SAS

Last Updated: 17th January 2017
Analyst Coverage: Philip Howard

SAS Institute, more commonly known just as SAS, is headquartered in North Carolina, and was founded in 1976. The company started life by offering the SAS System, a 4GL-based statistical package for financial and economic analysis, but the company has since expanded to offer a multi-faceted product set providing organisations with a complete information delivery system. This includes data warehousing, business analysis and analytical intelligence. In fact, the company provides all aspects of business intelligence functionality, except the hardware, for which SAS teams with partners: hardware vendors and systems integrators. In recent years the company has concentrated in developing vertically specific analytic solutions. The company has offices throughout the world.

Since its foundation SAS has expanded in an organic manner. However, that doesn’t mean that it has eschewed acquisitions altogether and, with particular reference to data governance and associated technologies, the company acquired DataFlux in 2000. DataFlux operated as an independent subsidiary of SAS for the following decade but has now been folded into SAS proper.

One final point to note about SAS is that it consistently invests a significant proportion of its revenues into R&D. Currently, this stands at around 25%. This emphasis on R&D, plus the company’s refusal to listen to the blandishments of the stock market (where short-term trends are more important than long-term profits), has meant that today SAS is, by some margin, the largest independent vendor to specialise in the business intelligence market.

Company Info

Telephone: 1-800-727-0025

Company Links

DataFlux

Last Updated: 29th January 2013

What it does

The SAS solution in the data discovery and profiling space is part of the SAS DataFlux Data Management Platform. DataFlux started life as a data quality vendor but, after it was acquired by SAS, has expanded its capabilities to include data integration (including both ETL and data virtualisation/federation), master data management and complex event processing along with a business glossary (see other SAS product pages). The company has been active in the data governance space for some years. Until recently it has acted as an independent subsidiary of SAS but that has now changed, with the brand now having been taken directly within the SAS umbrella. This will be good for SAS customers but will likely mean that the company loses traction as an independent vendor looking for sales in non-SAS accounts. Given the quality of the product this is unfortunate.

The DataFlux Data Management Platform is arguably the leading product in the market in technical terms and is certainly a leading product. It is especially strong in its technical competency for both profiling and profiling combined with discovery. In particular, DataFlux has very strong support for users, both at a business and technical level.

Markets and channels

Historically, DataFlux has had a broad focus across industry sectors and across organisation sizes. SAS, on the other hand, is well-known for focusing on the top end of the market. It is common when companies are absorbed like this that the parent company will continue to claim that the relevant products will be marketed independently but in practice that never happens: salespeople prefer low hanging fruit and that is the existing client base. For all intents and purposes therefore we expect DataFlux sales to be concentrated on the SAS user base. This is also likely to mean that companies that are otherwise non-SAS users may move to other platforms in the fullness of time.

SAS has a rich partner program but it is difficult to isolate partners that are specific to Dataflux data profiling/discovery.

Users

Customer numbers are measured in terms of thousands though how many of these are using profiling/discovery as opposed to other elements of the Data Management Platform is not clear. In any case it will be a significant number and many of these are household names.

Technology

Data profiling and discovery is a part of the DataFlux Data Management Platform, which is an integrated (truly integrated) platform with common metadata across the entire suite. It runs under Windows, Linux and AIX. JDBC and ODBC are supported and there are native drivers for Greenplum, DB2, Informix, MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, SQL Server and SAP Sybase. However, there are no facilities for supporting non-normalised data such as Oracle nested tables. On the other hand, COBOL copybooks are supported; along with text files; XML; and spreadsheets; as well as Hadoop and Hive.

Services

SAS is a major worldwide organisation with offices all around the globe. DataFlux thus enjoys the consulting, support and training capabilities that one would expect from a company of the size of SAS.

SAS Risk Management for Insurance

Last Updated: 13th March 2013

What it does

SAS is one of very few companies that can provide both the data governance and risk management capabilities necessary to support a Solvency II solution. Of course, you could implement either part of this solution separately but addressing the whole problem with technology and support from a single vendor is likely to prove a winning combination.

Markets and channels

SAS in general has a wide customer base across all industry sectors but, of course, we are here concerned with the insurance sector. Here, as well as in other markets, the company tends to focus on the largest companies.

Users

Overall, SAS has thousands of customers. Relatively few Solvency II case studies are listed on the SAS web site but we suspect (actually we know) that this as much to do with organisations not wanting their names to be known as anything else. It is also a result of these case studies being specifically linked to the company's risk management solution and not also to its data governance.

Technology

To support Solvency II regulations you need both risk management and data governance to ensure that the data is timely, accurate and as complete as possible. You also need data governance because you need to be able to prove that you are actually using the relevant models to support your business, so you need some sort of monitoring capability.

The headline SAS product supporting Solvency II is SAS Risk Management for Insurance which includes features to support firm-wide risk (calculation of Pillar I requirements), market risk management, P&C underwriting risk, life underwriting risk, risk data management and risk reporting (Pillar 2 and 3 requirements). Relevant data models are included in the product along with relevant ETL (extract, transform and load) capabilities to support the creation of relevant data marts for analytic purposes.

The data governance aspect of Solvency II compliance is provided by the SAS DataFlux Data Management Platform. This is a an integrated suite of products, built on top of a single infrastructure (so this is truly integrated and not a bunch of acquisitions that have been bolted together) that provides data profiling, data cleansing, data enrichment, ETL and other data integration options, and, for those that require it, master data management. The platform also provides specific facilities to support data stewards and data governance processes.

Services

SAS, as one might expect, provides all the services one could wish for and it also has a number of systems integrators as partners, such as Accenture, Capgemini and Deloitte Consulting, who can also provide relevant services.

What's Innovative?

What's Changed?

Where's The Value?

Calling a spade a spade

Solutions

The company offers the following solutions:

DataFlux
SAS Risk Management for Insurance

Downloads and Further Information

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