I know, I know, nobody here believes an IPO is happening, and a sale is the likely plan/wish if not outcome. However, there is an in between option called SPAC, special purpose acquisition company. A SPAC that has gone public in order to seek acquisitions in specific areas may acquire a private company (usually a startup), and then that company has basically gone public without going through the IPO process. Normally the assumption is high risk/high reward potential, though. However, could it be a viable path for SAS? Seems unlikely but who knows.
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SPAC purchases are unusual. DJT was given as an example to show that it’s possible.
Because of SAS auditing requirements, the earliest practical date for a SPAC or IPO is about a year from now. A private sale of course could happen at any time.
Either a SPAC, an IPO, or a private sale would likely result in a mass layoff. Those are typical when mature software companies are acquired.
Many SAS employees believe that nothing will ever change. But they should be making their plans.
“If DJT is worth $20 billion on the market, surely a profitable company of $billions would be worth at least as much.”
DJT (Truth Social), RDDT (Reddit), and BTC (BitCoin) are all highly valued. The whole market is highly valued; both SPY (S&P 500) and Nasdaq (QQQ) are at all-time highs.
A year from now, SAS should meet the SEC requirement for three years of audited financial statements. If the market is still roaring then, it will be a great chance to IPO.
It’s not what you think. It’s what you know and it’s who you know. You don’t know do you ?
DJT? Really, you want to make a comparison with DJT? That’s more like money laundering or funneling of money from foreigners into the pockets of you know who. A Google search reveals those behind DWAC are under investigation. With its revenues, there’s no way DJT has worth anywhere near its current valuation. You forgot the /s.
Is SPAC possible ? Yes!
DJT was taken public this week using a SPAC. The firm lost $55 million last year, with a total revenue of $10 million. The MEME stock is worth $20 billion today based upon the crazy market.
I believe SPACs and pump and dump schemes are worthless.
If DJT is worth $20 billion on the market, surely a profitable company of $billions would be worth at least as much. For those of you who hate working there, leave. For those of you who think you’ll get rich, wake up! For the rest of us, pray and hope that JHG shows some reasonable generosity like he has in the past. Uggh.
Thanks, on the same page now. The process of building it was a horrific political cluster. It was the worst project I'd ever been on. I couldn't even describe how crazy and wasteful it was.
VDMML was a pathetic and failed attempt to replace Enterprise Miner.
Faster, yes...as it's built on a distributed architecture (CAS)....but not nearly as feature rich, of course, just like most of the lightweight Viya equivalents of SAS9 products.
Is VDMML the replacement for Enterprise Miner? Is this all under "ewww!" and "dohh!"?
VS (Visual Statistics).
VDMML (Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning). Surely one of the most daft product names ever.
I heard sensible people wanted to call it just VML (Visual Machine Learning), but JG intervened because he thought Data Mining was still a fashionable term...demonstrating yet again, just how out-of-touch he had become.
What products make up VS?
CAS was never intended to “compete” with R. CAS was designed to be an evolution of the LASR analytic server— in support of next generation VA, VS, DMML (VDMML) and other new products. All of this and most of the other concerns on this particular thread have been addressed ad nauseam on many other historical threads here on layoff@sas. Posts on these threads are from several folks who spent the modern history of SAS in various positions of influence and innovation.
Many people posting here (present poster included, have strong opinions) based on their natural biases regarding their own history with SAS, various leaders they have interacted with and how that went for them.
Viya was a marketing/branding term added at the 11th hour. Many things could and should have been done differently. To add a little humor, that’s the story with most of us here if we are honest about our lives. Most of the phenomena we experience can be modeled with the proverbial birth, life and death cycle. That is what we are seeing played out at SAS.
work at a customer site now and not sure we even would be willing to pay for improved performance. there are (at an increasing rate of change) fewer and fewer users submitting fewer and fewer jobs, so the stress on the servers is surely lower. more users using platforms like snowflake. meaning the demand for increased sas performance is decreasing.
where I see a possible brighter spot is in one of the solutions. We are looking to upgrade. if other customers are like us, there is at least a renewal/upgrade market in certain solution areas.
Before Viya started, SAS already competed against R. Why anyone thought CAS would do better, I do not know. Once Python began taking market share, the competition against open-source languages got harder.
At some point, it must have become obvious that Viya also competed against open-source infrastructure, like Spark. After that, existing SAS customers became Viya’s only viable market.
To the extent that Viya can be made backward-compatible, it can offer those customers a good value proposition. Many existing SAS customers will pay for better performance.
Addressing their needs can slow SAS' revenue decline. But the only way to stop a revenue decline, when competing against open source, is to go where they are not. Tableau did it; QlikTech did it; PowerBI did it. They all innovated — in what used to be our market.
