In the data science and analytics sphere we have a number of tools today. Some of them like the Python and R has gained much popularity and captured a substantial amount of market in the recent years. However, one tool which stands tall and is still much popular is the SAS. Developed in the 1960s, the software made much progress with the establishment of SAS institute in 1976. The SAS has maintained its supremacy in the business intelligence and data analytics market since forever. Even in the recent years when there have been a lot of competitions from open source platforms, the SAS has been able to maintain its heavy weight status.

How the SAS still dominates the data analytics market? 

According to IDC, the SAS led the advanced and predictive analytics market in 2017 with approximately 30.8% market share. In a survey conducted by Burtch Works in 2018, 34% of all the respondents preferred using SAS and 43% of the predictive analytics professionals use SAS for their work. Moreover, it has been also reported by IDC that since it had started analyzing the data analytics market in 1997, SAS has shown constant growth. Thus, one may wonder how the SAS has been able to maintain its supremacy— 

● One of the biggest advantages of SAS over its rivals is the simplicity it offers. Performing tasks in SAS is the easiest with a simple GUI. Moreover, you do not need a massive experience in programming to work with the software. Learning SAS is even easier if you have basic knowledge of the SQL. Accessing multiple applications is also easy with the SAS and its 4th generation language is simple to learn. Moreover, SAS can easily handle big data and creating graphs and generating reports in SAS is also simple because of its drag and drop feature. 

● SAS is more flexible than the others. Incorporation of data files created by Excel or the SPSS into a SAS program is allowed and experienced users of other data bases can easily perform their tasks in SAS. There is a variety of input and output formats to suite your purpose and includes many procedures to perform descriptive or inferential statistical analysis.  

● The customer support system of SAS is the best and none of its rivals have such a dedicated support system. SAS invests more than 26% of its revenue of approximately $3.24 billion into its R&D team which continuously updates the software system and makes interlinking with the latest technologies possible. Although SAS is a premium tool and costly it is much secure compared to any open source software. 

Employment opportunities with the SAS 

The SAS Institute has more than 80K customers worldwide and most of the fortune 500 companies use the SAS data analytics tool. Thus, there is always a huge demand for candidates with SAS knowledge in the market. A study involving 350 industries and 15K job titles by MONEY and Payscale.com reported that SAS skills is the most in demand analytics skill.