Thoughts on WPS, SAS , R

Just as unexpected market segments decided the Betamax and VHS  debate. I find that the Small Business Segment is totally compatible with lower priced software and Self Development Kits.

What is interesting about WPS – SAS suit is that WPS now offers development for people wanting to write and extend their own code. That makes the SAS language theoretically as extensible as R packages.

http://www.teamwpc.co.uk/products/wps/modules/sdk

Develop Bespoke Language Items

Anyone with a familiarity of Assembler, C or C++ programming languages, can use the WPS SDK module to create bespoke custom language items for use by WPS.

Once you have created and compiled your own custom language items, you can freely distribute them to anybody who uses WPS on the same platform.

Catagory of Language Item Support

Below is a list of the type of language item that can be developed with WPS SDK.

Language Item	Comment
Informats	Supported
Formats	Supported
Functions	Supported
Call Routines	Supported

The ability to create the four language items indicated as supported in the table above is known as IFFC support (IFFC is derived from the first letter of the four language items).

Dependencies and Usage

The WPS Core module is required to use WPS SDK.

WPS SDK can be used on any of the supported platforms.

A standard third party C, C++ compiler and/or assembler are required to create the custom language items.

Once a language item has been compiled, neither WPS SDK or the third party compiler are required. Only WPS Core is needed to run the created language item.

WPS SDK and the language items that are created, can only be used with WPS versions 2.4 or higher.

On the negative side- I am not sure on who WPS is. The organizational structure is very secretive and I think that’s okay with a small private company but a true competitor to SAS may not want to lie in the shadows. I think that some of it is due to legal aggressive history in this field and whoever wins the case will end up creating a precedent.

Also some of R functionality is due to design of programming interfaces of command line. and modular structure of packages. Think of it as this way- what is SAS decided to license each proc individually rather than bundling procs as a new software. That would simply eliminate the not so successful procs and also give SAS much faster feedback from customers.

For the small business segment- offering on demand SAS ( or SAS SaaS!) could help reconcile both SAS licensing and cannibalization of revenue fears. So if you have less than 10 employees and less than 1 million revenue go to SAS on the Web hosted on an Amazon Ec2 or the 70 millon investment in data centre ( in Feb 2009 called cloud computing by SAS Institute).
An alternative is to offer SAS Learning Edition but ONLY on the web through a Citrix server. This enables tracking usage as most academics rarely need big data capability.
An alternative would be to track usage of individual language items like procs and macros ( if it can be enabled programmatically using a freq analysis of the logs and remote submission of counts in an anonymous way) Or do a web analysis of the SAS Online Doc.

What I find incredible is SAS documentation is both copyrighted by SAS and yet is freely available. When ideally all SAS papers and documentation should be accessible to SAS license holders only. Maybe by some secure way.

Curiously I am more than happy to try Sas enterprise guide (see below) however a bit of redesign with a JMP- Apple like interface.