I’m a lead architect at a major financial services organization in Europe. We’ve just completed a large SAS upgrade project. While we had no interest in SAS Viy

I’m a lead architect at a major financial services organization in Europe. We’ve just completed a large SAS upgrade project. While we had no interest in SAS Viya, SAS legacy remains an important part of our landscape. It’s not a tool for programmers. It’s a toolbox for people doing other jobs, who happen to know how to program. Would we invest in SAS if we were starting today from scratch? No. But none of SAS’s biggest customers are starting from scratch, and things like continuity, risk, and embedded institutional expertise are incredibly important to these customers, in a way that might not be obvious if you’re coming from the fast-paced world of startups who have the luxury of starting with nothing. In the endgame though, I can’t see how SAS will be able to resist the cost pressure coming from the Python/R/Hadoop/FOSS-in-general ecosystem, as those tools continue to mature. Even COBOL will die one day.