After some discussion with SAS Product Marketing yesterday, we devised this response to everyone's question about the Business Analytic differentiator that SAS provides.
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Business Intelligence is one of the key components from SAS that ties into a suite of analytic techniques, information handling and performance infrastructures needed to deliver the insights through relevant Business Intelligence offerings. The majority of Business Intelligence systems provide general reporting capabilities (dashboards, web reports, etc.) to a wider group of users.
Business Analytical systems provide everything BI can do plus an additional level of functionality – the statistical analysis tools to complete tasks such as forecasting, regression, and modeling. Business Analytics from SAS includes ALL the key areas needed to successfully implement data driven decision making: Information Management, Analytics, Business Intelligence and tailored business solutions. The Business Analytics Framework is empowered by the High Performance Analytics capabilities from SAS.
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'Intelligence' and 'Analytics' can appear as very similar terms but in my mind (and in my thesaurus) they are not. The term 'Intelligence' is another word for Information, News, Communication. Therefore the tools included within a Business Intelligence system would be to provide that information or news to effectively communicate to a large audience. Whereas 'Analysis', synonymous with examination, evaluation, investigation, and scrutiny, is the actual task of slicing and dicing data, understanding past-present-future by exploring everything available. SAS Business Analytics includes High Performance Analytics capabilities. When given to business analysts, they can perform all the investigation and scrutiny their hearts can handle!
What do you think?
4 Comments
If business analysis softwares are way ahead and more useful than BI. Whats the use of still promoting or using BI softwares?
Great breakdown! I see Intelligence tools answering questions like "What Happened?" and "How many, how often, where?". Then I see Analytical tools answering questions like "Why is this happening?" and "What will happen next?".
Angela : if 'Intelligence' is another word for Information, News, Communication, then would "Reporting" be a subset of "Intelligence"? Reporting, after all, communicates data to stakeholders.
Yes Divyesh! I would agree, that is why SAS is set apart from other BI vendors who really perform only the reporting task. SAS has the ability to complete all of the analytical work in a single platform.