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October 22, 2014

SAS Visual Analytics Updated

LAS VEGAS, Nev., Oct. 22 — Controlling customer churn. Understanding marketplace sentiment. Pulling detailed graphical reports while traveling. Setting and meeting aggressive organizational goals. These challenges and more are met with enhancements to SAS Visual Analytics.

“With SAS Visual Analytics, organizations can seamlessly manipulate, analyze and view data of any size, helping them transform it into stronger customer relationships, increased sales and efficiency, even healthier patients,” said Jim Davis, SAS Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. “Enhancements in the new version of SAS Visual Analytics, based on user feedback, include expanded data sources; exploration and visualization techniques; and mobile, reporting, and management capabilities.”

What’s new?

Available now, the latest SAS Visual Analytics includes:

  • Goal seeking, considered the next step in forecasting. Users define a goal for a variable, such as unit sales or profitability. SAS Visual Analytics adjusts other variables, such as advertising spending or material cost, to graphically show what needs to occur to achieve that goal.
  • Path analysis, an analytical means to explain how a business transaction moves through a system, graphically illustrated in SAS by a Sankey diagram. This makes it easy to identify the main paths transactions follow and spot areas that need addressing to achieve the desired result. For example, an online retailer might look at how customers move through its site – where they enter, navigate within the site, and leave. Over time, this flow information can pinpoint areas within the website that could better trigger desired customer actions.
  • Deeper sentiment analysis, extending the perception of what is being said in the marketplace. SAS moves beyond counting the frequency of terms in unstructured data from warranty cards, comments and call center notes. SAS Visual Analytics can represent sentiment based on an entire document, defined terms or topics, which is virtually impossible to do manually, especially when analyzing big data.
  • High-speed loading from SAP HANA into SAS Visual Analytics’ in-memory analytic engine. A significant productivity boost for SAS customers also using HANA for operational applications, this allows analytics to run more quickly and frequently on the most current data. More frequent analysis provides more precise results, and isolates micro-trends that can be acted on quickly.
  • Mobile BI apps for sharing reports created in SAS Visual Analytics. Apps now support new operating systems and increase report interactivity for both iOS and Android devices.
  • Expanded Hadoop support. SAS Visual Analytics now supports Cloudera Impala and Pivotal HD distributions of the Hadoop open source big data infrastructure.

Since its 2012 unveiling, organizations large and small worldwide have recognized the power of data exploration and visualization. More than 2,600 sites have licensed SAS Visual Analytics, and this growth continues.

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