In an advanced analytics market that analysts claim is growing by more than 30% YOY, SAS is falling behind with revenue growth of 1.25% in 2017, 0.93% in 2018. That’s likely to go negative in 2019 after the worst half year in SAS’s history. Internally, the company feels like it’s dying.
Monopolies rarely foresee the end of their dominance and often assist in their own demise by burning customer bridges over the years. SAS is no different. Many C Level IT and Data Executives were once mid-level managers who experienced SAS’s vendor lock-in tactics and mediocre support. These individuals are now making sure they don’t get fooled again with concerted efforts to minimise the use of SAS’s proprietary language and tools within their organisations. In Australia this can be seen with the significant drop in the number of “Beacon Accounts” (SAS’s largest customers) in Banking and Utilities, as well as significant licensing losses in government and telecommunications over the past year.
The differentiators that once made SAS the analytics company of choice have been whittled away by competitors and the open source community. Delays in the release of the long overdue SAS platform replacement called Viya provided the time competitors needed to close the capability gap. Viya is here now and it’s not that it’s bad – it’s just that after 4+ years in development, Viya still doesn’t have all the functionality of “old SAS” and frequently what was developed on “old SAS” (e.g. reports, dashboards and model projects) is not backwardly compatible. Not to mention, Viya’s hardware footprint is massive, which pushes SAS’s total cost of ownership beyond that of competitors. To stay current on SAS, customers are forced to rip and replace SAS for SAS and this has opened the door to more cost-effective and customer-friendly alternatives such as Python, R, Knime, Spark, Databricks, Tableau, Microsoft… The list goes on. Furthermore, SAS’s solutions in Risk, Fraud and Compliance have been frozen in time waiting on Viya with few, if any, upgrades for a number of years. When they eventually are made available on Viya, customers should expect to rip and replace their existing SAS solution making competitive solutions based open standards and not proprietary tools even more attractive.
Monopolies are generally cash rich and thus happy places, but often lack quality management. The move for SAS into a non-monopolistic position can not only be seen in the fall in revenue growth but in employee satisfaction as well. SAS’s rankings in Fortune’s ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’ list has plummeted from 4th to 8th to 15th to 37th to 60th between 2015 and 2019. A simple forecast puts SAS out of the top 100 Great Places to work by 2021. In Australia, rumours abound about employees making complaints to HR regarding bullying and harassment by managers and directors where there was no action taken by the company and the employee left shortly after making their complaint. Good employees go first and at SAS there is an exodus, leaving behind those hanging on and hoping retirement comes before SAS’s doors close.
