For all of you who have ever been to Heidelberg, location of the headquarters of SAS Germany and the place where I live, you might know that a town called Mannheim is nearby. Some might even know that Mannheim is the place where a genius German engineer called Carl Benz
I just returned from the largest annual gathering of upstream oil and gas technology professionals. Some of the brightest minds in resource exploration – from graduate students to 50-year professionals – enjoyed the masquerade carnival that filled the exhibit hall on Halloween night. But the real entertainment was in the sessions.
Imagine you are standing on the corner of a very busy intersection in the middle of downtown New York City. It's the peak of rush hour and you need to get across the street in a hurry. And, oh yeah, you're blindfolded. This was one of the various scenarios discussed
Before a group of reporters representing countries from as far away as Mexico, Brazil and Japan, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight touted the company’s continued growth, innovation and unmatched culture during its annual Media Day event at SAS world headquarters in Cary, Tuesday. “In 2011, SAS has continued to grow as
When you Google “big data,” you get big data about big data. We are living in the age of information overload, which creates many challenges, including big data, information silos and integration issues. It was my great pleasure to introduce a panel of experts at The Premier Business Leadership Series
The Premier Business Leadership Series in Orlando was the backdrop for a number of news announcements from SAS. Here's a rundown: 1. Big Data research A new survey has found that organizations with formal data management strategies derive more value from data assets and outperform competitors. The survey, Big Data:
At our latest Power Series event in Manhattan, one of the teams took a futuristic approach to addressing data challenges. They described the need for a “compliance box” that front ends the data management process that integrates, cleanses and ensure data integrity across a number of different, typically silo’d data
We’ve talked a lot lately about the overwhelming tide of data – velocity, volume and complexity – that organizations are dealing with. SAS wanted to know how organizations are currently managing "big data," what resources would be required in the future and how to plan for those needs. The Economist
A women’s specialty retailer operating more than 1,000 boutiques, Chico’s FAS, Inc. was faced with a significant challenge: reducing the number of markdowns while more effectively targeting its middle- to high-income clientele. To achieve these goals, the company needed to optimize its prices and more effectively target its most valuable customers,
The Platform Development team in SAS R&D has a vision for how SAS applications will be built and deployed in the future. It’s a vision that accounts for recent trends in cloud computing, high performance computing, open APIs and smart phone app stores. It’s also a vision that promises to
Rome was not built in a day. Similarly, high-performance analytics is a product of many cumulative architectural, computational and analytical advances. The ability to solve complex business problems by applying algorithms from multiple disciplines to increasingly large volumes of data of all types - both structured and unstructured - is
In preparation for TDWI San Diego, I was finalizing my schedule and checking out what some of my favorite TDWI instructors are up to for San Diego. I'll be blogging about my fave classes from these instructors all next week. This evening I caught up on Cindi Howson 's blog
SIFMA held its Dodd-Frank Impact Analysis Summit in New York City on July 13, bringing together almost 500 industry participants for a day-long discussion just prior to the first anniversary of the Act’s passage. In addition to Tim Ryan (SIFMA CEO), the summit included guest speakers Larry Kudlow, Evan Thomas
A popular custom among the diminutive hobbits of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth was giving away presents on their birthdays instead of receiving them. This week, SAS toasted its birthday, celebrating 35 years as an analytic innovator, by giving its customers a gift: the latest version of SAS analytics and data management
The SIFMA Financial Services Technology Leaders Forum and Expo came to Midtown New York City in mid-June to more fanfare than in the past few years with speakers including Jim Cramer, Art Cashin, Gillian Tett, senior executives from capital markets firms including NYSE Euronext and DTCC, and regulators from the
In the world of technology, 2011 is unremarkable in some ways. As with every year, there are hot trends – hype, buzzwords and “must-have” technologies. Some might even assign analytics to the trending category this year. 2011 marks the 35th anniversary of the founding of SAS. For the past 35
The basic big data problem is simple to understand: we create too much data to store and analyze it all. The problem gets bigger, however, when you consider the related factors: our problems themselves are getting bigger, the analytics needed to solve them are more complex and the data is
Director of Business Strategy for the Orlando Magic, Anthony Perez, recently spoke at the SAS Global Forum Executive Conference on how analytics is molding the NBA - both on and off the court. The Orlando Magic is currently one of the top teams in the NBA, and that is no
In this panel discussion, a diverse group of companies from different industries are finding profitable growth opportunities through analytics. We’re joined by: Jim Foreman, Director of Circulation Analytic, Staples Halina Karachuk, VP Innovation, AXA Equitable Life Barb Buettin, Director, CRM – Enterprise Information Management, Chico’s Nelle Schantz, Sr. Marketing Director,
After talking about SAS products and development roadmaps with industry experts at the SAS Analysts Conference in Steamboat Springs earlier this month and now as we're preparing for SAS Global Forum next week, I have to say how proud I am of the SAS Research and Development and Product Management
We are getting ready to kick off this year's Applying Business Analytics Webinar Series. You can participate in the monthly live webinars and hear directly from organizations that are actively applying analytics, BI and data management to create business value. We promise it will be worth your time! The series
Today, financial services organizations are swamped in data because of regulatory requirements, years of rapid growth, mergers and acquisitions, and Internet-accessible data. This flood has many firms struggling with disparate sources and varying degrees of data quality. There are several reasons your organization might choose to integrate its data, including,
Jerry Williams is a Project Manager for Environmental Sustainability at SAS. What are you working on right now? There is so much going on…. No two days are ever quite the same. Some of my priority projects include: Balancing expectations of employees so passionate about stewardship while giving fair consideration
Data integration is not data warehousing, says Claudia Imhoff in a post that discusses data quality, master data management and operational data stores. According to Imhoff: None of these is a data warehouse project. They should stand on their own two feet as independent initiatives that just happen to make
