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Gaining Insights from Your Data Faster than Ever and Sharing the Insights with Others
CONCLUSIONS PAPER
Featuring:
Justin Choy, Global Product Management, Business Intelligence, SAS Jennifer Marchi, Global Product Marketing, Business Intelligence, SAS
Table of Contents
Quickly Visualize Big Data Analysis on the iPad and the Web . . . . . 1 Introducing SAS Visual Analytics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Six Components of SAS Visual Analytics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Fast and Easy Visual Data Exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Visually Explore the Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Create Your Own Hierarchies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Choose the Best Visualization for the Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Refine the View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Understand the Distribution of the Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Identify Relationships Among Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Understand with Confidence What It Means . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Create Your Own Visual Reports and Dashboards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Publish Information to the Web and Mobile Devices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Closing Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Quickly Visualize Big Data Analysis on the iPad and the Web
Organizations are inundated with data terabytes and petabytes of it . Data pours in from every conceivable direction: from operational and transactional systems, from scanning and facilities management systems, from inbound and outbound customer contact points, from mobile media and the Web . It is structured and unstructured; it is messy and overwhelming; it flows at greater speed than ever . The optimists vision for this tidal wave of data is that organizations will be able to harvest and harness every relevant byte of it to make supremely informed decisions . However, traditional architectures and infrastructures are not up to the challenge . IT teams are burdened with ever-growing requests for data, ad hoc analyses and oneoff reports . Decision makers become frustrated because it takes hours or days to get answers to questions, if at all . More users are expecting self-service access to information in a form they can easily understand and share with others . Many challenges arise when working with this much data, said Justin Choy, Global Product Manager for Business Intelligence Solutions at SAS . Choy joined Jennifer Marchi of SAS Business Intelligence Product Marketing for a webinar in the SAS Applying Business Analytics Series . One problem is that it takes a long time to aggregate all that data . To get around this problem, IT has to create summaries of the data, or a cube with predefined hierarchies for better performance . Once you have a summary or a cube of the data, you can look at it more quickly, said Marchi . But what happens when you realize you need to look at the data in a different way than the summary or cube provides? You would typically have to turn to a data administrator or someone else in IT, and request another view of the data . In most organizations, accessing this new view will take some time, sometimes even a day, which, in turn, delays your analysis . Another problem is that some business questions are best answered by using all available and relevant data, which might be too much data to process within the decision window . Here is where high-performance computing and data visualization techniques come in . Data visualization is shaking up the world of analytics, changing the way you work with data, said Marchi . Youll find insights from your data faster than ever and be able to share those insights with others .
Learn More
View the on-demand recording of this webinar:
sas.com/reg/web/corp/1838098
Do you simply want to collect large amounts of data, or do you want to understand and take advantage of its full business value? What if you could easily access more than a billion rows of data, and then very quickly explore all of that data using visualization techniques combined with powerful analytics? You can.
SAS Visual Analytics combines an easy-to-use dynamic interface and in-memory processing to enable all types of users to visually explore big data, execute analytic correlations on billions of rows of data in minutes or seconds, understand what the data really means, and deliver the results quickly wherever needed via Web reports and mobile devices.
The speed of in-memory architecture offers tremendous benefit. Organizations can explore huge data volumes and get answers to critical questions in near-real time. SAS Visual Analytics offers a double bonus: the speed of in-memory analytics plus self-service eliminates the traditional wait for IT-generated reports.
Dan Vesset Program Vice President of Business Analytics Research, IDC
Users can explore all data, execute analytic correlations on billions of rows of data in seconds, and visually present results to the Web and mobile devices. This kind of processing speed with massive data sets makes it possible to quickly identify patterns, trends and relationships in data that were not evident before.
Build-it-yourself hierarchies eliminate the need for data analysts to constantly seek help from IT. It is easy to drill up and down through the hierarchies to slice and dice data on any level.
Autocharting capabilities help users create the best possible visualizations, including those specifically designed to display big data.
Figure 2: Interactive box plots help users quickly understand the distribution of the data.
By using box plots and correlation matrices, SAS Visual Analytics can help speed up your analytics life cycle because analytical modelers can now do variable reduction more quickly and effectively.
Justin Choy Global Product Management, Business Intelligence, SAS
On-demand What Does It Mean balloons give business users clear explanations of complex analytic functions, correlations and linear regressions in a language that they can understand.
Figure 3: Business users can create their own reports and dashboards using a highly visual workspace.
SAS strongest play with SAS Visual Analytics is to supercharge its predictive analytics capabilities. The time shift from hours to minutes promises to enable customers to do more analysis with more data and greater accuracy than ever before.
Doug Henschen InformationWeek (SAS Introduces Big Data Visual Analytics Platform, March 23, 2012)
Figure 4: Get a quick, easy visual understanding of customers or operations on your mobile device.
Closing Thoughts
Even the most common descriptive statistics calculations can become complicated when you are dealing with big data . You dont want to be restricted by column limits, storage constraints and the limited data type support of traditional data architectures . The answer is an in-memory engine that accelerates the tasks of data exploration and a graphical interface that displays the results in simple visualizations . Dealing with billions of records on a regular basis is just a reality of doing business today, and SAS understands that, said Marchi . SAS Visual Analytics allows you to explore all of your data using visual techniques combined with industry-leading analytics . Visualizations such as box plots and correlation matrices help you quickly understand the composition and relationships in your data . Large numbers of users, including those with limited analytical and technical skills, can quickly view and interact with reports via the Web or mobile devices, while IT maintains control of the underlying data and security . The net effect is the ability to accelerate the analytics life cycle and to perform the process more often, with more data all the data, if thats what best serves the purpose . By using all data that is available, users can look at more options, make more precise decisions and succeed even faster than before .
With SAS Visual Analytics, you can explore your data, discover new insights, generate reports and deliver the information to the people who need it, all from a single solution. Whatever your industry retail, insurance, health care and life sciences, or financial services SAS Visual Analytics can help.
Justin Choy Global Product Management, Business Intelligence, SAS
St ay Inf ormed
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About SAS
SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market . Through innovative solutions, SAS helps customers at more than 60,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster . Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW For more information on . SAS Business Analytics software and services, visit sas.com .
SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright 2012, SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved. 105884_S87282_0812