Every year, SAS hosts the Premier Business Leadership Series, which focuses on gathering the most innovative corporate minds from around the world to tackle and discuss the latest challenges and trends within the corporate world.  With SAS being used in 90 of the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 list, the conference content is usually geared toward the larger of the corporate spectrum…until now.

The growing impact of the SMB world is clear when we see the big guys taking notice, and that is exactly what is happening in Las Vegas this week.  There will be a ton of great presentations but, what has really caught my attention is a panel discussion focused on analyzing how young, innovative companies are growing their business.   Sitting on the panel are Authur Sweetser, CMO of 89 Degrees, Tamara Gruzbarg, Senior Director of Analytics & Research at Gilt Groupe, Matthias Kehder, CEO of Modern Analytics, and moderated by business super mind, Mark Jeffries.

Of course, I will be covering the panel and posting all of the delicious take-aways for the SMB audience later next week but, before that, I wanted to open up some of the panel questions to you and get your insight.  I mean, you all are the ones down in the SMB trenches…these questions are really for you. So, here we go:

• What are the biggest obstacles facing small/younger companies today?
• Why do you think analytics are still not mainstream in many smaller/younger companies?
• Are analytics becoming more pervasive within organizations or are they still limited to certain pockets? Does this help or hinder your business?
• Any examples of how insights within the data have helped you become more innovative, efficient or profitable? Any cases where intuition was counter to the direction you needed to take?
• How would you classify analytics: as “nice to have” or “must have”?

You don’t have to be a multibillion-dollar organization to derive value from analytics. Through this panel, I hope other SMBs and startups can  learn why these young, innovative companies turned to strategic analytics solutions to be more competitive and optimize their data into a game changer decisions for their business. Clearly, SMBs have an enormous impact on the global marketplace...is the presence of SMBs at the Premier Business Leadership Conference further validation of that?