Category Archives: SAS

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Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics

Gartner

Right from the name change of Gartner’s usual Magic Quadrant for BI to include analytics system, this year’s report has a lot to cheer about. There is more clear definitions on what makes up Business Intelligence and Analytics systems. Its broken down into 3 categories: Integration, Infomartion Delivery and Analysis.

The image is self descriptive and more info on each vendor is available as apart of this 35 page report.

Gartner – Worldwide BI and Analytics Market up 4%

“Even though growth was nowhere near the levels of 2008, and by no means immune to the recession, BI showed that it is not as cyclical as many other software areas, recording healthy growth in one of the toughest years recorded in software history,” said Dan Sommer, senior research analyst at Gartner. “The dominant vendors continued to put BI, analytics and PM front and center of their messaging. Organizations largely continued their BI projects, hoping that resulting transparency and insight would enable cost-cuts and improved productivity and agility. However, there is no doubt pressure has intensified on deal sizes and price points on new sales throughout the year.”

The top five vendors continued to make up most of the market with 71 percent market share. “The large vendors held their own. As IT is consolidating, BI spending often went to a few strategic vendors. However, the application-centric vendors didn’t have the same up-selling momentum as they did in 2008,” said Mr. Sommer.

More here and the full paper can be reached here.

Who’s Hot and Who’s Not in BI, Analytics?

A blogpost on BI Vendors by Doug Henschen on Intelligent Enterprise -

In the “Advanced Analytics” camp, IDC’s stats show that Microsoft, SPSS and SAS were the fastest-growing vendors among the top five with 20.0%, 17.8% and 15.2% sales increases, respectively (see chart at left). Visual Numerics grew 9.3% and Teradata treaded water with 3.0% growth. Mind you, SAS and SPSS are in a league of their own with $440 million and $205 million in revenue, respectively, while all the others were in the Single-A, sub-$50 million ballpark.

SAS has plenty to crow about in IDC’s stats, so it has once again purchased rights to distribute an excerpt of the report as a free download. Unfortunately, this year’s excerpt only covers the top-five vendors in each category (last year’s excerpt covered 21 BI tools vendors and 13 analytics vendors). If you’re prepared to pay $3,500, you can purchase the complete “Worldwide Business Intelligence Tools 2007 Vendor Shares” report, which details sales among the top-15 vendors in BI in 2007 — a list that adds MicroStrategy, Information Builders, Actuate, QlikTech, Panorama Software, IBM (without Cognos), and TIBCO to the companies mentioned above.

SAS measures eco-friendliness

From IT Web Article -

Business intelligence firm SAS is set to release a solution that enables companies to measure how their operations impact the environment – a tough sell for now but a step in the right direction, according to one analyst, says Inquirer.net.

SAS says its Sustainability Management solution allows end-users to measure business based on what it refers to as the “triple bottom line” of environmental, social and economic indicators.

SAS says its solution uses predefined “green” metrics from the Global Reporting Initiative, used by more than thousands of businesses to measure the environmental impact of their operations.

Ireland is facing a data tsunami

From Silicon Republic, an interesting article on the exponential growth of data -

CURRENTLY the amount of data worldwide is doubling every 11 months – by 2010 it will double every 11 hours.

Ireland stands in the direct path of this tidal wave of data, warns a senior executive with business intelligence (BI) giant SAS.

Dr John Brocklebank, director of analytic solutions at privately held software giant SAS Institute, believes Irish firms are ill-equipped to deal with this rapid growth in the world’s data.

He says the challenge for Irish companies is to capture and exploit the 1-2pc of data that is relevant to their decision-making processes and strategic objectives.

“We know that, on average, managers spend two hours a day looking for data and that more than half of this is useless to their decision-making process,” Brocklebank explains.

“Most frightening is that 42pc of managers say they accidentally use the wrong information to make a decision at least once a week. So never mind trying to deal with the data in its entirety; it needs to be made meaningful and accurate to support business decisions.

Teradata Improves Analytics for Business Users

By Anshu Shrivastava of TMCNet, an article on the new Teradata Warehouse Miner.

The technology of data mining discovers patterns in customer, financial and operational data that can provide valuable business insights, according to Teradata.

The newest enhancements to Teradata Warehouse Miner are supported by the recently announced SAS (News – Alert) Scoring Accelerator for Teradata. Keith Collins, CTO at SAS, said that Teradata’s new functionality, and the recently released SAS Scoring Accelerator, are integrated and complementary solutions.

Teradata’s officials pointed out that the an initial benchmark of the SAS Scoring Accelerator for Teradata demonstrated the ability to process the number of records “45 times faster” than the traditional scoring method.

Moreover, the SAS Scoring Accelerator for Teradata also eliminates the need for manual translation of the SAS scoring code into SQL, or structured query language.

BI market consolidation: What does it mean for you?

