SAS® Visual Analytics

Data visualization

• Web-based, interactive data exploration mode suits the needs of all types of users.
• Autocharting automatically chooses the graph best-suited to display the selected data.
• Geographical map views provide a quick understanding of geospatial data.
• Choropleth maps make it easy to visualize measurement variances over a geographical area.
• “What does it mean” capabilities automatically identify and explain relationships between variables.
• Exploration capabilities are available for in-memory server data sources.
• Graphical skins can be applied for 3-D appearance and light effects on visuals.
• Compelling visuals include box plots, heat maps, animated bubble charts and more.
• The toggle feature displays grid lines and lets you adjust axes to optimize viewing.
• Queries can be changed by selecting items to be displayed from a sidebar or by dynamic filtering and grouping.
• A resizable overview bar lets you visually subset a portion of data sets with many records (high cardinality).
• New forecasting capabilities help you explore data to find out what might happen in the future.
• Thumbnails of recent and favorite items can be viewed.

Easy analytics

• In-memory server provides fast data analysis.
• Data can be easily queried from a seamless set of viewing modes.
• Multidimensional data can be sliced and diced by applying filters on any level of a hierarchy.
• Drillable hierarchies include expandable and collapsible levels.
• Viewable descriptive statistics, such as min, max and mean, provide an overall sense of a particular measure.
• New measures can be calculated and added to any view.
• Forecasts can be generated on the fly with forecasting confidence intervals included.
• The most appropriate forecasting algorithm for specific data is automatically selected.
• Scenario analysis lets you see how changes in different variables would affect forecasts.
• Graphically depict likely outcomes with interactively generated decision trees. An expert level allows you to modify certain influencing parameters for the tree generation.
• Create time-period based calculations in a single click.
• Enables custom binning and grouping (based on custom categories).
• Text analysis capabilities, including content categorization, let you analyze social media (including Facebook, Twitter and Google Analytics) and other text data.
• Network diagrams provide the ability to display networks across a map, including ESRI maps.
• Integrates with Esri mapping technology.
• Views can be saved as report packages to share with other advanced data exploration users in web reports, images or SAS mobile apps.

Robust reporting

• Web-based, interactive report-building interface is provided for report authors.
• Data acquisition wizard is available for previewing, filtering or sampling data prior to creating visualizations or reports.
• Data can be loaded into SAS LASR Analytic Server from within the report design interface.
• Precision layout capabilities provide flexibility in report layout and design. Stack or group items, use send-to-back or bring-to-the-front capabilities, and more.
• Includes custom graph templates and mashups.
• On-the-fly hierarchies can be created to add drill-down capabilities to visualizations and reports.
• You have the ability to select predefined filters, set groupings and sorting, and override default formatting.
• Custom calculations and progressive filters are easily created.
• A variety of charts are included: bar/3-D bar with multiple lines, pie/3-D pie, line, scatter, heat map, bubble, animated bubble, and tile – all of which allow annotated reference lines to be added.
• Integration with ESRI mapping technology.
• Filtering and selection capabilities can be added to reports with easy-to-integrate common action elements such as radio buttons, drop-down/combination boxes, check boxes and sliders.
• Range-based or threshold-based alerts let people subscribe to reports and receive notices when a report changes.
• Guest mode for viewing explorations, reports and dashboards without requiring a login ID or password.
• Seamless integration with SAS Office Analytics and SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office lets users open reports from their Microsoft Office applications.
• Ability for recipients to add consolidated comments to a report. Mobile users, Microsoft Office users and Web users can all share and view comments in a central location. Comments stay with the reports so everyone can see them.

Mobile BI

• Native iPad and Android support for tablets and smartphones uses the most popular gestures and capabilities, including zoom, swipe, etc., to optimize ease of use and user engagement.
• Flexible layouts let you create content tailored to different business needs.
• Link indicators enable data brushing as defined while creating reports. A selection in one indicator is applied as a filter or selection in the related indicator(s).
• Reports can be viewed securely on mobile devices either online or offline.
• New collaboration support includes the ability to annotate, share and email reports to others.
• Screenshots can be captured and comments shared with others.
• Alerts are sent to mobile devices when reports are updated.
• Integration with third-party vendors, such as Good Technologies and Mocana, provides mobile device management.

In-memory analytic server

• Uses in-memory analytics to quickly conduct exploration and analysis.
• Designed to run in a single-server mode for smaller organizations and departments.
• Optimized for distributed environments to use the parallel processing capabilities of many nodes to scale as your organization and data grow.
• Integration with Hadoop for performance optimization and scalability.
• Can be used on commodity hardware, on database appliances or in a cloud.

IT administration

• Easy-to-use web-based interface for IT administration.
• SAS information assets, including users, servers and data, are easily managed.
• Data structures are easily translated into terms everyone can understand.
• Support for star schemas within SAS LASR Analytic Server. They can then be used for reporting or exploration just like other tables.
• User authentication and information authorization supports data governance.
• Data is loaded to in-memory servers based on volume, frequency of updates and scalability needs.

Flexible deployment

• Traditional on-site deployments:
  • Single server with support for Windows servers is appropriate for small to midsize organizations.
  • The distributed mode is easily expandable to support growing data demands (on either database appliances or commodity hardware).
• Cloud deployments:
  • Public cloud providers, including Amazon EC2 Web Services.
  • Your own private cloud and/or virtualized data centers.
  • The SAS Cloud.
• SAS Solutions OnDemand:
  • Provides a customized experience with SAS Solutions OnDemand for private hosted cloud services.