Go!!!!
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I work in industry and am very involved with the open source community.
JMP is FAR more protected from open source than SAS. JMPs biggest upsides are the point-and-click GUI and the support.
As someone that maintains several open source packages in the statistics space, the absolute last thing I want to do is invest my limited time in user-friendliness, let alone a GUI. And I'm certainly not going to pay someone to do it.
SAS has great support, but someone competent in SAS can easily become competent in R/Python for free at the cost of occasionally having to spend time digging when an issue arises. Many JMP users are not at that level, and need the support that most free open source packages don't provide.
Having said that, maybe JMP is fat staffed. 500 employees at an average of $100k "all in cost" between salaries and benefits is $50 million just in staffing costs.
The reason to sell JMP bundled with SAS is that it is more attractive to a buyer.
JMP's staff has grown slowly and steadily over the years. The SAS CEO would never allow that, unless sales and profits were also growing.
Risk and Fraud make money also. In theory, SAS could sell or IPO all three units separately.
But it's advantageous to sell them as parts of the whole, to emphasize that the company has growing and profitable areas, even though its main product line is in decline.
JMP should be for sale unbundled. There are more pros than cons using that approach.
Pros:
- More potential buyers because price is way lower
- JS has a better chance of having a more significant role with the new buyer. Versus being looked at as just one more person to let go. I dont see JMP as having enough value to interest a Broadcom type buyer to keep it. Flush it and take the tax write off is how they operate.
- Above logic applies to JMP employees.
Cons:
May take longer to dispose of JMP if not bundled with SAS. It is harder to hide unprofitability when a product is not bundled . Especially if JMP's net profits are underwhelming. JMP is flush with 500ish highly paid employees and sells for a meager $1250 a copy.
JMP's revenues have grown slowly and steadily, about 10% annually for many years. This is in part due to a switch from shrink-wrap to an annual license model under the previous head of sales.
But however you get it, growth is growth. In line with its revenue growth, JMP has slowly but steadily added employees for many years, and has not laid any off.
JMP's revenue stream is nice but not huge. JMP is indeed important to some of the chip manufacturers, but as @fkc+1vsU2NaL says it's not any kind of AI growth story. It is like a little tug boat -- not big enough to pull the SAS aircraft carrier.
"Have any JMP employees been laid off?"
Probably a Safe Space so no.
some of the use cases are pretty niche but high stakes, like statistical process control in computer chip manufacturing to help find production issues in real time. doesn't seem like a great business case to fix something that's not broken to save $1200 then waste time and money switching to a free UI tool that probably then needs modifications when fixing defects and having higher process yield (more chips to sell) is 10000x more important and urgent. but yeah, that doesn't really help JMP or SAS too much with any kind of AI growth IPO story.
"JMP's revenue stream is only sufficient to support hundreds of employees"
Have any JMP employees been laid off?
JMP offers a rich mix of analytical techniques -- just like SAS, like R, and like Python.
Unlike SAS, JMP is priced low -- a $1,250 annual license for a single user, discounted for multiple users, with a free version for students.
That low price makes JMP more resistant than SAS to open source competition. On the other hand, JMP's revenue stream is only sufficient to support hundreds of employees, not thousands.
https://store.jmp.com
Is there a point-and-click open source analysis tool?
I think it's pretty clear that Open Source is hurting everything related to SAS or JMP
Why? Discuss!!!