SAS does everything analytics. This is true of predictive analytics and the company provides many technology options for those who want to build predictive models and deploy them, and it also provides a wide range of analytics solutions.
The list of products SAS can supply would be too tedious to duplicate and can be found here. They fall into a number of categories including Data Mining, Statistical Analysis, Forecasting, Text Analysis and Optimization and Simulation. The main tool used for building predictive models is SAS Enterprise Miner, and tools are also provided to manage deploy and monitor analytical models – an important component that is almost totally missing in many other platforms.
So on the plus side SAS provides almost every tool imaginable and has pretty good deployment and management aids. As always with SAS the rub is the price. It could probably be argued that we get what we pay for, but SAS is not the only extensive analytics toolkit on the market, and the rancor that often manifests between the SAS and R (an open software analytics platform) communities betrays the fact that R is a fairly strong competitor – and it is free.
Make no mistake, SAS is the foundation stone of analytics in many large corporations and will stay that way for the time being. But it would do well to consider supplying cut down versions of its products at a cut down price for organizations that do not need every single analytical method known to man.
The performance issues that plagued SAS are currently being addressed, and SAS 9.4 did much to accommodate in-memory processing and multi-threaded execution. But in reality many other products have done this for a while. In summary SAS is a safe bet if your needs are extensive and advanced, otherwise it might be best to shop around.