In reply to Lindsay Wright.

Wow, great question. Here's a link to the product fact sheet, which might help.

Briefly, I can say it works like this. You have a huge amount of historical data (gathered from a data historian like OSISoft PI), and you have records of past incidents that caused maintenance or downtime. The product brings this data together to help you create specific analytical models that can predict when such incidents are at risk of happening again. SAS Asset Performance Analytics supports acquiring this data, developing, training, testing the models, and then putting the results into operation.

For more details, visit the product page on SAS.com.