SAS

SAS has several technological advantages over its competitors paramount among them the long history of use , the amount and quality of technical support available for the SAS software , the flexibility of the product and its already having proved itself useful and reliable in a variety of applications , particularly large scale projects

Though the software is used in a huge variety of industries and applications , the field of Business Intelligence still remains a major market for the SAS Institute . The growth of the amount of data available to businesses regarding their customers , workflow

and quality control only serves to expand this cornerstone of SAS 's market . Business Intelligence has become a field no longer only of interest to the financial sector . The ability to mine data has come to be invaluable to wide range of business and the variety of tasks for which it is employed has broadened over the years (Imhoff , 2005 ,

. 1 . Economic downturns have made it more critical for corporations to carefully monitor their returns on investment and to be able to accurately determine where their money is going internally and externally (Imhoff , 2005 ,

. 1

SAS enjoys widespread acceptance for these tasks and many more which adds to its technological appeal and , thus , its competitive advantage The applications of SAS extend beyond Business Intelligence , for example , SAS has proved a powerful tool for pharmaceutical companies conducting clinical trials (Dmitrienko , 2005 ,

. i . Additionally , SAS 's website lists a plethora of corporate clientele which spans from obvious clients such as financial sector businesses to regulatory compliance and anti-money laundering applications . Clearly , SAS is an extremely flexible product . According to Larry Hatcher in Step-By-Step Basics Using SAS : Student Guide , SAS can be used in over 40 operating environments , including the ubiquitous Microsoft Windows operating system and UNIX . SAS software is installed in over 38 ,000 sites spanning 115 countries . Add to this that SAS is used by 90 of Fortune 500 companies (Hatcher , 2003 ,

. 5 ) and SAS 's technological advantages where acceptance and usability are concerned are readily apparent

The sheer power of the SAS language is an competitive advantage . SAS is able to process large quantities of data in sophisticated ways and is able to output the results of that processing with extreme flexibility Because the practice of statistics can sometimes make insignificant relationships between numbers seem vastly more important than they may actually be , SAS allows programmers to work with their data in ways that make the results more useful and revealing , a paramount concern for the businesses that employ the technology . SAS allows , among other things predictive analysis , the analysis of trends based on historical data the measurement and analysis functions necessary for quality control and numerical modeling (Stein . This sort of flexibility and the capacity to produce results that are precisely tailored to the needs of the user are obviously attractive aspects of the product

The technology market is one where constant innovation , or the lack thereof , can be the make or break...