SAS Stays a Step Ahead

SAS Stays a Step Ahead

Although SAS was founded more than 35 years ago, it’s now coming into its own. Or rather, the mainstream market is finally coming to SAS.

With a laser-like focus on high-end analytics, SAS has never felt compelled to follow the crowd. It has quietly provided analytical workbenches and data access tools for statisticians and other wonky number crunchers, building a $3 billion business along the way. Now with the big data and analytics tsunami washing over companies worldwide, SAS is well positioned to capitalize on the almost insatiable demand for actionable intelligence.

Eager to lead this new market and not let agile upstarts steal its thunder, SAS has transformed itself into an agile competitor in its own right, spawning innovative technologies, products and applications designed to help companies turn data into insights and action. One sign of its new vision and voice: SAS has dropped the “Institute” from its corporate brand in favor of a more modern, concise, and confident “SAS.”

SAS Analyst Event. These insights were validated during a SAS Analyst event that I recently attended in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. During the short time that I spent with SAS executives, product managers, and customers, I was impressed with SAS’ strategy to compete for mindshare and marketshare in a fast-moving, increasingly mainstream market. SAS is enhancing an already overflowing product portfolio with new tools and capabilities to capitalize on the trends towards cloud, mobile, big data, Hadoop, visualization, open APIs, streaming analytics and packaged intelligence applications.

Streaming In-Memory Analytics

One of the more eye-catching technologies SAS executives discussed last week was its LASR in-memory analytics server. SAS will soon release its third generation of LASR, which will run natively in Hadoop and a hosted cloud environment, and most interestingly, will integrate an event stream processing (ESP) engine. The ESP will perform lightweight on-the-fly analytics on thousands of events per second and then push data into the LASR server where analysts can run more advanced algorithms.

The “Analytics of  Things.” The combination in-memory/ESP server, running in the cloud, positions SAS well for the next big wave in digital computing: the internet of things (IoT). Using industry research, SAS executive vice president and chief marketing officer, Jim Davis, estimated the number devices connected to the internet will explode from about 10 billion today to 30 billion by 2020. This is a huge opportunity for SAS, which has marshaled the infrastructure, algorithms and machine smarts to become an integral player in analyzing machine data in IoT deployments. “Our opportunity is in the ‘analytics of things’ not connecting billions of devices,” says Davis.

Cyber Analytics 

The potential for SAS in the IoT (or AoT) market is most palpable when examining SAS Cyber Analytics, a new packaged application that SAS will role out next month (April, 2015.) The application, which is designed to process billions of network events in near real-time, detects reconnaissance activity of hackers so security administrators can intervene before hackers can exploit network vulnerabilities.

In a recent four-day test with a large financial institution, SAS analyzed 25 billion machine-to-machine events that it captured using its ESP engine at a rate of 180,000 events per second. The application created a profile of each networked machine and spit out alerts when a machine’s networking activity deviated from an expected norm. Wouldn’t it be nice to catch the bad guys before they actually do harm? That’s the potential of SAS Cyber Analytics.

A Step Ahead

However, what really sets SAS apart is its portfolio of packaged analytic applications, which includes Cyber Analytics. Rather than just selling analytical tools, SAS embeds intelligence into business applications designed to tackle fraud, risk, and money laundering and better understand customer behavior for marketing applications, among other things. It has also developed intelligence applications in many vertical industries, especially finance, energy, government, and education. 

Embedding analytics is the long-term direction of the industry. And while other vendors have chased the technology du jour, SAS long ago made the decision to invest in the future. And in that sense, SAS has always been a step ahead of the crowd.  

Wayne Eckerson

Wayne Eckerson is an internationally recognized thought leader in the business intelligence and analytics field. He is a sought-after consultant and noted speaker who thinks critically, writes clearly and presents...

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