We did not maintain backward-compatibility with our old technology, and we did not successfully innovate with new technology.
I pushed these ideas while I was in SAS R&D. Others, smarter and better positioned than I, pushed them harder. Our careers suffered, because we weren’t “team players”; we didn’t “get along”; we weren’t “on board the train”.
I left with sadness in my heart, and I’m sure the others did too. When we joined, SAS was a place where you could build great software. But it became a place to play politics, and the politicians won.
Does SAS have a future? Making Viya backward-compatible will stop some of the bleeding. But innovation is the only way to increase revenues.
Otherwise, it’s foolish to hold a declining asset, so a private sale or public IPO will come soon.
My kid is in college majoring in computer science stuff and he laughs at sas. It doesn't even exist to young people. Not trying to be mean or rude it's just the truth. There is no motivation or reason for young people to want anything to do with sas -- the language or the company.
"This is the fundamental problem with Viya/CAS. There is no value proposition. Nobody needs it, nobody wants it. It's a failed product, period."
When I was in R&D (yes R&D, working on Viya) I repeatedly asked, "Who is our customer? Who are we selling Viya to?"
Crickets.
back in the day when I went to many SAS user groups, after a while, I noticed there were only boomers close to (voluntary or forced) retirement age attending. possibly one millennial intern for those folks or a random grad student. came back and reported the alarming news. got blank, indifferent, or confused stares.
even the most ignorant, anti-DEI, anti-avocado toast commenter can surely understand why having only two perspectives (from two similar, old, white, ex-academic guys) and beyond that, only "boomer" yes men/women validating those limited perspectives and only understanding their own demographic of users is/was not "diverse" enough to stay relevant. or maybe not. maybe they and their users all age out together.
hubris ki-ls all kinds of empires.
it's true, nobody likes to admit it but it's true. this is a boomer company. every time a SAS brand study happens, the age bracket of people who are even aware SAS exists gets older. the number of millennials and Gen Z people who know what SAS is gets smaller and smaller. not good.
OS was an academic masquerading as a businessman.
At least he is self-aware enough to realize that and has returned to academia. But it's a shame about the damage he did to SAS along his journey of self discovery.
that's all already difficult enough in a vacuum assuming the world doesn't ever change. but there is also a real time constraint of the loyal users aging out of the workforce - probably 10 years at best, assuming the youngest are around 55 and will retire at 65. let's say it's actually 5 years. by the time there is 100% compatibility, what loyal user base is there left that will care or have internal corporate political power to keep it rolling? joke about or criticize "DEI" or "avocado toast" all you want, but the millennials and gen Z in charge of IT and analytics budgets will not know or care about the compatibility when their colleagues have retired. an outdated "boomer" culture selling legacy "boomer" software doesn't mean much to them at best. adding more avocados or more python isn't enough.
Unless it gets to 100% compatible, migration will remain a major headache and barrier to adoption.
Most companies have been trying to get rid of SAS for years - this compatibility issue is the perfect catalyst to finally get rid of SAS once and for all. And that's exactly what's happening. Viya is ending up just accelerating SAS's decline.
I guess that Viya can be made 80% compatible with V9, in a few years. The last 20% will be difficult and probably cost-prohibitive.
Still, 80% compatibility, with faster performance, can be sold to existing SAS customers.
Unfortunately, V9 compatibility does not sell Viya to new customers.
So I believe Viya is salvageable, and quite useful to modernize SAS. But it does not address the fundamental problem of declining revenues.
bless your heart, OP.
“ this new platform runs my existing SAS jobs — only much faster.”
This. This should have always been the goal. Instead, we got two trains.
"OS didn't have a good answer."
Yet OS was allowed to forge ahead with something that only he thought was great. Somethings people fall for the gimmick that high price=high value. Evidently most SAS customers are not that naive.
I don't see a good end game because the untasty fruit has been allowed to spoil.
"Are you are aware that Viya CAS actions can be invoked directly from Python, Lua, R, Java, and Rest API?"
Of course I am. Anyone who worked at SAS since the release of Viya must know this - it was drilled into us as a major selling point.
But nobody ever came up with a good answer as to why anyone would want to do that. OS didn't have a good answer. The marketing department didn't have a good answer.
The hope was either:
- Existing SAS users would transform the way they do things and become relevant again (that didn't work because of the Viya/SAS compatibility issues that have been discussed at length)
- That SAS could break into the data science teams that had abandoned SAS in favour of open source (or never used SAS in the first place). That didn't work either, because whenever I (or my other colleagues in sales/pre-sales) took this message to our customer's data science teams, the conversation would go something like this..."so you want us to buy this CAS Server thing that will cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars, when we currently use Apache Spark for our large data workloads and it doesn't cost us anything and we know how to use it and it's really widely used...". That shut down the conversation pretty quickly - we simply had no answer to that.
