SAS is #1…In Plans to Discontinue Use

I’ve been tracking The Popularity of Data Analysis Software for many years now, and a clear trend is the decline of the market share of the bigger analytics firms, notably SAS and SPSS. Many people have interpreted my comments as implying the decline in the revenue of those companies. But the fields involved in analytics (statistics, data mining, analytics, data science, etc.) have been exploding in popularity, so having a smaller slice of a much bigger pie still leaves billions in revenue for the big players.

Each year, the Gartner Group, “the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company”, collects data in a survey of the customers of 42 business intelligence firms. They recently released the data on the customers’ plans to discontinue use of their current software in one to three years. The results are shown in the figure below. Over 16% of the SAS Institute customers surveyed reported considering discontinuing their use of the software, the highest of any of the vendors shown. It will be interesting to see if this will actually lead to an eventual decline in revenue. Although I have helped quite a few organizations migrate from SAS to R, I would be surprised to see SAS Institute’s revenue decline. They offer excellent software and service which I still use, though not anywhere near as much as R.

The full Gartner report is available here.

SAS Attrition Plot

Learning R: Live Webinar, Interactive Self-Paced, or Site Visit?

My recent blog post, Why R is Hard to Learn, must have hit a nerve as it was read by over 6,000 people in its first two days online.  If you’re using R to augment your work in SAS, SPSS or Stata or you’re considering switching to R, my workshops can help minimize many of those headaches by pointing out the commands and options that frustrate users of those packages the most. Also find out which of the thousands of R packages will give you the output you’re most used to.

My next two live webinars done in partnership with Revolution Analytics are in January:
R for SAS, SPSS and Stata Users
Managing Data with R (updated to include dplyr, broom, tidyr, etc.)
Course outlines and registration for both is here.

My R for SAS, SPSS and Stata Users workshop is also now available as a self-paced interactive video workshop at DataCamp.com.

I do site visits in partnership with RStudio.com, whose software I recommend and use in every form of my training.  If your company does its training through Xerox Learning Services, I also partner with them. For further details or to arrange a site visit, you can reach me at muenchen.bob@gmail.com.

Updated: Why R is Hard to Learn

I’ve updated one of my most widely read blog posts, Why R is Hard to Learn. It focuses on the aspects of R which tend to trip up beginners. The new version is over twice as long as the original and it is located under the Articles menu, making it easier to find. Of course my new interactive workshop on DataCamp.com and my up-coming webinars with Revolution Analtyics cover these trouble spots thoroughly.