It is 30 years since Jim Goodnight and John Sall founded a company called SAS Institute (now simply SAS) and built it to a £1.7bn turnover on the ideals of excellence in software development and best practice in people management.
Through those years, Goodnight has kept a fierce hold on a company that has become a byword for prodigious application development. It now numbers its software products in the hundreds, covering areas like the financial sector, government applications and CRM as well as the core business intelligence (BI) market.
Last week, ZDNet UK caught up with Goodnight in Geneva at the company's annual forum and asked him about the next version of the core SAS software suite, the future for applications development, and his plans, or lack of them, for life after SAS.
You will only release software when it is ready. Other companies have a different approach. Do you have any advice for them?
Well, Microsoft is a monopoly, they can do what the hell they want to. The consumer doesn't really have a choice so there is no incentive for Microsoft to make any changes in the way they operate.
I think, to some extent, that Oracle is getting to that perch in the database business. Yet there is a lot of movement in the database business with open source software. We use one called Firebird. They should do something about it.
We had an experience when we were thinking about going public and our consultants said that we needed to get off SAS for our internal ERP work because it is just not a recognised brand and they suggested Oracle. It was Ernst and Young and we spent three or four years and $10m and it was just outrageous. And in the release (of Oracle) that we were working on there were over 10,000 bugs. That's horrible.
Is that a good reason not to make SAS a publicly quoted company -- because the software doesn't work?
Well it works now. I am only using that as an example but I am sure that Oracle ships a lot of buggy software. You know -- the customer knows -- that a new release means lots of bugs, lots of problems. But that's not what it should mean and not what it means from us. It really upsets me that CIOs of the world have in their mindset that they don't want to mess with a new release because it's full of bugs.We did not give customers that impression. It's the other vendors, like Oracle and Microsoft, that have given software a bad name.
Talkback
Having several years experience in SAS, been involved in beta-testing of several SAS products and in migration to SAS 9 revolution, I was really amazed by some of the Jim's declarations.
First of all I want to point out that I will give my reactions about the BI solution provided by SAS, not the SAS Base product.
I never ever saw such a buggy and such a badly packaged application.
To illustrate my opinion, I am taking 3 simple examples:
1) Classes subject to change in released products
2) Entreprise Guide (EG) 4.1 installation.
3) Service Pack (SP) 4 Upgrade to Entreprise BI Server
1) Classes subject to change in released products
simply go to: http://support.sas.com/rnd/gendoc/bi/api/Portal/com/sas/webapp/contextsharing/RequestActionMenuData.html
2) I recently bought a new portable, running XP SP2. When trying to install EG3, it fails saying my version of MFC Shared Library was not up to date. Indeed, EG3 requires version 7.0 or higher ... and the version on my laptop is 7.1 ... moreover, the 7.0 version is also available on my laptop. To avoid the problem, I had to install EG4.1 that I had to order. Unfortunately, EG4.1 requires the recently SP4 to be installed on server components.
3) So we decided to apply the SP4 on our server products. We downloaded the SP4 from the SAS support site and read the installations instructions from http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/biupgrade/bi_31_upgrade.pdf
Reading the document, you will rapidly understand you have first to remove any previous client installation and to install newer version of them ... strange step for a simple Service Pack upgrade ... to install newer version of client products ... but you don't have them and you can't find them on the SAS web site ... so you have to order them...
Well I am not going further here, just wanted to give some hints on how I found Jim to be knowledgeless of the quality level of products his company is delivering ... not that different from Oracle, Microsoft and others.
Finally, what about a SAS/Access to Firebird ??? :-)
I fully share your opinion Pascal, we are exactly facing similar problems.
We developed a Java Web Based application on top of SAS Entreprise BI Server and we used some SAS classes marked as stable in the documentation we get with the installation medias... if you now look at the same classes on the SAS web site, they are flagged "Subject to Change" ...
We are also busy with the Service Pack 4 installation for SAS 9.1.3 ... well, it looks we better have to speak about a migration to SP4. We are busy with this since several days ...we called SAS yesterday to get all the needed Medias regarding our installation, in addition to the SP4 download available on the SAS web site ... we received 9 CDs ... none of them contains the components we need most ... so we have to ask for additional medias ... We will have by the way more than 10 CDs to apply on an installation that initially requires about the same amount of medias. Do we better have to speak about a new release ???
Compared to the "effort" we have to put in the SP1 installation for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and its BI clients, it becomes really ridiculous. Including download time and installation procedures, it took us not more than 30 minutes to have it done ...
Forget to add this in my post:
It becomes unacceptable for us to apply so heavy procedures on our production environment ... and what will we be facing with the so called next release (SAS 9.2) ?