Enterprise Guide vs Business Intelligence

[aha123]

I am a long-time SAS programmer but new to SAS Enterprise Guide and Business Intelligence. Could anyone explain to me what is the relationship between two? Is Enterprise Guide part of Business Intelligence? Or they are separate products.

[LinusH]

Business Intelligence is not a product, rather an area of tools and methods for support decision making.
SAS has two bundles that they call BI Server and Enterprise BI Server, see sas.com for description of these bundles.
Enterprise Guide is tool which is a part of these bundles.

/Linus

[aha123]

Can I say SAS Enterprise Guide is a comparable product SAS Inc created to compete with SAP's Business Objects?

[LinusH]

I have no real world experience with BO, but I feel confident enough to say no.
BO has also a variety of tools. One might say that you could compare SAS Enterprise BI Server with BO. I don't think that BO has any tool that is directly comparable with Enterprise Guide. They have something called Desktop Intelligence, but it requires a experienced person to really tell how these products can be compared.

/Linus

[aha123]

My company uses BO. But to me, BO is for managers or non-analysts. It only allows users to create simple reports. It is very lacking in terms of capabilities of generating more sophisticated data analysis or reporting. After reading some online articles, it seems to me that EG provides the similar functionalities as BO does: just make it easier for general users to create simple reports. Unfortunately, my company doesn't have budget to buy EG, so I only can guess.

[ChrisHemedinger]

SAS Enterprise Guide is a productivity tool for SAS users on all levels, from novices to advanced programmers. As such, it is often used by companies that have SAS BI solutions as well as other SAS solutions. It's also used by lots of "standalone" SAS users.

SAS Enterprise Guide first shipped in 1999, predating the big "BI" buzz and any formal BI solutions from SAS. It complements the SAS BI offering but it isn't *the offering* itself. The main SAS BI offering also includes SAS Web Report Studio, the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office, and several other clients and foundation technologies that can benefit enterprise users.

I'm not an expert on the competitive offerings from other companies. I'm told that other companies don't really have anything quite like SAS Enterprise Guide. I take that as a positive comment for SAS. 🙂

Chris

[SusanJ516_sas]

Please see the overview of business intelligence in this document:
SAS 9.2 Intelligence Platform: Overview(http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/biov/63145/HTML/default/viewer.htm#titlepage.htm).
Also, the resources on the support site's "Enterprise BI Server" Product page might be helpful to you:
http://support.sas.com/software/products/entbiserver/

[boschy]

I'll chip in the comment that 'business intelligence' (whatever that means this week) depends strongly on having your data organised properly. I find that this point is rarely mentioned when discussing BI solutions.

BI software is not a magic bullet. It's a presentation layer that delivers data that's already been processed and massaged by custom-written, and usually very complex, programs, in SAS or some other language. So...

source system --> data warehouse --> data mart --> logic report view (e.g. information map) --> BI presentation via report, cubes, dashboard

I wouldn't call Enterprise Guide a business intelligence tool. Rather, it's part of a suite of SAS software products that together can deliver 'business intelligence', but not without a lot of work done on the data first.