In reply to Dan.

I consider Version 8, Version 9.1.3, and Versions 9.2, 9.3, and 9.4 all to be strong, stable releases that represent the best technology of their respective times. However, software technologies and architectures change over the years to accommodate need for bigger data, more efficient processing, security and management. The old releases are not "terrible", but they are limiting when customers are modernizing the way they use the software.

So yes, we're always encouraging customers to adopt the more recent releases. Since SAS has a renewal licensing model, "upgrading" doesn't necessarily provide a big new price tag for a software license -- but there is always a cost to upgrade production software and hardware.