Last week at SAS Global Forum, SAS demonstrated its commitment to bring powerful business analytics to customers wherever they choose to work, including on the desktop, on the Web, and on mobile devices such as the iPhone. In that spirit, SAS today announced plans to port its powerful analytics software to a new platform: the Nintendo® Wii®.
"The Wii represents an opportunity to reach a new generation of end users," said Randy Guard, Senior Marketing Director at SAS. "With this offering in place, our customers will never have to leave the sofa again, except to grab some more Diet Dr. Pepper."
The SAS Business Analytics platform will roll out gradually for use on the Wii, in the form of various new game titles for the ubiquitous gaming system. The first round of titles includes:
- Wii (Goodness of) Fit
- BI Hero - Legends of Reporting
- Animal CrossTabs
- Mario Kart- BI Dashboard edition
- Grand Theft Autoregressive Models
In addition to these easy-to-use titles, SAS will allow SAS programmers to create sophisticated programs by using the Wii remote. "It’s going to be great," said Paul Kent, Vice President of the SAS R&D Platform Technologies group. "To create a DATA step, you raise and lower your arm quickly, while pressing the 'B' button. To create a PROC step, you swing the ol' Wii-mote back and forth, like so, while holding the A button. To create a macro program, you have to do some tricky footwork on the Wii Balance Board – a notion that macro programmers are quite used to."
The first edition will also include several "Mii" characters to serve as avatars in the new offering, including Jim Goodnight, Jim Davis, and Eddie – the guy who delivers M&Ms to the SAS breakrooms.
The SAS platform for the Nintendo Wii is scheduled to ship one year from now: April 1, 2010. Customers who are interested in serving as early adopters can contact SAS to get on a waiting list.
13 Comments
As I understand it, the same technology that allows SAS to be accessed via an iPhone will also allow the soon-to-be-released Nintendo DSi to use EG on both screens
I believe the version selling in France will be ported to the "Oui" platform, no?
Chris:
I'm especially looking forward to finally being able to deploy JMP on my Wii (Goodness of) Fit. Up until now, that hardware stack has come with a warning that this behavior was prohibited.
We managed to emulate this by running SAS over Citrix using Opera as a browser downloaded to the Wii. It worked well for Enterprise Guide, but data-step coding was trickier.
My battery burned out.
I guess if you stomp really, really hard like an angry three year old, you'll get some serious SAS macro code. Blabber, like you are speaking in tongues, and you get a customized text mining dictionary.
Now I understand that visit by the SAS product team to Santa's workshop. It wasn't just to close the Kris Kringle SAS Analytics sale, but to get the elves to beta test the SAS Wii-motes! The question is - will there be enough SAS Wii dashboards to go around this Christmas or do I have to line up now?
It was certainly an innovative idea and good insight to roll out SAS on the Wii, which has now become one of the most popular gaming consoles. This would certainly prove beneficial for SAS on the long term & would certainly help in improving its popularity.
There is a version for the PlayStation 3?
Pingback: Greatest hits from 2009 - The SAS Dummy
Pingback: “You have Jail” - The SAS Dummy
Pingback: Netflix streaming: Making every minute count - The SAS Dummy
Pingback: SAS on a video game system? I called it. - The SAS Dummy