Data is the new oil of the digital economy. The analytics market in India is poised to double from current $1 billion to $2.3 billion by the end of 2017-18. Hence, it comes as no surprise that both the government and organisations across various industry segments are embracing analytics as it has become a strategic imperative for them, says Noshin Kagalwalla, Managing Director, SAS Institute (India) Pvt. Ltd, in conversation with Elets News Network (ENN).
Managing Director
SAS Institute (India) Pvt. Ltd
Please give us an overview of the company. SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. SAS has over 14,000 employees and customers in 146 countries. Our software is installed at more than 80,000 business, government and university sites. 91 of the top 100 companies on the 2015 Fortune Global 500® are SAS customers.
SAS Institute (India) Pvt. Ltd. is a wholly owned subsidiary of SAS Institute Inc. SAS has been in India since 1997 and consists of a strong team of over 500 highly-qualified technology and domain experts helping customers address their business challenges through effective use of business analytics. SAS products and solutions are widely and successfully used by organisations of all sizes as well as by the government – both central and state – across the globe as well as in India.
What solutions and products do you offer for Indian companies?
While SAS has comprehensive Solution tailored for a large number of industries, solutions can be broadly classified into the following:
Business Intelligence and Analytics – Solutions such as SAS Visual Analytics that empower even non-technical users to get the right information when they want it and where they want it. It allows users to integrate and discover data, create and share vibrant interactive reports and monitor key metrics with easy to use analytics.
Advanced Analytics – SAS advanced analytics software is infused with cuttingedge, innovative algorithms that can help customers solve even their most intractable problems and unearth opportunities they would otherwise miss.
Customer Intelligence – Our comprehensive digital marketing hub delivers insights that are fuelled by data from every touch point and data source which in turn help marketers create customer experiences that truly matter.
Data Management – Solutions are designed to help organisations transform big data into big opportunity. Solutions that range from data integration, data quality, data governance, event stream processing and data preparation for Hadoop are what we have to offer.
Fraud and Security Intelligence – Solutions include fraud prevention, helping companies comply with regulations and prevent crime and terrorism.
Risk Management – SAS’s risk management has proven to be the best practices to help organisations establish a risk-aware culture, optimise capital and liquidity, and meet regulatory demands.
Supply Chain Management – Help chain professionals understand demand patterns, supply networks, operation, quality and customer service requirements like never before.
SAS Cloud Analytics – It provides an easy and cost-effective way to deliver valuable business insight through on-demand access to SAS technology.
Solutions for Hadoop – Our Hadoop solutions provide everything you need to get valuable insights from Big Data. Simplified data management eases time-consuming data preparation and visual data discovery helps you quickly spot what’s relevant.
SAS Viya: A modern, open platform that conquers any analytics challenge – from experimental to mission-critical. SAS Viya is a single, cloud-ready environment that serves everyone from data scientists to business analysts, application developers to executives with the reliable, scalable, secure analytics management and governance essential for agile IT.
SAS Analytics for IoT – It covers the full IoT analytics life cycle from data capture and integration to analytics and deployment.
Please tell us something about SAS – Analytics for Internet of Things (IoT).
While analysts expect the IoT to soar to tens of billions of devices by 2020, no one knows how many or what new types of intelligent devices will emerge. Today, simply collecting data from connected sensors, systems or products is not enough. Businesses need more flexibility about where, when and how to manage and analyze IoT data. And they must understand which data is relevant, so they’ll know what to store and what to ignore. To benefit from the promise of IoT data, businesses need to be able to shift analytics from traditional data centers toward devices on the edge – the “things.” To get there, they need a trusted, automated solution.
SAS Analytics for IoT allows our customers to get more value from the connected world by fusing analytics with IoT data.
Support for the IoT analytics life cycle – SAS supports analytics throughout the IoT infrastructure – from the central hub, data center or cloud all the way to the edge, and at any point in between.
Comprehensive analytics capabilities built on proven data management techniques – Continuously improve on the latest techniques to find those best suited for high-frequency and streaming data. And our industry-leading data management capabilities can take IoT data – generated anywhere – and make it analytics-ready.
Proven event stream processing- Built on SAS Event stream processing, which analyses data in motion by processing huge volumes at very high rates – with extremely low latency.
Flexibility to run on a range of hardware, or in the cloud – Our solutions runs on a wide variety of platforms, including low-cost commodity hardware. It can exploit big data appliances and run in the cloud. SAS also works with many communication and hardware vendors to support embedded analytics in their edge devices – especially IoT gateways.
SAS positions organisations to make faster, better informed decisions in today’s new landscape.
In this digital age, how is data helping both the government and the enterprises to enhance their business domain?
Data is the new oil of the digital economy. According to an industry report by NASSCOM in partnership with BlueOcean Market Intelligence, the analytics market in India is poised to double from the current $1 billion to $2.3 billion by the end of 2017-18. Hence it comes as no surprise that both the government and organisations across various industry segments are embracing analytics as it’s become a strategic imperative for them.
Democratisation of Analytics – Both public sector and private sector organisations have realised that data-driven decision making needs to be made a vital component of the organisational culture. To drive this, businesses and government offices are adopting techniques such as self-service Business Intelligence and data visualisation which can be utilised by business users to get quick answers to their questions.
Hyper Personalisation and Omni channel marketing – To leverage analytics in their marketing department and to analyse huge amounts of customer data, enterprises are moving towards mass customisation and marketing to markets of one.
Detecting and Mitigating Fraud – It also plays a major role in surveillance and fraud detection process for both financial institutions as well as for government organisations. While traditionally financial institutions were the first to leverage big data analytics to prevent fraudulent practices, we are seeing a very strong interest from government bodies now. The governments, like any other organisation is vulnerable to fraudsters who attempt to cheat and abuse the system.
In short, the applications of data and analytics vary and examples can be cited in each industry, however, organisations that are poised to succeed in the future will be the ones that understand data’s fundamental value and learn to extract and use it.
SAS Analytics for IoT allows our customers to get more value from the connected world by fusing analytics with IoT data.
What are some of the new products that you plan to launch soon in India?
We have a number of exciting products which have been either recently launched or in the offing. These include:
SAS Viya An open, cloud-ready, inmemory platform that delivers everything you need for fast, accurate analytical results – all of the time. With its fluid, scalable and fault-tolerant processing environment, this resilient platform addresses the complex analytical challenges of today with the ability to effortlessly scale into the future.
SAS Visual Investigator: A cloudready investigation and incident management platform that combines large, disparate, structured and unstructured data sources. Designed for banks and financial institutions, it lets users define, create, triage and manage alerts, perform detailed investigations, and customise the platform to meet their individual and organisational needs and help safeguard them from fraud.
SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning: It combines the processes of data mining, data wrangling, data exploration, visualisation, feature engineering in a single scalable in-memory processing environment.
SAS Customer Intelligence 360: This suite of products is designed to help marketers create relevant, satisfying, valued customer experiences by infusing marketing decisions with unprecedented customer insights. With SAS CI 360, customer-level digital data is merged with traditional data sources that yield a 360-degree customer view to craft compelling customer experiences.
SAS Event Stream Processing on SAS Viya It analyses and understands millions of events per second, detecting patterns of interest as they occur. This web-based interface makes it easier for users to manipulate data and build projects, while a dashboard delivers information visually so they can test and validate results.
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