More and more organizations are finding value in big data with SAS Visual Analytics, the in-memory solution announced to wide acclaim. Global customers and industry watchers quickly recognized the advanced graphic solution’s self-service data visualization as the key to yielding valuable insight.
SAS Visual Analytics combines industry-leading analytics with unique in-memory architecture, intuitive data exploration, and the option to deliver information to a wide variety of platforms, – including iPad and Android tablets.
SAS offers the only in-memory engine designed specifically for business visualization of big data on general-purpose, nonproprietary hardware. SAS Visual Analytics, which runs on commodity hardware or database appliances from EMC Greenplum and Teradata, supports increasing demands for fast answers from big data.
With the UAE in particular leading the GCC economic recovery, and with the IMF predicting a 3.6% year-on-year growth in 2013, this may present a shortfall of expertise of workers with deep analytical skills. The same is the case in the US, which faces a serious shortfall of such workers , according to the McKinsey Global Institute. This trend, plus corporate data rising 60% to 100% annually, has made SAS increasingly popular.
Employees with limited or no previous experience or skills in analytics can understand and benefit from the use of Visual Analytics, as all of the sophisticated, complex data is seamlessly integrated with a variety of user-friendly features such as on-the-fly predictions and scenarios, autocharting, ‘what does it mean’ pop-ups, and drag-and-drop capabilities.
“Anyone in the organization can use SAS Visual Analytics to derive insight from data, regardless of data size,” said Jim Davis, SAS Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. “With its easy to use interfaces, business users can parlay powerful analytics and reporting into full understanding of data relationships. Customers are sharing exploratory insights from SAS Visual Analytics among a wide range of information consumers, including executives, business users, data scientists, managers and analysts. Many SAS customers have said this is exactly the scalable visualization solution they sought,” he added.
Regionally, customers from a variety of sectors, including healthcare and finance, are already seeing the value in SAS Visual Analytics. Internationally, XL Group’s global insurance and reinsurance arm (NYSE: XL). XL Group will use SAS to rapidly visualize business data from internal and external sources to explore new ways of analyzing risk.
The resulting proprietary insights will enhance decision making and profitable growth, said Kimberly Holmes, Head of Strategic Analytics for XL Group. She said the results will enhance decision making and grow profits. The company will tailor data visualizations specifically for a business team, extending advanced analytical modeling within the company.
“The quality of our decisions determines our success. With SAS Visual Analytics, we will explore our data in new ways to develop unique insights and drive profitable growth,” Holmes said. “Data visualization will enable us to clearly communicate complex statistical insights to colleagues and encourage widespread use of analytics in business planning and decision making across XL,” Holmes added.
In addition to XL Group, the US Internal Revenue Service, SM Marketing Convergence in the Philippines and Cosmos Bank in Taiwan are among others choosing SAS Visual Analytics to expose valuable insight in their big data assets.
SAS Visual Analytics previewed in March to industry analysts. The immediate, highly positive reaction continues today.
“SAS Visual Analytics brings speed of thought analysis to business users with its capability to explore huge amounts of data,” said Cindi Howson, Founder and President of research firm BI Scorecard. “Business users can interactively analyze data without submitting an IT request and waiting for the results to be returned. The big benefit is that if a certain view of the data doesn’t produce the desired insight, the user can visually and interactively explore the data differently, whether from a browser or an iPad,” he added.
Fern Halper, PhD, a Partner at Hurwitz & Associates, said, “Because SAS Visual Analytics runs in-memory, it’s capable of analyzing more than 1 billion rows of data in a matter of seconds. This can enable a high degree of interactivity with huge amounts of data, which can lead to better decisions.”
