Users get say on where SAS ploughs back its 45% of revenues earmarked for development
A record 800 users turned out to SEUGI ’91, the ninth annual conference of the SAS European Users Group International, held last week in Amsterdam. SAS user conferences are more significant than most user meetings, since SAS prides itself on listening to its users and being guided in development by their requests and, since 45% of SAS revenues are ploughed back into research and development, users have a lot to gain by attending the conferences and participating in the annual SASware ballot. In addition to SEUGI, user meetings are held locally each year, in Belgium, Finland, France West Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, The Netherlands, the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. SAS Institute Inc, based in Cary, North Carolina, is a private software house which developed the SAS System, an information delivery system for executives. In 1990, the company turned over $240m in 1990, showing a growth of 17% on the previous year. In Europe, sales were up 30% at the equivalent of $73m the UK, for its part, contributed UKP10m. SAS has 2m users worldwide and 85,000 product installations, 26,000 of which are in Europe. Some 8,200 SAS Systems are hosted in the IBM mainframe environment, 3,800 in the DEC VAX environment, 1,500 in the Unix environment, and 150,000 are running on personal computers under OS/2 and MS-DOS. The European division of SAS Institute, headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, chose SEUGI ’91 as the venue to launch SAS System version 6.07.
Answering again the perennial question yes but what exactly is SAS System?
The SAS System, as described in detail in January issue 1,581 of Computergram, is a data access, management, presentation and analysis system. The system started life as a Statistical Analysis System, hence the acronym SAS. This component of the package still very much exists, but is now only one part of a multi-faceted data-to-information transformation system. The SAS System now includes around 125 built-in applications grouped into logical, modular components, providing capabilities for data entry, access and management, executive information information systems, application development, report-writing, graphics, statistical and mathematical analysis, business forecasting and modelling, quality control, project management and computer performance evaluation. It is the executive information management component of the package that SAS Institute is eager to promote now, feeling that this aspect of SAS has to date suffered from a lack of publicity. SAS Software (UK) Ltd’s Steve Darbyshire points out that his company doesn’t market a shrink-wrapped executive information system, but rather provides a way for users to develop their own customised systems. As for data access, SAS’ Multivendor Architecture means that the system can access data from a variety of sources. Transparent data access is enabled via SAS/Access interface software products – in version 6, interfaces were available to DB2, dBase, OS/2, Database Manager, DIF files, Oracle, Prime Information, Rdb/VMS, SQL/DS and System 2000 Data Management Software. With the new release 6.07, interfaces link to IMS/VS, Adabas and CA-Datacom/DB on MVS, and Ingres on VMS. In addition to its data delivery capabilities, SAS provides a development environment for users to design their own customised executive information systems – the SAS System itself has been developed over the years using SAS. The current implementation is written in C, but SAS has a team of developers looking at the possible benefits of writing future versions of the software in C++. Meanwhile, object-oriented techniques are now available to SAS users for the first time through a new SAS/EIS software development module which sits on top of the SAS System.
Interest growing in the executive information system side of the product
According to John Kane, management consultant with Price Waterhouse, SAS’ presence is growing noticeably. Kane’s clients are mainly blue-chip companies with predominantly IBM
, DEC and Pyramid hardware environments. These users, he says, seem especially interested in the executive information system side, especially as SAS is cheaper than competitive products such as Comshare’s Commander Pilot, and Pilot Software’s Pilot system these can cost UKP200,000 each, compared with SAS’ UKP70,000. SAS is confident that it will sell at least 1,000 of the new executive information system software licences in the first year, becoming the market leader. Another plus point for SAS, according to Price Waterhouse’s John Kane, is that it is an integrated product line, with graphics and spreadsheets all running together. On the downside, however, he continued, competitive products seem to be ahead of SAS with their broadened penetration and their focus on the pharmaceutical industry. Price Waterhouse has noted, though, the increasing occurrence of clients dissatisfaction with their existing information systems. Kane cited a Belgian electronics company that uses IBM’s SLR menu-driven tool for monitoring computer usage – the company bought this system as a matter of course, being an IBM site, but now regrets not examining its options and choosing SAS System. This, he says, is happening more and more.
Creeping up on the ICL base by stealth
As to whether SAS will be adapted for the ICL VME environment, Steve Darbyshire suggested that SAS had approched ICL Plc, but that ICL had not seemed overtly willing to co-operate with the porting process. As SAS will support Sparc-compatible environments, the system will automatically support Unix System V.4 on the DRS 6000 and the DRS 3000.
