ACADEMIA

SAS will add high-performance text mining to its powerful in-memory analytics software in the third quarter of 2012. SAS High-Performance Analytics, appliance-ready software for Teradata and EMC Greenplum, performs complex analytics on big data.

SAS High-Performance Analytics, which began shipping last year, will be enhanced in August with new text-mining support to provide companies with insight gained from unstructured data in emails, social media, call center logs, documents and other information.

Unstructured data, accounting for more than 80 percent of today's data, can be difficult to analyze, often swamping traditional computer architectures. SAS High-Performance Analytics will provide new capabilities to address even the largest text repositories, known as "big data," revealing hidden relationships within unstructured data. This helps organizations uncover potential opportunities -- new lines of business, untapped customer segments, quality and client satisfaction issues -- and profits.

"Enterprise data assets have grown exponentially in recent years, and these massive amounts of structured and unstructured data require two things to be valuable for decision making," said Surya Mukherjee, Senior Analyst at Ovum. "First, the data volume must be abstracted from users so that they can analyze very large data sets without having to worry about the plumbing. And second, these insights must be delivered quickly to decision makers before a business opportunity is lost or a risky situation develops into a catastrophe.

"High-performance analytics like those offered by SAS have the potential to generate significant value from data, providing answers in near-real time and delivering competitive advantage," he said.

SAS High-Performance Analytics slashes analysis time from days to hours, from minutes to seconds, without sampling or using less-than-ideal analytic techniques, even on billions of rows of data. This technology will proliferate across SAS' broad product line for faster, better answers within enterprises facing tight competition and increased regulation.

"High-performance analytics is the most significant SAS technology advance in at least 10 years," said SAS CEO Jim Goodnight. "We realized that organizations were accumulating massive amounts of data that could provide answers to questions they could never ask before. The analysis took so long to process, answers were irrelevant by the time the computer spit them out. High-performance analytics provides answers when the information is still useful and leaves time to explore multiple possibilities."

Limitless Insight

"With high-performance analytics applied to their text data, companies can greatly improve decision making," said Radhika Kulkarni, SAS Vice President of Advanced Analytics. "For example, a large financial services firm with millions of customer accounts and thousands of products can merge customer call-center transcripts with demographic and financial data to improve response rates from marketing campaigns with SAS. Add to that the speed of SAS High-Performance Analytics, and marketers can interactively adjust and fine-tune scenarios to find the best way to reach customers."

Enterprises are finding real value in faster answers:

-- Using SAS High-Performance Analytics, a major US retailer delivers store-specific pricing involving more than 270 million item prices every week. What once took more than 30 hours to compute now takes two with SAS High-Performance Analytics. The retailer can then optimize its prices more frequently, respond to market conditions and maximize revenue.

-- An Asian bank valued its complex capital markets portfolio of 100,000 instruments across multiple time horizons with more than 100,000 scenarios in less than 30 minutes with high-performance analytics technology from SAS, calculating on-demand, intra-day portfolio risk.

SAS High-Performance Analytics could be highly beneficial in many other scenarios, such as manufacturing. A manufacturer using SAS could build predictive models from product and parts catalogs, which contain millions of items with full text descriptions. The models could then be used to match new customer service requests with appropriate information, and prioritize ordering needs in near-real time.

The SAS High-Performance Analytics product family includes other solutions, such as SAS High-Performance Risk, SAS Visual Analytics and its patent-pending SAS LASR Analytic Server. With these solutions organizations can explore all data, analyze billions of rows of data in just minutes or seconds, and visually present results. Business professionals can use a graphic interface in SAS Visual Analytics to explore data without IT support.

Road to better decisions

Today, organizations around the world rely on SAS Analytics to make better decisions, whether fighting fraud, managing risk or improving road safety.

Spain's National Observatory for Road Security, Direccion General de Trafico, needed advanced analytics that integrated well with existing infrastructure, said Anna M Ferrer Gimenez, former Director of the agency.

"SAS matched that criteria and had the analytics power that we needed. Now, thanks to SAS, we can analyze traffic accident data with the best analytics tools. This helps us to make better informed decisions to achieve our main objective: reducing accident rates and saving lives," she said.

With SAS High-Performance Analytics, organizations can now make crucial decisions faster than ever.

Today's announcement came at The Premier Business Leadership Series event in Amsterdam, a business conference presented by SAS that brings together more than 700 attendees from the public and private sectors to share ideas on critical business issues.