SAS users help drive innovation, providing feedback on SAS products through various mediums, including customer advisory boards, communities, SASware Ballot® ideas, and SAS Global Forum. The SAS User Feedback Award is presented annually to a user whose recommendations and insights lead to significant improvements to SAS software.

This year SAS is recognizing Roshan Shah of Georgia Pacific for his outstanding contributions to enhancing SAS software, specifically SAS Event Stream Processing. By continuing to ask both inspiring and challenging questions, Roshan has helped provide us new answers that help customers reimagine their businesses and maximize success.

Roshan has led his team in extensively using this platform to develop, deploy and operationalize thousands of machine learning models to reduce downtime of critical assets and improve overall operational efficiency. To provide immediate notification and minimize latency, over 90% of these analytical models are deployed via SAS Event Stream Processing. Throughout the year, Roshan has provided valuable feedback and insight on the goals and challenges that Georgia Pacific faces to make SAS Event Stream Processing better all around.

His input has resulted in many improvements to the software, specifically around operational efficiency. Enhancements include ensuring the SAS Event Stream Processing XML Servers can scale to meet current and future demands, executing from 3,000 models to 10,000 models and beyond, as well as best practices and guidance on the use of Event Messaging to enable scaling IoT data connectivity. These features helped Georgia Pacific find new answers to its toughest challenges in order to grow and expand.

Today's announcement is in conjunction with SAS Global Forum 2021, the world's premier AI and analytics conference. Due to the ongoing pandemic, this year’s conference is once again virtual and free.