Thanks to all for the participation. Unfortunately I cannot afford to visit the global forums like Innovate etc. hence would be dependent on announcements and articles about the proceedings in these events.
I was aware of the IPO readiness but under the impression that IPO would be launched in 2024. Now if it has been pushed to 2025, then that is quite disappointing for me I must say.
Getting the academic students having a lot more exposure to SAS is the need of the hour, and if the backlogs in this category are not addressed then the future students might not be knowing/just be having a bare idea about SAS in their academic years . Surely the Open source softwares have come a long way and I had been seeing the use of Open source Analytics in Life sciences and Banking & Financial services which were supposed to be bastions of SAS. Add to that the the very impactful influence of Cloud providers and technologies like Databricks , Google BigQuery adding to the pain of SAS. The footprint of SAS is not observed that much in the promising domain of Data management(including Data integration, Data catalog etc.)
The AML, Fraud softwares provided from SAS appear to be good but these are niche areas and the SAS ecosystem cannot be dependent on few niche areas. Now that the problems of the SAS ecosystem are clear and evident and also facing falling market share can the following points be addressed?
I really hope that the decision makers of SAS ecosystem take a look at this post and do the needful things very swiftly
a) Increase the exposure of SAS to Academic students to a great level including sponsoring events, hackathons etc events and organizing other learning events
b) The IPO should be made ready at the earliest possible and the license/new procurement costs need to be decreased by a drastic amount
c) Improving the features of the SAS technologies and applications wherever applicable to make it a very attractive option for the Decision makers at the Business side.
d) get involved in Open source more, create utilities /sub-softwares etc. to have a broad reach. A notable issue with the SAS ecosystem is that there are not any mechanisms to import packages and run . Can this be introduced with creation of Multiple SAS packages( for the various algorithms and techniques) and providing the flexibility to the users to import the packages from SAS repository, install and run codes/workflows?
e) Improve /build applications for the data management domain to make SAS offerings an attractive option for the Decision makers of the Business.
f) Other Business domains like retail, telecom etc. need to be thoroughly explored with an aim of increasing the the relevance and acceptance of SAS.
g) Identify other new growth areas like geospatial analytics, creating query languages of SAS for geospatial analysis, finding use cases in cybersecurity domain, and if law allows, then aggressively work on GenAI, LLM domain.
h) Identify how SAS can be used in areas of Quantum machine learning, Quantum finance.
I am a very long term user and proponent of SAS ecosystem and it is very disturbing for me to see that SAS ecosystem getting side-lined gradually. Even though I have increased my expertise in Open source and Cloud technologies, but I would always prefer to have SAS as my primary skillset in short as well as long run of my career. Hence I would be very grateful and satisfied if the needful actions are taken by the stakeholders and bring SAS softwares and technologies regain position under the limelight.
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