Visual Analytics – insights on a speed of sight

 

While many organizations across the industries have generated tremendous value of using analytical technologies to solve their business challenges, there are many who have simply failed in generating value from the analytics. There are many reasons for this failure and most of these reasons can be put under single banner “business was not on-board”. And they were not on-board either because they don’t have trust in analytics or they have a misconception of what they can get out of the analytics.

With new analytical technologies aimed purely at business folk there is hope that analytical maturity will fasten, gap between business and technical users will narrow, and that will lead to deeper analytical explorations.

One of these new technologies is Visual Analytics by SAS Institute. Many companies have accumulated vast ammounts of data and they simply don’t have means to do any analytical processing on full data at one time. That leads to overburdened IT, and to frustration among decision makers who are not getting quick enough answers to their business questions. SAS Visual Analytics combines easy-to-use interface and robust in-memory technology to enable users to explore all of the data and to and extract new insights through on-the-fly reporting capabilities before delivering results via Web reports and mobile devices.

What I like about SAS Visual Analyitcs is how easy is to do data exploration, and to generate dynamically linked reports. New “auto-charting” capabilitiy automatyically choose best report for the specific type of data items that was chosen. Everything is drag-and-drop, so if user know what he wants execution is lightning fast even on billions of records due  to the ability to take advantage of massively parallel environments . And once you get desired output - with the few clicks you can surface these insights or reports o your i-pad or android tablets. This is in my view will really bring analytics to new audiences and hopefully it will open the door for more and more business-driven analytical initiatives.

Goran Dragosavac