No one can predict the exact future. You can learn about past history, observe current trends and plot some estimates but few things are not in our hands.
The perfect example would be “the office life”. The way we used to work has drastically changed when COVID-19 hit the world and work from home became the new normal.
Honestly, there has been some decline in the popularity of SAS in the market but there are many other elements to consider when discussing the future of SAS.
Almost all the organisations are either moving to or thinking about cloud solutions. On-premise solutions are expensive and outdated.
The great thing is SAS has already identified that trend and is constantly putting more efforts creating Cloud solutions. SAS Viya is just the beginning.
It would be interesting to see what are the new things they introduce to the world in machine learning, AI, and cloud solutions.
Before we deep dive into why SAS? and what is the future of SAS, let’s try to understand the history of SAS.
The History
SAS, previously known as the Statistical Analysis System, was developed in the 1970s by the North Carolina State Institute, which was later incorporated as SAS institute.
They provide complete solutions in Business Intelligence analytics and today everyone already knows the real power of data driven decisions. Almost all the companies thrive to make decisions based on data insights.
The SAS has been leading the analytics industry for more than 3-4 decades. It has been heavily used in the pharma, advertising and financial services sectors.
The SAS language is often compared with R and Python. Python is getting more and more popular though it has seen a quick decline for R language.
Where SAS stands today:
When it comes to popularity, it would be interesting to know where it stands today. As stated earlier popularity is declining in the market but still holds the importance in the market.
The TIOBE programming community index is a measure of popularity of programming languages, created and maintained by TIOBE Software BV. TIOBE stands for The Importance of Being Earnest.
As per the TIOBE index for programming languages, SAS was ranked 21st on the basis of popularity, much behind Python (1) and R (11).
Key elements to know :
Highest Position (since 2001): #11 in Mar 2007
Lowest Position (since 2001): #53 in Feb 2012
As per TIOBE’s report, apart from a spike around 2007, the popularity of SAS have had many ups and downs but didn’t go up as it was expected.
If you want to go further deep down into SAS popularity then this reputed survey by burtchworks conducted in 2021 shows a clear picture who’s is winner between SAS, R, and Python.
Though it has been noticed that popularity of SAS is high among the professionals working in the analytics industry for the last 15 years. Whereas new professionals are in favour of Python.
According to a 2020 Burtch Works report, SAS is heavily used in the industries like pharma/healthcare, finance, and advertisement.
Lastly, when they asked data scientists and analytics professionals, Which tool do you prefer to use: SAS, R, or Python?
This is what report looks like:
Is SAS dying?
Looking at the statistics, the answer is easy, Yes.
Many industry experts deny this. The real answer would be YES and NO!
As we said earlier, “popularity” is one important element to measure and take it into consideration but we can’t forget that SAS has been in the industry for the last 50+ years.
Many big companies are using SAS for analytics and machine learning and they trust SAS more than ever.
There are two major reasons SAS will be here for at least next 10, 20 years.
- Technology migration is hard
- Cloud Storm: Analytics in the cloud continues to grow
Technology migration is hard
If you have a system designed using SAS and it is up and running for the last many years and it is still functioning as “expected” then people don’t prefer to switch the technology.
It doesn’t make sense to go away from the working system just to try out different tech. You need concret reason for switching to other technology, also the cost of migration is usually very high.
Cloud Storm: Analytics in the cloud continues to grow
Almost everyone is trying to be on the cloud. They’re slowly moving their systems into the cloud and many companies are looking for cloud solutions. SAS has identified this little earlier and worked hard to build SAS Viya.
SAS is compatible with integrating Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. The Microsoft Azure cloud is the most preferred solution in the industry though to capture even more market SAS is making progress with smooth integration with AWS and Google cloud as well.
This is the most important reason why you rely on SAS and you should learn and consider your career in SAS.
That’s why you are probably seeing more job openings on LinkedIn where SAS skills are in demand.
At last there is one more thing to consider while discussing the future of SAS, that is open source integration.
SAS used to be a closed black hole for outsiders but now it is getting changed. Probably they have realised that a closed environment is a real danger to SAS.
SAS® and Open Source Integration
This is the beginning and smartest move made by SAS. SAS Viya integrates open source technology across the analytics life cycle, enabling all types of SAS and open source users to collaborate.
Open Integration Capabilities:
Combine the benefits of every technology system in your organization for model development and deployment.
Conclusion:
In our opinion SAS is not going away at least for the next decade or two. SAS can be a perfect skill set to learn and stay relevant in today’s competitive world.
There are exciting opportunities in the analytics and machine learning areas and you can literally grab those opportunities. The future of SAS is bright and not going to fade away very soon.
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Honestly, answer is yes and no, both! Popularity of SAS is getting declined in the industry though SAS foundation is very strong. Many big industry giants are using SAS and there has been some futuristic changes are getting implemented in the software suit.
SAS viya and open source integration could be the game changer for SAS.
The future of SAS is bright. SAS has made Microsoft a strategic partner to analytical solutions on Microsoft Azure cloud.
There would be many interesting features on its way towards building analytics software suit on cloud.