Well, all this talk about how Visual Analytics is good or bad; and our readers must now be wondering - does this visual analytics make any business sense? is there any commercial application, or a platform, which businesses can deploy to use visual analytics for making their life better?
Answer is a big YES.
And, while there are a number of vendors currently providing Visual Analytics packages - both server based and cloud based, I found one vendor particularly interesting. Name of vendor is SAS.
In March 2012, SAS introduced its Big Data Visual Analytics Platform. This is how "Information Week" describes the SAS platform,
"It promises the speed-of-thought data-analysis capabilities of SAP Hana, the scalability of Hadoop, and the intuitive visual-analysis capabilities of Tableau. But what makes SAS Visual Analytics, a platform announced Thursday, truly stand out is the tie to the Cary, N.C.-based vendor's extensive predictive analytics portfolio.
SAS Visual Analytics is not an in-memory database. In fact, it liberates customers (and SAS) from dependence on an expensive third-party database because it holds data in memory on a rack of blades running the Hadoop Distributed File System. Customers won't have to know anything about configuring or running Hadoop, said SAS, because all the deployment, provisioning, and administration will be handled by the platform's SAS LASR Analytic Server. The platform has been tested with more than 20,000 columns and 1 billion rows of data, according to SAS, and to scale out, customers simply add more nodes."
Jim Davis, SAS' senior VP and chief marketing officer, elaborated further, "If you look at what SAS is doing versus others, we're not just exploring past activity, we're supporting analyses that are predictive, so people can see into the future of their business performance"
As an example, Davis said that predictive marketing campaign optimization efforts that now take eight to 10 hours in a conventional SAS environment can be completed in less than three minutes on the platform, and bank-risk calculations that formerly took 18 hours now take 15 minutes.
Moving a step ahead with current trends, on 1st May 2013, SAS took its visual analytics paltform to the cloud.
"Every IT organization is either building their own private cloud of virtualized systems on commodity hardware or looking to third-party providers," said SAS CTO Keith Collins, in a statement. "These enhancements will make it easier for users to access new SAS high-performance analytics capabilities in our current analytic product portfolio. Our goal is to decrease the time-to-value for SAS users while reducing the total cost of ownership for IT."
With these features and developments, SAS currently offers Business Analytics solutions for variety of industries as Banking, Communications, Education, Government, Insurance, Life Sciences, Manufacturing, Retail, Utilities, etc.
To discuss the example of its application in banking, it is interesting to know that SAS Visual Analytics can be used to visually explore data sets of any size to spot trends, patterns and hidden insights that you can use to design a strategy, confirm a hypothesis or identify a new idea. For example, you can:
- Create more personalized customer interactions and an improved customer experience based on a better understanding of customer needs and preferences.
- Quickly and accurately perform interactive regulatory data analysis to spot patterns and trends, answer regulatory questions and deliver the exact information requested during inquiries.
More information about business application of SAS Visual Analytics can be explored at their website:
http://www.sas.com/software/visual-analytics/overview.html
This post may sound like a promo for SAS, but based on my lookout, this seems to be one of the best ways to implement Visual Analytics for any business, no matter how small or big it is; and it is this practical utility of our discussed topic 'Visual Analytics' that makes all this information even more appealing to our group.
I am sure our readers will also enjoy reading this post and knowing more about a prominent Visual Analytics vendor.
Answer is a big YES.
And, while there are a number of vendors currently providing Visual Analytics packages - both server based and cloud based, I found one vendor particularly interesting. Name of vendor is SAS.
In March 2012, SAS introduced its Big Data Visual Analytics Platform. This is how "Information Week" describes the SAS platform,
"It promises the speed-of-thought data-analysis capabilities of SAP Hana, the scalability of Hadoop, and the intuitive visual-analysis capabilities of Tableau. But what makes SAS Visual Analytics, a platform announced Thursday, truly stand out is the tie to the Cary, N.C.-based vendor's extensive predictive analytics portfolio.
SAS Visual Analytics is not an in-memory database. In fact, it liberates customers (and SAS) from dependence on an expensive third-party database because it holds data in memory on a rack of blades running the Hadoop Distributed File System. Customers won't have to know anything about configuring or running Hadoop, said SAS, because all the deployment, provisioning, and administration will be handled by the platform's SAS LASR Analytic Server. The platform has been tested with more than 20,000 columns and 1 billion rows of data, according to SAS, and to scale out, customers simply add more nodes."
Jim Davis, SAS' senior VP and chief marketing officer, elaborated further, "If you look at what SAS is doing versus others, we're not just exploring past activity, we're supporting analyses that are predictive, so people can see into the future of their business performance"
As an example, Davis said that predictive marketing campaign optimization efforts that now take eight to 10 hours in a conventional SAS environment can be completed in less than three minutes on the platform, and bank-risk calculations that formerly took 18 hours now take 15 minutes.
Moving a step ahead with current trends, on 1st May 2013, SAS took its visual analytics paltform to the cloud.
"Every IT organization is either building their own private cloud of virtualized systems on commodity hardware or looking to third-party providers," said SAS CTO Keith Collins, in a statement. "These enhancements will make it easier for users to access new SAS high-performance analytics capabilities in our current analytic product portfolio. Our goal is to decrease the time-to-value for SAS users while reducing the total cost of ownership for IT."
With these features and developments, SAS currently offers Business Analytics solutions for variety of industries as Banking, Communications, Education, Government, Insurance, Life Sciences, Manufacturing, Retail, Utilities, etc.
To discuss the example of its application in banking, it is interesting to know that SAS Visual Analytics can be used to visually explore data sets of any size to spot trends, patterns and hidden insights that you can use to design a strategy, confirm a hypothesis or identify a new idea. For example, you can:
- Create more personalized customer interactions and an improved customer experience based on a better understanding of customer needs and preferences.
- Quickly and accurately perform interactive regulatory data analysis to spot patterns and trends, answer regulatory questions and deliver the exact information requested during inquiries.
More information about business application of SAS Visual Analytics can be explored at their website:
http://www.sas.com/software/visual-analytics/overview.html
This post may sound like a promo for SAS, but based on my lookout, this seems to be one of the best ways to implement Visual Analytics for any business, no matter how small or big it is; and it is this practical utility of our discussed topic 'Visual Analytics' that makes all this information even more appealing to our group.
I am sure our readers will also enjoy reading this post and knowing more about a prominent Visual Analytics vendor.
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