For me the most interesting piece now – how SAS sees Decision Management and operational decisions. This involves a new product coming soon – SAS Rules Studio – as well as continued innovation around workflow, analytic model management and more. A great demo kicks it off with business rules in a tabular layout as one step in a decision flow that also uses deployed predictive analytic models, supports impact analysis and champion-challenger, and rapidly deploys to multiple platforms. Classic Decision Management stuff. There’s also some nice features around improved model management, where models are used in processes and decisions and more.
What’s interesting about this is that SAS is now finalizing and integrating functionality that it has had for a while. The functionality they had built for instance into the SAS Real Time Decision Manager for customer intelligence/marketing allows for real-time decision-making. This is being generalized going forward as well as new support for explicitly managing business rules as part of the platform (rather than doing this application by application as in the past for instance). A new Event Stream Processing capability is also coming as another deployment option.
This is an exciting development. SAS has had some great tools for building and deploying predictive analytics but has lacked a general purpose ability to manage operational decisions, the decision logic required by these decisions and the way models are used in these decisions. Now this is changing and SAS is going to be one of the significant Decision Management players in my new report on Decision Management Systems Platform Technologies.
