SAS takes on major competitors in BI and data integration `bake offs`

It is one thing to talk about how favourably SAS compares to its competitors, but it`s quite another thing to actually prove it in a head-to-head competition. Two teams from SAS did just that at the recent The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) conference, in San Diego, California.

During the conference, industry thought leaders Cindi Howson and Mark Madsen hosted a pair of classes intended to educate attendees on how to evaluate business intelligence (BI) and data integration vendors. Each of the classes included market and product overviews followed by a competition in which top vendors participated in an extensive head-to-head demonstration. Class attendees were individuals currently involved in BI or data integration initiatives.

* Competition: Business Objects/SAP, Cognos/IBM.
* SAS team: Justin Choy from the Global Technology Practice, Tammi Kay George from Product Marketing.
* Challenge: Show competitive advantage in several areas, including overall company positioning, primary BI product positioning, query capabilities, OLAP, dashboards and administration. The SAS team also highlighted JMP and SAS integration.
* Evaluation: The SAS BI team beat the overall vendor average of 3.98 by receiving a 4.21 average rating (on a five-point scale) for its ability to demonstrate the software and answer questions. Nineten respondents said their impression of SAS`s BI solution improved; three said it stayed the same; none said it worsened.

* Competition: Business Objects/SAP, Oracle.
* SAS team: Ken Hausman from Product Marketing, Eric Hunley from Product Management.
* Challenge: In a proof-of-concept format, demonstrate data extraction and integration capabilities in a variety of complex scenarios.
* Evaluation: Competitors were not rated, but Hausman and Hunley received more questions than did the other vendors. The SAS team was the only data integration team to run an error-free job during the class. They successfully demonstrated job management capabilities that Madsen said only a few vendors could offer.

* More information

In both challenges, even the competition was impressed. The other BI vendors commented that SAS BI "is looking very good". According to Hausman, the SAS data integration team "received kudos from the other vendors, attendees and [Madsen] on our new GUI and how well we met the proof-of-concept challenges". Read the full SWW news article for full coverage of the event, including comments from attendees.