It’s no secret that I’ve long held that SAS’s relative strengths in both merchandising and customer intelligence uniquely position the company to both navigate and enable the customer-centric transformation that omni-channel retailers are experiencing right now. If anyone can bridge customer and merchandising in a way that drives both the marketing and merchandising organizations to work together to enable customer experiences, it should be SAS. And six years of listening to the company’s message have only strengthened my belief.

Yes, I have been attending SAS’s analyst forum in Steamboat Springs for six years now. During that time I’ve seen the company evolve in many ways, from struggling to explain how the retail-specific solutions in the portfolio relate to the analytics core to having fully moved all those solutions onto that core, from the development and subsequent maturation of SAS’s customer intelligence solutions into a full-fledged CI and marketing suite, and most especially from a very science-based solution set (not that it isn’t still) to one that seems to have fully embraced some of the foundational technology innovations that are still shaking up IT departments in every industry, around the world.

So it’s amazing to me to encounter either retailers or other analysts who seem to have little understanding about what SAS really has. I’m not going to argue the merits of allocation or forecasting capabilities, or segmentation capabilities or any other nitty-gritty details – that’s up to each individual retailer to decide which are important and which provider has the best capability fit. But in a technology era when retailers need to be looking for both “platform” and “vision”, I believe that SAS has both. And this year’s analyst conference only reinforced that for me.

Much as I hear people summarily dismiss SAS (wrongfully so), I hear people dismiss the computing revolution that has come to analytics. Those more niche vendors whose solutions are not architected to take advantage of Exadata or HANA pooh-pooh the performance gains these vendors report, which I believe is a serious oversight on their part – or bitterness at getting left behind. For solution providers like SAS, who have both done some re-architecting of their own AND have enabled their solutions on these new high-performance architectures, the performance gains are so exciting that I can’t describe them without sounding like a cliché: game-changing. Revolutionary.

And really, all it comes down to is speed. It’s been awhile since I’ve worked with data so large that there literally aren’t enough hours in the day to ask the questions I want to ask – though I did very recently get a familiar taste of that experience with some work we did over the holidays. You know the kind – where you set your query, go help the kids with their homework and cook dinner, only to come back and find that the question you asked wasn’t quite right, and if you tweaked it just so, maybe that will give you what you’re looking for – tomorrow morning.

When you start thinking about a world where you could get answers to your “what-if” questions in the time it takes the average internet page to load, I honestly don’t think people have enough imagination to understand how much it changes how they would work. We heard it from SAS’s customers – that it completely changed the way they approached some of their stickiest customer problems, or enabled whole new lines of business by using data they never could’ve used before. We heard it in the context of how it has changed their analytics team – in one case, now staffed with lonely data analysts and business consultants who don’t have much to do because Visual Analytics has so democratized their data that those resources aren’t needed to answer tactical questions any longer (note, however, that it does free them up to be far more exploratory and strategic in how they use data).

We also heard it from SAS executives, who made comments like “We don’t require a user to pick the best forecast method to run a forecast because we can do six different forecasts simultaneously and return the best fit” – all within that page-load kind of paradigm.

The challenge for SAS is that, right or wrong, in retail they have been somewhat pigeon-holed by MarketMax. If you ask “What’s MarketMax?” that’s good. If you know what I’m talking about, then you should know that the old solution as we know it no longer exists, and hasn’t for a few years. It’s all SAS. And SAS is a heck of a lot more than just merchandising and forecasting.

What I often forget is that even though, in my mind at least, SAS has a big play in retail – in merchandising, at least as big as the usual suspects of JDA, Oracle, and SAP – retail consists of only 5% of SAS’s revenue. And what SAS could (and does try to) bring to retail is way more than merchandising. Historically, the company has combined retail and manufacturing together as an industry sector, but this year that comes to an end, and that’s good news, because it allows for better retail focus, especially on the sales side. If the company takes advantage of that focus, the upside opportunity for them is huge. And if SAS captures that upside, I guarantee that the retail industry will feel the impact too – in a way that changes how they do business, and increases their ability to truly put the customer at the center of their enterprise.

There aren’t too many companies out there that really have an opportunity like that.