Item: SAS Enterprise Miner
Rating: 10
Author: Thomas Young

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SAS Miner is used across the organization. The software is used for two main purposes. First, SAS Enterprise Miner is perhaps the most useful software in the world for ensemble modeling. Second, SAS Enterprise Miner makes producing reproducible models in an efficient structure about as easy as it can get.

Pros and Cons

Developing and evaluating ensemble models.
A very transparent interface.

SAS Enterprise Miner is far from the fastest software out there
Integrating SAS Enterprise Miner with other software tools is not easy.

Return on Investment

SAS Enterprise Miner is a positive ROI in the sense that it saves a ton of time coding.
SAS Enterprise Miner is a negative ROI in that it's expensive, and perhaps makes analysts brainless.

Alternatives Considered

TIBCO Spotfire, SAS Advanced Analytics and Amazon Kinesis Analytics

For those that are used to the SAS ecosystem, SAS Enterprise Miner is a massive move in the right direction. It makes doing analytics much more enjoyable. It is more user-friendly than Spotfire or Kinesis and seems to produce better results overall. SAS Enterprise Miner seems to be written by analysts for analysts.

Support Rating

SAS' customer support used to be non-existent many years ago. Today, contacting SAS customer support is great. They are responsible, knowledgable, and seem to have an interest in getting the results right the first time. With that said, Enterprise Miner's online support is weak, probably because the user base is much smaller than other tools.

Key Insights

Do you think SAS Enterprise Miner delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SAS Enterprise Miner's feature set?

Yes

Did SAS Enterprise Miner live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SAS Enterprise Miner go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SAS Enterprise Miner again?

Yes

Other Software Used

TIBCO Spotfire, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, QlikView, Tableau Desktop, Mitel MiCollab, Microsoft Azure

Likelihood to Recommend

SAS Enterprise Miner is world-class software for individuals interested in developing reproducible models in a reasonable amount of time. Perhaps the most useful part of SAS Enterprise Miner is the ability to compare models with other models without writing code. The ensemble modeling capabilities is the easiest way to do ensemble modeling I have come across. SAS Enterprise Miner is well-suited for beginning to advanced analysts who know something about advanced analytics. The software is not well-suited for analysts or companies that have little interest in advanced modeling.

SAS Enterprise Miner is my favorite modeling software. Does the job well.

Overall Satisfaction with SAS Enterprise Miner