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What's the story with high-performance analytics?

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Something we all know instinctively is that many stories are better told in images. This week, as you may have heard, SAS is proving that concept on a very large scale with roaming life-size drawings that depict the main points made by speakers at Predictive Analytics World and the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit. The theme of the project is, What's the Story with Analytics? The latest image from that series that caught my eye is this one that illustrates SAS Business Director Paul Bachteal's presentation, Technology Strategies for Big Data Analytics.

One of the things this image is telling us is that big data streams in so quickly and in so many formats that the first challenge is sorting it out to begin with. Paul recommends a process to stream, score and store that involves applying a level of analytics at the start to determine whether each piece of data is valuable enough to keep.

Once your data is sorted in this manner, you can get to work analyzing it for competitive advantage. I've heard a couple people at SAS talk about the OODA Loop also pictured above, which is a method of situational analysis that was first described by Air Force combat pilot and military strategist Colonel John Boyd.  He showed how in any competitive areana - business, combat or sports - the first competitor to quickly observe, orient, decide and act - and repeat that process consistently - has a big advantage.

And that's where big data provides an advantage. If you can be the first in your industry to apply this strategy to your data, you have a definite advantage. But how can you do that? With high-performance analytics, of course. Specifically, in-memory analytics and advanced analytics, as depicted in the image above.

Think about your current methods for decisions. Are you observing, orienting and deciding and acting based on current and accurate information? What would change if you did?

This is day 18 of our "HPA once a day" blog post series. To read more, see all of the high-performance analytics posts on this blog or follow the high-performance analytics rss feed. 

 

Tags high-performance analytics predictive analytics world
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About Author

Alison Bolen

Editor of Blogs and Social Content

Alison Bolen is an editor at SAS, where she writes and edits content about analytics and emerging topics. Since starting at SAS in 1999, Alison has edited print publications, Web sites, e-newsletters, customer success stories and blogs. She has a bachelor’s degree in magazine journalism from Ohio University and a master’s degree in technical writing from North Carolina State University.

5 Comments

  1. Oscar on

    Nice post. I liked the point made around the OODA Loop and the need for this to be as close as possible to "real-time". We are constantly investing in solving this similar problem to provide knowledge to our users.

    • Alison Bolen
      Alison Bolen on

      Thanks, Oscar. I'd love to hear about some of the ways you're helping users make decisions as quickly as possible.

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