SAS

Keith Collins was up next to talk about Cloud. This is an area where I have done some research before – check out the results from our Predictive Analytics in the Cloud research. Keith presented the NIST definition of cloud with its 5 characteristics – one demand, broad network access, measured service (subscription), resource pooling [...]

Paul Kent, VP of Big Data, came up next and gave a white board talk with no slides. His initial focus was on parallel processing for analytics, something that SAS has been working on for a while and that is key to their HPA and Big Data approaches. He points out that some problems (min [...]

Jim Davis kicked off the annual SAS analyst event. SAS sees their work on in-memory analytics in recent years as another major change in the way companies handle data and develop analytics, especially when combined with their work on taking advantage of this with their new visual analytics interfaces. This, he says, is going to [...]

The last two weeks have been very focused on analytics, especially predictive analytics. First I attended the IBM Analyst Summit where they formally launched their big new focus on Decision Management (see my blog series here). This event was a big deal, I believe, because it showed IBM’s increased focus on Decision Management – moving [...]

High-Performance Analytics from SAS consists of SAS Grid Computing, SAS In-Database Analytics and SAS In-Memory Analytics. The latter component has a new addition in the form of SAS High-Performance Analytics (SAS HPA), which was announced in Dec. 2011. SAS HPA is appliance-ready software that uses hardware from database partners (Teradata or EMC Greenplum) for high [...]

Fuzzy Logix is an advanced analytics software solution and services company headquartered in Charlotte North Carolina, with offices in Cupertino California, Richmond, Virginia and distribution channels throughout the world. Fuzzy Logix provides an in-database analytics solution, supporting both in-database model construction and in-database scoring.  They also offer in-GPU solutions, which allow users to access potentially [...]

SAS has spent the last four years moving its partnering strategy forward – making partnering a core part of how they do business, partnering with Teradata and Accenture, and most recently a push towards 30%/$200M of first year revenue impacted by partners. Russ Cobb reported out how this has been going in terms of partners: [...]

This session is focusing on three specific functional areas – customer intelligence, financial crimes/fraud and risk management. Customer Intelligence The landscape of Customer Intelligence involves the growth of empowered consumers thanks to the proliferation of channels, the explosion of data and the evolving CMO role as they have to balance analytical and creative. SAS’s vision [...]

SAS is making a big push around cloud. They want to provide a cloud enabled platform, manage their existing SAS Applications in the cloud, build new applications in the cloud and create a cloud app store for their customers. They want to ensure that all the business analytics solutions based on SAS – whether SAS [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Four themes in business visualization: Consumer-oriented BI Walk up and use, understanding through visualization, self-service Deriving value from big data Analytics and visualization that scales with in-memory Approachable analytics Integration into the user’s world Outlook, Office, mobile The new product (coming in March) has four components: Environment Manager for setup and monitoring Visual Analytics Explorer for [...]

High Performance Analytics first. As already noted this is a key focus area for SAS.  The three pillars, remember, are: Grid Computing Allocating out analytic tasks to multiple processors and cores in a managed fashion. In-Database Analytics Using database servers for analytic computing to minimize data movement and improve performance. In-Memory Analytics The key area [...]

Dr Goodnight kicked it off the executive viewpoint at the 2012 SAS Inside Intelligence session. SAS had another growth year in 2011 ($2.7B and growth of 12.1%) as Jim highlighted both its continued investment in new buildings around the world and the fact that many SAS locations around the world, and SAS overall, continue to [...]

Some time back I wrote a post called “It’s time to industrialize analytics“. In an ongoing twitter conversation (I am @jamet123) I referenced it and provoked some interesting responses that seem worth addressing in more than 140 characters. The conversation was between @JAdP, @deanabb, @merv, @ajbowles and myself and they are all worth following. We spent some [...]

Jim Davis of SAS had an interesting post back in October – What do retail banking customers want?– in which he talked about the results of some consumer surveys and the banking industry’s response. The three results Jim discussed were clarity and fairness, easy access and quality customer experience. Interestingly I see all three of these [...]

I got an update on Enterprise Miner™ from the folks at SAS recently. Enterprise Miner is their development tool for data miners and predictive analytic specialists and is a graphical environment for designing and executing the steps in the creation of a predictive analytic model. Enterprise Miner 7.1 was part of the SAS 9.3 release [...]

The Predictive Analytics in the Cloud research we have been conducting is coming to an end. We have closed the survey having garnered over 200 business and technical professionals. – thanks to all who participated. We are going to publishing the study findings and survey results in a webinar and a white paper on November [...]

We surveyed over 200 business and technical professionals for our study on cloud based predictive analytic solutions. Thanks to all who participated. Study findings and survey results will be presented on Thursday, November 10, 2011 at 10:00 a.m. PT, 1:00 p.m. ET, and will include short presentations from our research sponsors – Clario Analytics, FICO, [...]