We've done some cost comparisons and informally gathering information with regard to SAS Viya, Power BI and Tableau. They would all cost us around $100,000. With Tableau we would probably need the server, which means we would have to buy servers so it's quite a big price difference. 

We did evaluate other options. We did look at SAP, however, we focused on SAS in the end.

Qlik, IBM Cognos, MicroStrategy, and others.

We also looked at Qlikview. It was good at visualization, but poor about prediction and forecasting features, so we chose SAS Visual Analytics.

I sell and implement this tool. The evaluation is always at the customer end.

It doesn't matter if the data is live or historical, if you have visualization and analytics skills, then Visual Analytics is the best way to project the visualization of data to vendors and clients. Because the one time you invest and gain throughout the year, there are so many other tools suchas R, Matlab, Tableau, amd Qlikview available on the market, but there are certain limitations in those.

We evaluate other softwares. We found that SAS can take data from other applications such as Salesforce and many other enterprise applications.

SAS products/licensing fees are generally higher than industry standards.

No other options were evaluated.