In reply to Nick Rose.

Hi Nick, thanks for reading and for adding the comment.

Certainly, the big splash at SAS Global Forum was about high-performance analytics, big data, and the exciting new products that are being built around those themes. But the traditional SAS products such as Base, Graph, Stat, and the BI mainstays such as EG and WRS continue to evolve as well, albeit with less accompanying press. I had a couple of other SAS Tech Talk guests who discussed some technology that you can put in your hands right now, and certainly the conference program was full of many other examples.

All of our "mainstay" products of today began as prototypes years ago, including SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office, and Web Report Studio. This is an important exercise for us to see what's possible and what our customers want, and we believe that it doesn't take away from our ability to maintain existing products. For example, the developer in this video (Mike) also looks after the Microsoft Outlook integration in AMO. If a problem arises in that product, he's on the hook to put down the Kinect and attend to the urgent need in the field.