The exploding volume, complexity, diversity and velocity of big data have forced organizations to reconsider their approach to data management and re-evaluate their entire analytic portfolios.

SAS, a leader in business analytics, recently made several significant announcements at the Premier Business Leadership Series conference in Amsterdam that could help businesses boost bottom lines, create new business capabilities and make better and faster decisions through business intelligence and analytics. Here are some of the top announcements that we think you might be interested in:

• Research shows big data paying off for big companies: Big data initiatives enable companies to analyze diverse data – structured and unstructured, from internal and external sources – and uncover new insights. A new research report titled Big Data in Big Companies co-authored by Tom Davenport and Jill Dyché, describes how 20 successful, large firms benefit from big data projects.
• New SAS Decision Manager transforms big data into smarter decisions: Businesses are often struggling with huge amounts of data pouring into their systems, making it difficult for executives to make critical decisions quickly and efficiently. With SAS Decision Manager, an integrated platform for predictive analytics, business rules, and data management, companies can now automate parts of the processes to eliminate manual handoffs, and to shorten decision-making processes with improved accuracy.
• SAS Energy Forecasting increases return on smart grid investment: Faced with volatile wholesale energy markets and increasingly complex asset portfolios, utilities are turning to business intelligence and analytics to improve planning and operations. With SAS Energy Forecasting, a new solution from SAS, utilities can operate more efficiently by capitalizing on new interval data from smart meters.

Whether you need to analyze millions of Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) to determine optimal price points, recalculate entire risk portfolios in minutes, identify well-defined segments to pursue customers that matter most or make targeted offers to customers in near-real time, high-performance analytics from SAS forms the backbone of your analytic endeavors.

Combined with a breadth of technologies to perform big analytics across the enterprise, large or small, SAS can help you extract meaningful insight from your big data and obtain the real business value with its offerings:

• With SAS® In-Memory Analytics organizations can tackle unsolvable problems using big data and sophisticated analytics in an unfettered and rapid manner.
• SAS® Visual Analytics is a high-performance, in-memory solution for exploring massive amounts of data very quickly. It enables you to spot patterns, identify opportunities for further analysis and convey visual results via Web reports, the iPad or an Android tablet.
• SAS® Social Media Analytics is a solution that integrates archives, analyzes and enables organizations to act on intelligence gleaned from online conversations on professional and consumer-generated media sites.
• SAS® High-Performance Analytics Server is an in-memory solution that allows developing analytical models using complete data, not just a subset, to produce more accurate and timely insights. Now you can run frequent modeling iterations and use sophisticated analytics to get answers to questions you never thought of or had time to ask.

As Davenport and Dyché state in their report Big Data in Big Companies, “big data can bring about dramatic cost reductions, substantial improvements in the time required to perform a computing task, or new product and service offerings” - just like many new information technologies. Both emphasize, in addition, that the primary value from big data doesn’t comes from the data in its raw form, but from the processing and analysis of it and the insights, products, and services that emerge from analysis – facts that play right into SAS’s hands.

The authors concluded their executive by explaining that ”the sweeping changes in big data technologies and management approaches need to be accompanied by similarly dramatic shifts in how data supports decisions and product/service innovation”, adding that “there is little doubt that analytics can transform organizations, and the firms that lead the 3.0 charge will seize the most value.”

By MediaBUZZ