This is the fundamental problem with Viya/CAS. There is no value proposition. Nobody needs it, nobody wants it. It's a failed product, period.
For the future of SAS, the only point that matters is the selling point.
If Viya can be made SAS-compatible, there’s an obvious selling point for existing SAS customers. They can say: this new platform runs my existing SAS jobs — only much faster.
It’s nice that Viya runs R, Python, CASL, et.al. But what’s the selling point?
People who run R and Python have cheaper alternatives. Is CASL so much better that people will pay for it, when the alternatives are cheaper?
You're missing the point. CASL a new Viya-specific language with syntax similar to other languages in the historic SAS suite. Most of those languages are also supported in Viya.
The compatibility issues with V9 are much broader than anything having to do with CASL specifically.
It is "SAS like", but nobody cares. Customers want "SAS compatibility".
"SAS Viya also provides the CASL scripting language, which is very "SAS like",".
You are joking, right?
@utp+1rFtF4zI
"The fundamental problem of SAS is that revenues are declining."
Our competitors went after markets constrained by outdated and flawed bad tech. Innovators ate SAS's lunch. If we had built simpler and more integrated offerings than V9 the customer base and upsell could've followed. The opposite happend. These days CAS even less relevant than 5 years ago by order of magnitude
Are you are aware that Viya CAS actions can be invoked directly from Python, Lua, R, Java, and Rest API?
SAS Viya also provides the CASL scripting language, which is very "SAS like", yet the aforementioned languages give programmers flexibility WRT language choice while still having the power and scale of CAS.
Viya maybe a step in the right direction in that it makes SAS more scalable, and is cloud-based, but at the end of the day it's still the SAS language. Ask anyone working in the analytics space under the age of 45, what they think of the SAS language and they almost universally hate it. Archaic, unintuitive and inflexible. Python is where it's at.
We agree Viya is a step in the right direction; modernizing SAS architecture is essential,
When/if Viya accomplishes revenue growth, the sales figures will show it.
Isn’t the new Viya support for EG pretty much accomplishing that? I see it as a step in the right direction at least.
We agree that modernizing the platform does create those opportunities. New revenue streams could be created upon the Viya platform.
They have not been so far, and it’s been a damned long time.
Doesn’t modernizing the platform with a V9 compatible Viya also create upsell opportunities with existing customers while buying time to seed and cultivate successful new products on Viya?
This seems like the best play for SAS. I don’t see them becoming a glorified Python/AI consultancy.
The fundamental problem of SAS is that revenues are declining.
Making Viya compatible with V9 modernizes SAS. That’s absolutely necessary, because it helps retain the existing revenue stream.
It does not create a new revenue stream.
It’s not too late to make Viya compatible with V9. But that doesn’t solve the fundamental problem.
While your last sentence is a bit extreme, the premise of everything else is correct! There are around 100 former veteran SAS Devs who could’ve made V9 and Viya compatible, while also making complex portions of the latter more usable.
It would’ve taken the right kind of leadership and development process management as well as significant pay increases to motivate many of us. This yearly increase in salary cost alone would likely be less than SAS is losing per month in reduced contract renewals and missed sales opportunities.
DEI and other Gen Z friendly initiatives will not save SAS. Agile and continuous delivery will not save SAS. The only things that might are the timeless values of applying intelligence and work ethic to serve the customers’ needs first. Is it too late given the myriad of other factors discussed at length on other threads?
Until Viya and V9 are compatible, there likely will be no sale and no IPO. The fly in that ointment is that most of the brains who could make compatibility happen are no longer with SAS. They wither got laid off(to cut expenses) or walked to greener pastures. The less expensive new blood won't make compatibility happen. Simply because they don't have the experience and also because they do not view that as fun work. Forgive the comparison, but Viya is to SAS what he---s is to a person. Undesirable to others and impossible to cure.
SAS is in a real pickle.
Forget that IPO, SPAC, and Sale stuff. Here's my modest proposal:
The company should be put into a conservatorship that pays dividends into a trust for the children-of-record. The trust could pay perpetual salaries for no-show jobs.
The children-not-of-record would be promoted to leadership levels. They'd manage feckless departments based on their hobbies, whims, and fealty. In these roles, they can continue their belief of hitting a triple, regardless of a birth on third base. These jobs would require attendance, but they'd last in perpetuity, with no expectations of competence or accountability. It's a "family company", as they say, but secrets and appearances need to be kept. You can't have the full bounty, but this is a great consolation prize for "off the books" membership to the club.
For the regular folk, well, they could continue performing the daily grunt work while believing in the concepts of effectiveness and merit. The joke's on them.
Carrying out this modest proposal would result in minimal disruptions. Business as usual, as they say.