If you've heard anything from SAS in recent months, then you've heard about high-performance analytics and the new SAS Visual Analytics offering. SAS has taken the high-performance analytics message around the world in a series of recent "road shows".

From the start, this project has enjoyed a different development process than most traditional SAS software. The development team moves fast, responding to customer feedback and industry needs at an unparalleled pace for a SAS offering. They are Agile with a capital "A".

During a SAS Global Forum Tech Talk I sat down with Nascif Abousalh-Neto, one of the development leads for SAS Visual Analytics. He demonstrated the product for us, and he also described his team's development process.

(cc CodeProject)

My favorite part of the story is that the visual analytics project did not begin as a vehicle for high-performance analytics. Its original charter was simply to provide an intuitive UI to SAS' analytics capabilities, without requiring much intervention from an organization's IT staff. When SAS CEO Jim Goodnight asked them to focus on delivering results against big data from a high-performance environment, the team didn't miss a beat. Now Dr. Goodnight personally demos the software to audiences everywhere. That's a testament to Dr. G's technology street cred, but it also shows the solid result of an Agile process.