A lot of people don't see the difference between business process management (BPM) and business intelligence (BI) software. What's your take on the difference?
In the past, BI has represented just the creation of reports. BPM has been a dashboard of KPIs (key performance indicators).We like to use the BPM as a sort of overview of all the KPIs and then we let you drill down and go into the BI reports. They really belong together. They are still two different pieces of software but that ability to start with the performance monitoring and then being able to drill down is the way to do it.
I share my dashboard with most of the managers in the company, so when we are doing really well and the revenues are really good they know when to come over and ask. The company knows what profitability and revenue levels we are shooting for and they can try and do their share.
Can you talk about the next release of SAS?
The next release is System 9.2, set for some time around March next year. We set development targets but we can't ship the product until it is finished. It has to be ready. We don't ship until the bugs are out.
We are doing a couple of things. One is "cascading prompts". That requires a lot of changes in a lot of software. The major releases are when we try and get all of the features that we can into the basic system. Multi-threading is part of that too. This is becoming more prevalent with dual-core and later this year, quad-core processors.
I was at a meeting when Scott McNealy pulled a chip right out of his pocket and said, "Jim, guess how many cores are in there?" Not four, not eight -- 16 CPUs, right there on that one chip. So we have that kind of power, but we won't be able to take advantage of it.
SAS, like all other programs, is written so that only one processor is working. Like all others they are written sequentially, so the software does one block and then moves to the next block.
How do you take an existing program that is written sequentially like that and spread it over multiple processors? Well, one way is you can break up the input into four different input streams and let each processor do exactly the same thing to each one of those input streams. Another way is pipelining. Take those same sequential blocks of code and get them to one thread. We can distribute the blocks but they still have to execute sequentially.
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) ?