BioSense was created in 2003 with the intent of establishing an integrated system of nationwide public health surveillance for the early detection of potential bioterrorism-related syndromes or other public health emergencies. BioSense has evolved into the National Syndromic Surveillance Program that includes the BioSense Platform - an improved suite of analytical tools based in a cloud environment. To address the user community''s priorities of the platform''s current system requirements and the preference for including other software on the platform to improve syndromic surveillance data processing, CDC conducted a pilot project to evaluate the tools, SAS and ESSENCE.