I would rate the initial setup a three because it is a little bit complex to implement, to stabilize the solution.

The deployment took almost nine months.

We have a team of three people to maintain this solution.

It is a visual analytics product. It used to be quite complex, but it has changed in the past years. It's getting easier and easier. Like every product that has a long-lasting history and with a supplier who is aiming at long-lasting customer relationships—meaning that a customer can rely on the software irrespective of the age of the software and will always get something new—it is something that is going to be complex in an existing environment. In newer environments or for new customers, it's easier and cheaper.

The deployment is kind of complex because we need to install many servers and establish a relationship between the servers and the database. The database part is standard, but the implementation is complex.

I wasn't around for the initial setup but we recently went through an upgrade. I expressed our need to do this quickly and efficiently, and that we had no time to waste because we were trying to get something out, and SAS assigned us a team to move things forward quickly. 

The initial setup took us about six weeks. We had capacity issues. The people dealing with it had limited resources in terms of dealing with the setup. We only had so many people that were skilled. 

I'm not sure if the process was easy or difficult, however. I never asked my colleagues for their opinion. I wasn't part of the initial implementation process. 

The initial deployment took about four days and a couple of people were involved with that. We used a third-party vendor for implementation. Visual Analytics is a complex model. If I need to make changes, I have to hire a vendor or other external help. There's no internal team able to handle the level of complexity, so we have to spend more to maintain the configurations while maintaining the audit. We have two people who deal with maintenance.

SAS Visual Analytics' deployment is straightforward. 

The deployment isn't smooth. Deploying Visual Analytics on the cloud takes a lot of work, or you can use some providers that give you SAS as a service. For example, there is a provider called SaasNow. They host SAS Visual Analytics and the license. You can buy the license and deploy it there without the hassle of installation because deploying the software isn't easy.

I deployed Visual Analytics twice. The first time I used SaasNow. That was too expensive, so I deployed it myself on Amazon Web Services. I used some instructions about a container that I can use to deploy it on Amazon Web Services. SAS provided the container, making life easier for me when I deployed it on Amazon Web Services. That made it easier to implement instead of implementing myself from scratch.

It seemed straightforward. Its implementation took about three to six months.

We haven't found the initial setup too difficult. I'd rate it three out of five. So far, the deployment has taken about two months. 

We have two or three people working on the deployment and maintenance. 

The initial setup could be improved. It's complex to use, it's not an easy-to-approach tool.

The implementation has many sections. The administrator section is very complex. The data management, it's very good, but the visualization is not good. The only complexity is the management. 

The full process took approximately five days.

The initial setup process is quite easy.

The straightforward part: Create a dashboard and calculate attributes. You don’t need programming experience using SAS Visual Analytics. You can export to Excel or PDF directly. The complex part: Creating a relationship between tables.

In terms of deployment, it is not quite a straightforward installation. It's still a little bit complex to install SAS.

That said, from a support perspective, at least, we don't have complaints. They are there and they support us throughout the process if we need assistance.  

I'm not so technical that I could comment in detail about the deployment itself. It depends on the solution that you are using from SAS. If you are just installing, for instance, the SAS Enterprise Guide or Data Integration Studio, it does not take more than one week and you are good to go. If you are installing other packages, more complex packages like Data Management and so on, it could be longer. SAS is quite a big landscape. It's difficult to comment on SAS as they are quite a generic provider. They have everything from data to campaign management. We used them a lot in the past. It's quite a big portfolio that you can install from this platform. Therefore, to properly calculate deployment times you need to find out which package you are trying to use from SAS and if there are different challenges within those implementations based on your business.

How big of a team you need for deployment also depends on the project, as we always look at it from, if we are a service provider once again, the size of the project. In a very big utility company, we need a lot of technical team members. If we are implementing SAS just for doing some ETL stuff in a small insurance company, we just need one guy, probably. It's difficult to calculate without parameters o base an estimate on.

SAS Visual Analytics is not easy to install.

This is a platform issue, but from what I understand with the SAS competitor, other on-premises installations have the same problems. These problems may be linked when we use a cloud solution. This could be the difference. This is yet another reason why Power BI over Azure is gaining popularity and is growing quickly.

Setting up SAS Visual Analytics is straightforward.

That depends on the environment. There are two different setups: Distributed and Non-distributed deployment. I cannot comment on the complexity of the installation and configuration.

Simple to set up. No issues. Fairly intuitive.

It was complex in that it took some troubleshooting and brainstorming sessions to combine all environments that we needed combined and to make all needed data available.

It was a completely new installation on a Unix server, so it was interesting and challenging, but if you have the installation documentation such the prerequisites and post-validation then you can replicate the installation in different environments.

The set up was not very straightforward as our company using a remote server that is not hosted on the company so we had to contact the server company and SAS back and forth to make sure setup is stable and ready to use.

Implementation of SAS is a very complex process. In fact, SAS employs a technician at the time of implementation and it takes about 1-2 days. There are several controls/firewalls layered throughout the process.

It's not straightforward, and proper guidance or a manual is required which is not provided by the SAS support team.