SAS Debuts Visual Analytics Offering

Acknowledging the fact that its users are "on Outlook and on mobile devices," business analytics software and services company SAS rolled out SAS Visual Analytics to meet the demand for deeper insights into high-volume data.

The newest addition to the SAS High-Performance Analytics portfolio, the solution is "completely new architecture from SAS [built to] bring data in-memory" to nontechnical users who need real-time insight into lines of business through things like visual reports, according to Randy Guard, vice president of product management for SAS.

Some of the major components of the release include:

• Environment manager, allowing for management of users, security and data;
• Visual analytics explorer, an ad hoc discovery and visualization tool;
• Mobile BI, which allows users to access native, interactive reports on iOS or Android devices;
• The Hub, which serves as a central location to launch SAS Visual Analytics elements;
• Designer, to help create standard or custom reports and dashboards; and
• SAS LASR Analytic Server, an embedded Hadoop Distributed File System.

SAS Visual Analytics was designed to extract viable business opportunities that lie in mounds of unstructured and structured data. For instance, a retail marketing campaign manager could use the solution to determine best-offer recommendations for customers. Or banks and capital market firms can cut through data and give its retail bankers and financial advisors insight into customer finance.

Antoine Georges, vice president of analytics at Virgin Mobile USA, called SAS Visual Analytics a beneficial means of "incorporating the massive amount of information in our call detail records into our models, but also the value of scoring and targeting our customer base in real time with the most relevant offers," in a statement.

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