SAS Prepares Hadoop-Powered In-Memory BI Platform

SAS says high-performance product for business intelligence will bring big-data scale, in-memory speed, and advanced analytic power to ordinary business users.

Analytics giant SAS is planning to step up competition in the business intelligence arena with a new high-performance platform that will hit on three of the hottest hot buttons in the data-analysis arena: big data, in-memory, and business analytics.

SAS executives said the planned hardware-ready software package will combine the scalability of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and the in-memory processing speed of a RAM-intensive clustered blade server environment. The platform is said goal offer rapid analytic insight into the types of routine, ad-hoc questions business analysts typically explore.

Tthe platform will be able to find patterns and correlations among data, uncovering root causes without requiring PhD-level analysts. The key to ease of use is an ad-hoc data exploration interface that lets users drag and drop data sets onto a palate for anlaysis. The product then automatically choses the most appropriate chart or visualization depending on the sources and data types selected.

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