Big Data and SAS Analytics

Big data is a popular term used to describe the exponential growth and availability of data, both structured and unstructured. Wal-Mart handles more than a million customer transactions each hour and imports those into databases estimated to contain more than 2.5 petabytes of data, Facebook handles more than 250 million photo uploads and the interactions of 800 million active users with more than 900 million objects (pages, groups, etc.) each day and more than 5 billion people are calling, texting, tweeting and browsing on mobile phones worldwide. Big data is important because it will transform how we manage our enterprises. In today’s world, most of the decisions of management are based on statistical facts because more data lead to more accurate analyses and more accurate analyses led to more confident decision making. Thus it is believed that companies that rely heavily on data analysis are likely to outperform others. According to an Accenture worldwide survey, 64% of the executives surveyed said that big data has changed decision-making in their organizations and 25% expect it will do so over the next two years. But still, data-driven decision making is often difficult for executives used to relying on their intuition.

In 2001 industry analyst Doug Laney defined the three Vs of big data: volume, velocity and variety, but SAS has added two more dimensions to it variability and complexity.

SAS features for Big Data: According to Philip Carter, Associate Vice President of IDC Asia Pacific ” Big data technologies describe a new generation of technologies and architectures, designed to economically extract value from very large volumes of a wide variety of data by enabling high-velocity capture, discovery and/or analysis.” These are three key SAS technologies that I believe can help you get a handle on big data:

A. Information management: SAS Information Management technology and implementation services enable organizations to fully exploit and govern their information assets to achieve competitive differentiation and sustained business success. Three key components work for this:

1. Unified data management capabilities, including data governance, data integration, data quality and metadata management.

2. Complete analytics management, including model management, model deployment, monitoring and governance of the analytics information asset.

3. Effective decision management capabilities to easily embed information and analytics results directly into business processes while managing the necessary business rules, workflow and event logic.

B. High-performance analytics: SAS Visual Analytics help to see correlations and patterns in big data quickly, identify opportunities for further analysis and easily publish reports. Because it’s not just the fact that you have big data, it’s what you can do with the data to improve decision making that will result in organizational gains.

C. Flexible deployment options: Flexible deployment models bring choice. High-performance analytics from SAS can be deployed in the cloud (with SAS or another provider), on a dedicated high-performance analytics appliance or in the existing on-premises IT infrastructure – whichever best serves your organization’s big data requirements.

SAS has reinvented its architecture and software to satisfy the demands of big data, SAS provides a set of preconfigured business solutions and business analytic solutions that greatly simplify the most complex analytical problems, including those based on big data.

There is a rapid growth in demand of big data professionals in the market that led most of the B-Schools to include big data related programs in their syllabus, the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business began its Master of Business Analytics program, in an interview Amy Hillman, dean at Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business, said interest in a year-old master’s program in business analytics has spread “like wildfire.”, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management offers several courses in analytics and in India as well many schools have introduced formal courses in analytics. Leading institutes in this field are IITs, SP Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai and the IIM-B, which, jointly with SAS Institute, has floated an executive program on Analytics. According to a recent study by Gartner 4.4 million IT jobs worldwide will be needed to support big data by 2015. That’s a lot of potential employment for the right people.

Because of its strong analytics capabilities, the big data is also considered as new and another form of artificial intelligence.