After a week of me sharing links and blogging about my thoughts on high-performance analytics, some of you may be saying, "Yes, but how are customers using it? What are the practical benefits, already?" With that in mind, I'd like to spend some time this week pointing out customer stories that feature high-performance analytics. This first one is about a data research service in Pennsylvania.

Though developed in 1993 to support faculty research at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton Research Data Services has evolved into the leading tool for a global community of researchers seeking answers to the world's most complicated economic questions, including portfolio construction and benchmarking, financial litigation support, and event studies.

WRDS provides flexible data delivery options, including a simple but powerful Web query method, to 30,000 users in 27 countries. The platform helps them spend less time conducting research so that they can spend more time executing strategy. In fact, WRDS built its success on speed, accessibility and reliability.

So to keep up with growing demand, WRDS implemented SAS Grid Computing, a major component of SAS High-Performance Analytics. Now, WRDS can run SAS Analytics on multiple servers at the same time to tackle even the most challenging requests. And the flexible grid environment can grow incrementally to handle unexpected increases in processing demand.

As demand for business data and complex analysis surges, WRDS will apply SAS technology to let users create wide-ranging models -- including portfolio construction and benchmarks, event studies, returns, market-to-book ratios, and momentum -- at unprecedented speed.

"Adding SAS Grid Computing helps WRDS meet the growing demands of academic and financial researchers around the world," says Robert Zarazowski, Senior Director of WRDS. "As financial research and analysis becomes more complicated, WRDS continually upgrades to ensure reliability and immediate results. We know our clients expect both, and SAS Grid Computing helps us meet their demands."

This is day six of my "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.

(Trent Smith and Barry Gay also contributed to this post.)