STATISTICS ARE SASSY

In fact, the term big data, which first saw its use over 100 years' later, has grown from megabytes to petabytes and it is no longer about data from one source – it is about the vast data lakes or warehouses created when you mix in your data with others like social media, finance, government, utilities, Telcos, marketing clouds, even free public Wi-Fi, street cameras and mobile/computer logins.

Or as Gartner, a research and advisory company puts it "Big Data represents the Information assets characterized by such a High Volume, Velocity, and Variety to require specific Technology and Analytical Methods for its transformation into Value." And a fifth “V” has been added for Veracity – it must be true to be of value.

The writer is a guest at the SAS Global Forum 2017 in Orlando Florida and will be reporting this week on big data, analytics, cloud, IoT, fraud, and risk assessment, crowdsourcing interpretation, and many more interesting uses of analytics.

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Backstory

iTWire has an article written from last year's event that provides a good overview of SAS and its culture. The short version follows.

SAS (pronounced "sass") once stood for "statistical analysis system," and began at North Carolina State University (NCSU) as a project to analyse agricultural research.

NSCU faculty members Jim Goodnight and Jim Barr emerged as the project leaders – Barr creating the architecture and Goodnight implementing the features that sat on top of the architecture and expanded the system's capabilities. Other co-founders included Jane Helwig and John Sall. SAS remains a privately-owned company to this day and that is a real strength in an erratic dot.com/IPO environment.

As demand for such software grew, SAS was founded in 1976 to help all sorts of customers –  from pharmaceutical companies and banks to academic and governmental entities. Its first user conference was held that year attended by 300 people from an initial 100 customer-base.

Computers were rare outside academic, government and enterprise and data was handled via punched cards and later magnetic tapes – the initial 300,000 lines of SAS code occupied about 150 boxes of cards – “a stack more than 40 feet high”.

Within two years SAS had grown to 600 customers and 21 employees. Not long after it went international and in 1980 moved to the SAS “campus” just outside Raleigh in Cary, North Carolina. Today it is home to over 7000 staff.

Staff retention and therefore intellectual capital is key to SAS. Jim Goodnight, CEO, said in an interview with iTWire last year, “95% of a company’s assets drive out the front gate every night, the CEO must see to it that they return the following day. 85% of our costs are people. The company’s best practices allow employees to focus on the task – free from distractions.” He said that the employee environment and benefits were not just altruistic but made good business sense.

Harking back to the punched cards the next fillip was the introduction of early IBM-PCs running DOS that effectively democratised computing for all. SAS embraced this move from huge expensive mainframes to PC and mini-computers.

SAS 2017 Global Forum Opening Session

The 2017 SAS Global Forum is being held in Orlando Florida #SASGF has attracted about 5000 people with a total of more than 30,000 people on-site and on-line.

There were so many key messages from the opening session – not specifically about SAS but big data and analytics - that it is best just to bullet point them and explore these in future articles.

Jim Goodnight, CEO

• Analytics is the engine of change - data is the fuel
• There is so much potential in data but so much is collected and never used
• You need to separate the signal from the noise
• Everyone creates and is engaged in data – from where you live, what social media you use, use of mobile technology, and so much more.
• It is exciting to look at the data in different ways to unleash its potential
• Now we have data everywhere we need analytics everywhere – analytics should be ambient, it can answer every question, it is where ideas come from
• BUT the world is moving a such a pace that you must know the answers “right now”

Goodnight demonstrated the new Alexa AI voice interface. While Alexa did not always perform as expected she did answer the question on what she wanted to be when she grew up, “I want to be the computer from Star Trek.” Goodnight had an appreciative geek audience – who loved every word. But it is significant as you will see later with comments from Oliver Schabenberger, Exec VP, and CTO.

Randy Guard, Exec VP, and CMO

• We are seeing a change in the market to the analytics led economy.
• Business now expects analytics to be part of any solution.
• You need to be an innovator to survive or your competitor will be.
• The focus needs to be on the customer journey and expectations. Ask what is best for this customer. Then if he does not do that what is next best and repeat that loop or lose the customer.
• You need to track the customer journey. What were they doing at the website, in the store, in an email, on the phone, and more? The volume of data has grown.

Oliver Schabenberger, Exec VP, and CTO

• Machines are coming for us!
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) is trendy but it is more of an illusion of human intelligence. AI is something that performs a specific set of tasks in a human-like way
• Human intelligence has creativity, innovation, sentience, morals, gut feel, is situation aware, bias, feelings, has learned from mistakes – AI like this is not going to happen.
• AI is deep learning and uses codified or learned responses.
• Sure they are better at repetitive tasks, 24/7, not distracted etc.

Schabenberger postured that while AIs could make decisions it was not ready to replace the human element. He preferred the term aI – algorithmic intelligence.