SAS Enterprise Guide vs. SAS Enterprise Miner

For writing out longer code creation for shaping data on complicated reports, the clean UI is helpful. If exploring data though, SAS Studio would be better suited given its easier interface for GUI graph building.

Incentivized

Text Miner option is very useful to uncover trending themes in very large data sets.

Incentivized

• It can load a huge amount of data as compared to R Studio and Excel.
• Data processing speed is very fast, millions of records are loaded into this software very easily and data manipulation is also very easy.
• Inbuilt Statistical functions and procedures make it very comfortable to use for non analytics professionals as well.

• Developing and evaluating ensemble models.
• A very transparent interface.

Incentivized

• I would like to see advance interactions with external databases to be able to kill ongoing queries from SAS. As of now, you can stop pretty much any ongoing process besides the one running on a remote database (killing SAS/EG doesn't stop the remote process)
• When creating prompts for programs, it would be nice to be able to have conditional prompts (based on the selection of other prompts). The prompts are clearly a recent feature and constantly under development but I wish it would be more powerful.
• More of a SAS metadata issue but when loading SAS/EG (first connection to the server), it takes a few seconds which feels like a long time. I really don't understand why the initialization of the session can take so long. Don't get me wrong, this has no real impact on productivity but that 10s delay just feels really like eternity when you want to run some code in a new session.

• One of the major flaws is that the tool is basically an interface to SAS/STAT code. It generates code in the background and runs it. Because of that, some errors are warning might be a little difficult to understand for users who aren't proficient with SAS code.
• R integration is nice but I would like to see the possibility to integrate even more statistical models different than SAS. That would allow for better performance optimization when really required.
• The light client is java based and a little heavy on the OS. It would be nice to get a web-based version of the tool instead of the java one.

Incentivized

On account of current user experience and the organization-wide acceptance.

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.

Incentivized

Although I use SAS support for information on functions, these are SAS related and haven't really come across anything that is specifically for SAS EG.

Incentivized

I have contacted SAS twice in the past year and they have been super responsive both times. They solved my problem. I am also registered for an in-person class next month and they called today to tell me that it will be an online-only session. They apologized for the change and registered me for the online version. Super helpful!

Incentivized

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.

Python-based platforms like Pandas or Spark are very good too at displaying data and do exploratory analysis. I definitely prefer them to SAS EG. It's just too slow, and doesn't let you peek into the data very easily. Lots of clicking, and I'd rather just write some code, rather do clicking.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Faster decision making, through powerful big data handling functionalities.
• Faster operations on daily basis, once the project tree is built, unskilled personnel can use it in their daily operation.
• Don’t need to choose SAS EG if you are not going to be handling big data. (such as over 1 million rows and 50 columns)
• You need skilled personnel to build the initial project tree.

Incentivized

• It has a positive ROI to our business, as our sales lead rate increased after we started recommending SAS EM.
• Our business operation numbers improved after we introduced SAS EM and started using predictive analytics for our customer retention and customer chain prediction.
• The statistical modelling for the risk controls in our financial department helped to reduce the related residual risk.

Incentivized