It�s Very Early in the Game for SAS Social Media Analytics

The flash and splash of last week's SAS Social Media Analytics (SMA) launch belies the apparent very early, incomplete state of the service. The SAS Global Forum launch created inflated expectations -- CMO Jim Davis said "the uptake on [the announcement] has been far greater than we ever expected" -- leading to glowing reviews of a tool that is nowhere in production, that is being moved toward production use by exactly one customer. SAS does have excellent data-mining, text-analytics, and visualization technologies and proven skill at bringing them to market, but let's get real. The dashboard interface is attractive, but the application is nonetheless narrowly focused and inflexible, an analytics silo with no out-of-the-box integration with enterprise systems. It is simply grossly premature to characterize SMA as having "a unique character that stands out in the market as, at this point, one of a kind and thus doesn't have anything to compare against as of yet," as Paul Greenberg did in his SocialCRM blog.

There is no question that SAS analytics offers an unmatched combination of depth, breadth, and business utility. SAS has deep technology and an intense customer focus that generated $2.31 billion in 2009 revenues. Add a hot, new information source, social media, and you get a great business case for a new product that will appeal to an unreached market, enterprise public-relations and marketing departments that need to understand perceptions of their corporate personas and work to shape opinion.

SMA is an on-demand, hosted solution. Nothing wrong with that: as-a-service offerings surmount adoption barriers by lowering entry and operational costs and speeding implementations and therefore time to insight. Further, SAS has collected certain news- and social-media feeds over the course of two years (as have, similarly, other social-media analysis providers over varying periods), a valuable asset.

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