at Universities used to be limited but I hear that this is changing.
January 31, 2018
SAS BI - Analytics made easy
SAS BI is being used by Local and Central Analytics teams to generate custom insights for advertisers, vertical level insights and to create various predictive models. SAS BI is used mostly by the Analytics teams. Since we are in AdTech industry, we deal with billions of rows of digital impression data which is mined to make sense using SAS BI. SAS BI directly connects to Vertica (SQL Database) and help us summarize the data and gather some insights on how to optimize the campaigns.
- SAS BI makes it very easy to create interactive dashboards even for someone who is not from an IT background. For some specific requirements, basic knowledge of SQL is good enough.
- A lot of functions have been predefined which makes it very convenient to create dashboards and reports. One doesn't need to be from an IT or a programming background to understand and create dashboards.
- It supports other programming languages like R and also has a seamless API integration with various data management platforms.
- 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.
It is majorly used to explore our data and discover new patterns. It aids in answering any curious mind's research questions. And most importantly it helps share the answers and the insights to relevant stakeholders in all the ways they can understand. It makes the data analyst's job easier and decision maker's decisions smarter.
- Robust software
- Amazing Microsoft Office Integration
- Always increasing number of features
- It can be sometimes be little clunky
- Need for seamless integration with more external softwares like R
- Installation, maintenance and user management can be made more simpler
October 07, 2014
SAS BI is the best product ever offered
SAS Business Intelligence is being used for health care economics and outcomes research and is used across the organization. It allows to develop optimal strategies of health care to treat patients and predict the cost of different options and protocols. SAS/STAT is an important part of statistical evaluation in most of the studies.
- User friendly
- Efficient
- Comprehensive
- More usage guides
June 06, 2014
SAS BI: The power to see and be seen.
The Institutional Research Department at the college uses the full functionality of SAS BI to manipulate data, and produce reports and dashboards. These products are placed on the SAS Information Delivery Portal for use by administrators, deans and other staff across the college in data-driven decision making. Having a centralized repository for reports that are timely, interactive and easy to use has helped our employees in their decision making.
- Collect and combine data from multiple sources. For example, data from the college database, the National Student Clearinghouse and our student services tracking software can combine to feed one report.
- Condense millions of rows of data into a single, easy to use report. For example, we can produce a cube that is collapsed at a high level, and users can drill down to their area of interest in seconds.
- Create interactive reports. It was important that our reports contained the ability for users to play with the data. They had to be able to filter large datasets, drag and drop comparison groups into graphs, and drill down to student-level data. SAS BI provided all of this and more.
- There will be a steep learning curve for individuals transitioning from BASE SAS to SAS BI. Our department was filled with experienced SAS programmers, but that did little to prepare us for the challenges of SAS BI. Training will be a must.
- It is possible, but extremely difficult to customize the web-based portions of SAS BI, like the Information Delivery Portal or Web Report Studio. Having an out-of-the box solution is great to get up and coming quickly, but customizing the look and feel for the web-based users will require some previous web design skills.
- In order to fully appreciate the features of SAS BI, you absolutely need someone on your team with a background in platform administration, security, web design or some other basic IT skills. Alternatively, you may just need strong support from your IT department. Simply having a group of individuals experienced in BASE SAS will not cut it.
May 20, 2014
SAS is the total package
This product is used by several departments across the organization. While it was slow getting groups engaged, it has solved the problem of accumulating data from different sources into one place where it can be reported on and analyzed, thus serving the need of having the identical data pulls across all organizations. It also solved the issue with having analysts using thin-client to access the data which alleviated the need to have software installed on their workstations.
- Providing a seamless data access engine to monitor utilization of credit lines across several lines of business. Pulling data from Teradata, Oracle, DB2, Netezza and others to be combined into a single data source for reporting
- Ability to analyze data through thin client which is able to access the data on the network
- Reporting software which is also thin client and can be productionalized to refresh at any time.
- Software setup and administration can be cumbersome if you do not have the right people to tune the product to operate efficiently
- Data Integration product can be difficult for those who do not already have some data processing experience.
- Difficult to get some departments to buy in to using the product as they are siloed into another product.