At the 2nd Annual Disney Analytics & Optimization Summit last week in Orlando, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight shared real-world examples of companies using analytics to achieve amazing results.

A major US retailer analyzes and optimizes its prices -- all 270 million of them -- each week using SAS High-Performance Computing. This big data challenge once took more than 30 hours to compute. With SAS, it now takes two.

"A bank in Singapore using high-performance computing from SAS was able to reduce the processing time for recalculating its entire risk portfolio from 18 hours to 12 minutes," Goodnight told the Disney Analytics Summit audience.

Decision makers need answers faster than ever, and must make sense of growing volumes of data -- on customers, operations, risk and more. With this "Big Data" challenge, the right analytic environment is key.

Goodnight (bio), who recently was described by Forbes as the "King of Analytics," is founder and CEO of SAS, the leader in Business Analytics. He was joined for his Aug. 30th keynote by Jim Davis (bio), SAS Senior VP and CMO, as they discussed "The High-Performance Organization: How Today's Leading Organizations are Leveraging Technologies & Analytics."

The Disney Analytics and Optimization Summit 2011 brought together some of the most talented analytical Cast Members within The Walt Disney Company to share best practices and learning in the areas of Measurement, Forecasting, Optimization and Pricing. The Summit was also open to analytical professionals from around the world. SAS was a platinum sponsor of the event.

Goodnight and Davis also delivered a live demonstration of SAS High-Performance Analytics, developed to solve complex business problems that require sophisticated, high-end analytics applied to big data.