SAS sees Information Management as being about treating data as a strategic asset. Changes in competition, regulatory environment and more are driving this to be more importance. Information Management for SAS includes Data Management, Decision Management (mixing rules and analytics to drive operational decisions in decision services) and Analytics Management (supporting what I call an industrial analytic process). Governance and strategy must reach across all three.
Data Management first. Big Data and the increasing variety and velocity of data is making data management more complex. Companies need to be able to use transactional data, transactional event streams, text anlaytics and more to understand what customers are doing, for instance. SAS Data Management is supporting big data with forthcoming support for SAS / Access to Hadoop support from existing SAS languages and tools as well as a Proc Hadoop and support for Hadoop in SAS Metadata so that you can see what data is in Hadoop. SAS has also added some support in the ETL suite for Hadoop, allowing some transformations to/from Hadoop.
