Cloud-Power to Drive SAS Business Analytics to New Heights

New SAS 9.4 Platform to Broaden Reach of Analytics to More Malaysian Businesses and Organisations
KUALA LUMPUR, August 21, 2013 – SAS Malaysia recently unveiled the SAS 9.4 update to SAS’ Business Analytics platform. Malaysian businesses now have more deployment options for their analytics solutions. On top of the traditional on-premise deployment, the latest update now unlocks the ability for businesses to choose between public, private or even SAS-hosted cloud solutions for unrivalled flexibility in rolling out SAS’ analytics solutions.

The latest update comes on the back of strong demand for powerful, robust analytics solutions to cope with the deluge of information that businesses and organisations globally are faced with. The American Bankers Association for example revealed that businesses around the world process more than 10,000 payment card transactions in just one second alone. Consequently, IDG recently reported that the Big Data technology and services market in the Asia-Pacific region excluding Japan is projected to grow from USD 258.5 million in 2011 to a staggering USD 1.76 billion in 2016.

Andrew Tan, Managing Director for SAS Malaysia expects the local demand for analytics solutions to grow in tandem with that within the region. He said, “Malaysian businesses are struggling to manage the information they have today and want the ability to produce insights faster while managing costs related to information management. SAS 9.4 with its cloud deployment option addresses the cost as well as speed issues.”

Tan is also confident that the new update would enable more companies to take advantage of SAS’ powerful analytics solutions. He said, “SAS 9.4 brings with it a whole new level of flexibility which will give Malaysian businesses much easier access to SAS’ suite of analytics software.”

“As in any significant technology implementation, there are many aspects to consider in order to ensure a smooth progress, particularly when cloud deployment is involved. With SAS 9.4’s built-in cloud capabilities, companies can focus on unlocking the potential of their information troves in the quickest, most efficient and effective way catered to their unique needs and requirements,” added Tan.

With new SAS programming languages, tools and improved interfaces which are part of the SAS 9.4 update, Malaysian businesses can expect faster model development, deployment and response times for SAS’ solutions. This is coupled with enhanced administration capabilities which would help to quickly and accurately highlight sources of failure.

One of the first products to build on the SAS 9.4 foundation and take advantage of cloud deployment is SAS Visual Analytics. As the number of SAS Visual Analytics customers continues to grow both locally and internationally - now more than 200 worldwide - so does the demand for new features. This latest release of this data visualisation software, the third in just over a year, includes a wide range of upgrades.

“Businesses operating in highly-competitive industries such as banking, FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), retail and insurance rely significantly on analytics capabilities to stay ahead of the competition,” said Tan. “With the SAS 9.4 update, we have made SAS’ Visual Analytics more accessible than ever before. Now every employee can harness the power of analytics to make informed business decisions.”

SAS Visual Analytics forecasting support, now with powerful new scenario analysis capabilities, adds prescriptive analytics to existing descriptive and predictive analytics, helping organisations rapidly and easily move to more advanced uses of analytics.

Among the enhancements in SAS Visual Analytics:
• Analytics: support for scenario analysis and decision trees.
• Reporting: more graphical themes and custom theme definitions, enhanced progressive filtering, ability to define custom graph templates, expanded report linking.
• Mobile: increased collaboration with annotation markups and sharing, integration with mobile device management.
• Security: improved flexibility in setting permissions.
• Server platform: new support for Windows 64-bit, in addition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and SuSE Enterprise Linux Server 11.

Among the first customers in Malaysia to recognise the value of SAS Visual Analytics was local telco U Mobile Sdn Bhd. As one of Malaysia’s most dynamic and innovative 3G mobile operator, U Mobile believed that Visual Analytics would help the company to make better informed decisions across the entire organisation, which would lead to better service offerings for its customers.

“By equipping the innovation, service development, sales and marketing departments with modern analytics capabilities, we want to bring a whole new level of  enhanced mobile services to Malaysian consumers that help them ‘live connected’ and meet their different usage needs and requirements,” said Jaffa Sany Ariffin, Chief Executive Officer of U Mobile.

For more information or to try an interactive demonstration of the software, please visit the SAS Visual Analytics Web pages. For a look at all SAS 9.4 offers, please read an in-depth description of the new platform.

Today's announcement was first made at SAS Global Forum 2013, the world's premier analytics conference and the largest gathering of SAS users, attended by more than 4,000 business and IT users of SAS software and solutions.