SAS business intelligence and business analytics
SAS's marketing people have started a discussion about the difference between business intelligence and business analytics -- whatever that means.

Here's a rather peppery take from Neil Raden.

James Taylor's not exactly new to the business, but he seems perplexed by SAS's marketing.

And Peter Thomas points out that SAS is attacking its own line of BI products.

Also talked to Michele Goetz about this, and she seems to be saying that SAS got it backwards -- BI is replacing business analytics!

That how the buzzword bubble works. A vendor or analyst looking for attention simply invents a new term or differentiates in a new way between terms and whole whole wave of discussions breaks loose. The upshot is that the company that started the discussion gets a lot of attention.

I think this is more legitimate for an analyst than for a vendor. After all, analysts are there to puzzle things out. Of course folks get carried away sometimes, and there are a lot more buzzwords out there than you really need to describe what's going on. But it's also true that new insights keep coming up and the market ghanges all the time.

It seems to name that a vendor would only have an excuse if

1. It actually has some new product to sell.
2. It decides to change its sales strategy.

Presumably SAS's goal was to get people talking about SAS, so that worked out pretty well. But changing your positioning is always a little uncomfortable for a vendor, because it leaves your customers asking what happened to the old positioning. Look at Microsoft's discomfort after it withdrew its planning tool. And in this case we get back to Peter Thomas's point -- if we take this seriously, what are we to think of SAS's BI products now?