How does SAS latest Data Management products stand in comparison to the following ....

[AhmedAl_Attar]

Hi there,

I wanted to know How does SAS latest Data Management products stand in comparison to the following

- https://www.trifacta.com/products/wrangler/  (Commercial - Free) vs. SAS Visual Data Preparation (SAS Viya)?
- https://cloud.google.com/dataprep/ (Hosted)

- https://kylo.io/index.html  (Open Source - Free) vs. SAS Data Management Advanced?

Thanks,

Ahmed

[SAS-Dan]

Ahmed,

Thank you for your question.  I'm not in marketing or sales, so forgive me if this doesn't sound polished!

All of the offerings you listed have their pros and cons.  Making a feature-by-feature comparison isn't likely going to really answer your question, so I'll take a different tack.  

Two points.  1) Platform, and 2) Products

The SAS platform is an important part of our offerings.  Yes, lots of companies have platforms.  Ours is predicated on the notion that there is a flow to discovering data, getting it ready, analyzing it, and coming up with the insight (and confidence!) people need to change their business for the better.  The capabilities on this platform (like preparation and analytics) are purpose-built to work together.  And they cater to many types of people with different skill sets; from occasional user to expert.

The SAS platform is a powerhouse.  Multiple parallel processing, in-memory processing, in-database processing - everything need to process huge amounts of data into actionable information.  It's great to see a customer Prepare a huge dataset, then click right over to Analytics and start investigating and visualizing data without long waits.  Plus we can run in a public or private could, on-prem, or hybrid.

Our Exploration and Data Preparation offerings are very compelling against the competition.  Plus, we add Governance, which for anyone worrying about the dissemination of personal information, this is a really good thing.  And of course, SAS Analytics - we do it better than anyone.  

We're not open source, and, yes, we do charge a fair price for our products.  Helps us make R&D investments so we can continue to make better products.

Finally, SAS has notoriety as a trustworthy partner.  And that comes from having an unparralled depth of experience and a driving interest in building products that you find valuable.  This community is just one example - these discussions guide us, validate us, and tells us what customers like or dislike.

I hope this gives you some insight!

Thanks,

Dan

[AhmedAl_Attar]

Hi Dan,

Thank you for taking the time to put together this nice answer. For the sake of continuing this technical dialog and avoiding the marketing hypes , let me properly introduce myself.

I'm and ex-SAS employee and a SAS solution patent holder. So I know all very well what SAS is and the Platform it provides along with all it features and capabilities. But with that said, I sincerely hope SAS Institute along with its Products Management and R&D arms don't lay back on the 40+ years reputations they have built so far. It's very dangerous strategy!    

Not sure if you had a chance to review any of the links to the products I had listed in my original post, but

- Trifacta - Wrangler : This company created a software application back in 2014 for analysts to explore, transform, and enrich raw data into clean and structured formats. Utilizing techniques in machine learning, data visualization, human-computer interaction, and parallel processing for non-technical users to prepare data for a variety of business processes such as analytics. I believe this product originally ran on top of Hadoop, and over the time, new iterations/versions and editions were developed.

In March 2017, Google announced the launch of Cloud Dataprep, a service for users to clean up their data sets before pushing it into a service like Google’s BigQuery managed data warehousing service. The software is an embedded version of Trifacta’s Wrangler Enterprise app.

- Kylo was developed by Think Big (a Teradata company) and released under the Apache 2.0 license. Kylo is a feature-rich data lake platform built on Apache Hadoop and Spark. It provides a turn-key, business-friendly, data lake solution enabling self-service data ingest, data preparation, and data discovery.
Kylo’s web application layer offers features oriented to business users, including data analysts, data stewards, data scientists, and IT operations personnel. Kylo integrates best practices around metadata capture, security, and data quality. Furthermore, Kylo provides a flexible data processing framework (leveraging Apache NiFi) for building batch or streaming pipeline templates, and for enabling self-service features without compromising governance requirements.

As you can see, all the benefits and capabilities of the SAS platform can easily be achieved with these newer, cheaper, easier to install, and launch on a public or private could, on-prem, or hybrid. With commercial companies standing behind these products and advancing their adoptions within their customer base.

My main objective from this discussion, is to make SAS Institute aware, if they were not already, of the amount of advancements, features and capabilities offered by such software packages and how they are promoted by SAS's technology partners. 

Best regards,

Ahmed

[SAS-Dan]

Ahmed,

Thanks for bringing this up and explaining a bit further. Yes, we keep track of the crowding market spanning analytics, data management, and more. Our customers, in part, help drive the direction of products and services. Technology is another part, and the prevalence of cloud apps (or hybrid scenarios), AI and ML, and data storage tech has helped guide our Viya offering as well. I can say there’s no resting on past success here. I hope you continue to follow SAS’ development through channels like this nurturing community.

Regards,

Dan