A must read article for BI entusiasts on the recent consolidation of the BI industry. Well researched and informative article by Stuart Lauchlan, MyCustomer.com.

Still, it’s encouraging that the BI market is still showing signs of life after a period of considerable turmoil and consolidation over the past two years with IBM, Oracle and SAP swallowing up Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion Solutions. Since March 2007, the three enterprise giants have dished out $15 billion to bolster their BI credentials. Oracle offered $S3.3 billion for Hyperion, SAP pitched $6.8 billion for Business Objects while picking up Cognos cost IBM $5 billion.

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Another development is the blurring of boundaries as BI starts to encroach on other technology areas. For example, Forrester Research cites the merging of BI and search technologies to provide business people with better context and information to make daily decisions. “As search and BI get ever closer, the lines could eventually blur to the point of simply going away,” said Forrester in its ‘Search + BI = Unified Information Access’ report. “This will help bridge the artificial system boundaries between structured data and unstructured content. It will not only affect the interfaces we use to search for, discover, analyse, and report on what we need to know, but help us learn more about what we don’t know.”

This is one of the immediate advantages of convergence between BI and search – the ability to discover things you didn’t know you didn’t know. Forrester noted: “As search gets more powerful and begins to understand the meaning behind unstructured text, entity extraction and other linguistic analysis methods will be able to be used to reveal unforeseen and highly illuminating connections among documents or between documents and data.”

Breakthroughs in Analytics – Part 3

Here’s a follow-up to the previously posted series, Breakthroughs in Analytics, from Tech News World.

In the latest update, Ned Madden talks about the various tools and vendors in the Analytics domain. Read more.

Today’s software packages are much more focused on the actual application of analytical approaches to specific types of decision problems and specific types of industries, according to Anthony Milano, GMI’s VP of professional services.

“In the old days, tools were typically very general purpose in nature,” Milano told TechNewsWorld. “Now, oftentimes, tools are much more focused on helping users solve specific types of problems in business verticals and industries.”

Vendors are even adapting their core analytical engines to specific needs by creating a packaged solution that includes a version of the engine, analytic models, processes, methodologies, add-ons and extensions that allow the product to solve a very specific need, Milano said.

“Importantly, this type of solution minimizes the amount of time required to solve the problem and makes it easier for the client to get the job done without requiring a deep topic expert,” he added. “In effect, these packaged solutions embed the expertise in the solution.”

Milano stressed the importance of analytics solutions that are provided under the rental model from an application service provider (ASP) as Software as a Service (SaaS).

“These software delivery models have proved to be very cost-effective and efficient for customers, particularly when all the costs of owning and installing your own software are understood,” he said.

SAS Unveils New Bundle Program with Teradata

“This new strategic partnership offers an exciting future for our mutual customers because they will benefit from the combined power of the leading BI and analytics provider and the leader in enterprise data warehousing,” said Mike Koehler, president and chief executive officer of Teradata. “Together, SAS and Teradata offer companies the ability to more effectively leverage their data as a strategic corporate asset for better, faster decision making throughout the enterprise. We clearly see the customer demand to optimize the processing and use of data throughout the enterprise.”

Customers are already communicating the value they see in the partnership and how the integration will help them achieve competitive advantages. For example:

“As a result of integrating SAS and Teradata technologies, we have reduced overall processing time to run our forecasting model from 36 hours to one hour and 15 minutes,” said Thomas Tileston, vice president of Business Decision Support for Warner Home Video.

“We are always seeking ways to increase our clinical analytics capabilities, which improve the delivery of healthcare for our clients and their membership,” said Mark Halloran, chief information officer, Medco Health Solutions Inc. “The ability to achieve a higher level of integration with both SAS and our Teradata platforms will provide both increased operational efficiencies and enhanced information analytics, which position Medco to better serve the needs of our clients.”

In addition, SAS and Teradata have created a Center of Excellence (COE). This dedicated joint team of solution architects and technical consultants will help customers achieve increased performance and capabilities from their current and future SAS and Teradata IT infrastructure. The two companies will also establish a joint executive-level customer advisory group for product feedback, future direction and determination of subsequent integration priorities.

Read more from the press release.

The Core Performance Management Vendors for 2008

Yes, all the ones whom you think about are there. No Misses. Good Going !!

Read More about each of these vendors on the story.

There are 9 vendors on the core list for 2008, same number as last year. This may surprise some people after all of the mergers and resulting consolidation of 2007. The fact is that some vendors that were not on this list before have now made it because of their acquisitions. Therefore, while the number is the same, the names of the vendors on the list have changed quite a bit. In addition, some smaller vendors that have been around for awhile have broadened their product set or customer base or both and now merit inclusion. Here now, in alphabetical order, are the core performance management vendors for 2008.

Adaptive Planning
Clarity Systems
IBM/Cognos
Infor
Longview systems
Microsoft
Oracle
SAP
SAS