SAS Previews High Performance Analytics Features

SAS is trumpeting news about its forthcoming big data analytics and risk management products well advance of its formal release at the end of this year, pointing to its ability to handle real-time streams of data in the terabyte range.

The offering garnering the most attention pre-launch is dubbed simply SAS High Performance Analytics. This suite will combine SAS analytics software with in-memory processing, which SAS claims will “complete in minutes analytic tasks that took hours or days using traditional techniques.” ‘

To support their claim, SAS points to an unnamed major retailer that is using the HPC-rooted analytics software to deliver store-specific pricing data across 270 million store-specific products per week. They say that this process, which used to take the company well over a full day to run, now takes only two hours.

As a second offering slated to appear in December, the SAS High Performance Risk product is set to appeal to financial services firms. The company says that it uses “SAS high performance computing techniques on industry standard server grids to deliver faster risk calculations.”

They point to early successes with their risk product, noting that in their testing with an APAC banking giant, “a complex capital markets portfolio of 100,000 instruments was valued across multiple time horizons with more than 100,000 scenarios in less than 30 minutes, calculating on-demand, intra-day portfolio risk.”

They claim that there are other benefits for financial services organizations who take advantage of the SAS High Performance Risk product, including the ability to perform full balance sheet risk analysis to gauge liquidity. They claim to have worked with another bank in Asia to crunch liquidity risk across 30 million instruments and 50,000 possible scenarios in just under eight hours. The company feels that their offering, which would allow for such assessments to run overnight is a large selling point.

SAS will leverage partners Teradata and EMC Greenplum for these offerings, extending them to yet unnamed specific database appliances.

These products will join their SAS analytics brethren, which including the company’s host of HPC offerings that are wrapped around the value of delivering real-time information to customers. It is not clear yet how, if at all, this product will touch other products in the SAS portfolio, including their database-bound, grid and in-memory analytics.