Hello everyone. My name is Jerry Oglesby and I’m the Sr. Director of SAS’ Global Academic and Certification Program and the co-chair of SAS’ 14th annual analytics conference, Analytics 2011. For those of you joining us in Orlando starting today (Monday), we’ve put together an impressive program for you and are looking forward to seeing you all in the next couple of days. This blog post, however, is really for those of you can’t be with us for the event.

Though it’s the first year for the conference under the name Analytics, the event is actually in its 14th year. For the first 13 years, the conference was known as the M-series of data mining events. Late last year, however, we made the decision to change the name to the Analytics Conference Series, a new umbrella that allows us to expand session topics to all areas of analytics, including forecasting, data visualization, data mining, text analytics and optimization. Orlando kicks off the series in the United States this year. Next spring, the European version of the Analytics Conference Series takes place June 14-15, in Cologne, Germany.

As for this year’s conference, we kicked off Sunday morning with SAS certification testing and five pre-conference training classes. More than 400 attendees arrived early to attend the sessions. On Monday, the conference officially begins. Over the next two days we’ll offer attendees two keynote talks, ten featured presentations, and 40 breakout sessions. With more than 1,000 attendees from over 400 organizations in 29 countries and 47 U.S. states, Analytics 2011 is the largest analytics conference of its kind. The conference is unique in that it combines the latest academic research in analytics with the most notable best practices and business applications across a number of industries. While the majority of attendees are SAS users, the conference is really for the analytics community at large; in fact, about 20% of our attendees do not even use SAS. The conference concludes Wednesday through Friday, when we’ll offer nearly ten post conference training opportunities covering virtually every area of analytics.

I’m particularly excited about Monday’s opening keynote talk. The presentation, delivered by SAS’ own Radhika Kulkarni and Oliver Schabenberger, will highlight how companies can use high-end analytics to tackle big data business problems. The presentation, High-Performance Analytics: Empowering the Analytical Expert, will discuss ways to minimize data movement for model creation and deployment; how to reduce duplication across the enterprise; algorithmic design for concurrent code execution in distributed and non-distributed environments; and how to seamlessly incorporate programming language and user interfaces. It’s a timely topic that I’m certain will be well received.

I plan to share more about this talk, and many others, as I blog during the next couple of days. We’ll even try to post slides and video interviews in real time, so stay tuned.

All the best from sunny Orlando,

Jerry