Who doesn’t love a good makeover story? We know we do at BNL Consulting—and so do our customers. That’s why we’re thrilled with SAS Visual Analytics sophisticated new look and feel as well as its expanded functionality. SAS Visual Analytics takes advantage of the performance and scalability of the SAS Viya platform, providing a Business Intelligence framework that can work with massive amounts of data, bringing forward the powerful analytics that has made SAS the market leader in this space.

With SAS Viya, we get an even more unified platform with a consistent look and feel across applications which have been rewritten as zero client HTML5 web applications. The visualizations that are available in SAS Visual Analytics are embedded within the other tools as well. Now customers—from analysts to business executives—can point and click all from their web browser to get the information they need to make better business decisions right out of the box.

The newest version of SAS Visual Analytics provides direct access to an in-memory set of data as well. The process of loading data that can be made available to SAS Visual Analytics has been streamlined to give users fast access to information to create dashboards, reports and perform ad-hoc analysis. And because the application is so intuitive, users can be up and running in a matter of hours, not days.

In what has become a highly competitive market for business analytics—with BI tools being ubiquitous—SAS Visual Analytics running on SAS Viya provides a formidable means to analyze data, helping organizations tell a story—simply and easily. With SAS Visual Analytics on their side, customers will no longer need to reach outside the platform and make additional purchases. The unified platform is extremely compelling.

New features and benefits

SAS Visual Analytics customers will also benefit from a number of new features, including:

• A new look and feel that provides drag and drop layout controls to size dashboard objects. New graph, chart, and map objects offer greater control of the properties to make them presentation-ready.
• Objects on the screen can “talk” to each other, listening in on object events to filter accordingly in unison.
• With no more LASR server, the process of loading and accessing data is much faster, with even better performance than the previous in-memory LASR server architecture.
• There is now the ability to create custom HTML5/JavaScript objects, which can be hooked up to the data loaded in memory (data-driven content). HTML/JavaScript/D3 has become the standard in web development, opening up almost countless options for SAS to visualize data and turn it into useful information. Before, custom development was sometimes needed, but SAS Visual Analytics can handle a customer’s needs, all with point and click, drag and drop.

Next steps

When organizations use BI tools, they expect appealing visuals on top of rich data that can tell a story. SAS Visual Analytics on SAS Viya delivers in a big way, ushering in a new era for SAS BI users. We encourage customers to try out SAS Visual Analytics and see for themselves. We have found that a successful path is to start with small-scale proof of concepts, designed to satisfy a few critical uses. As you become more comfortable, expand to include more users and different types of projects.

With all the software options out there—both COTS and Open Source—we want customers to feel confident that SAS Visual Analytics for SAS Viya is the right choice. For more details, you can contact BNL at BNLConsulting.com.