visual data

Through its new "Visual Analytics" offering, SAS seeks to deliver high-power data crunching through less-expensive hardware. That information then cab be shared through an iPad app.

Big data analytics on your iPad?

Yes, thanks to what SAS calls "Visual Analytics."

Leave it to the business intelligence gurus at SAS - an acknowledged global leader with a swelling customer base and sales now well over $2 billion annually - to make number crunching not only a graphic but simpler and faster with software that can run on less expensive hardware.

"Visually explore data at the speed of sight," SAS says in its announcement.

And to share the knowledge, enterprise users can keep employees in the loop with their iPads thanks to a specially designed app.

What's the need for SAS' latest offering?

As companies deal with more and more data in a variety of forms from an increasing number of sources (thus "big data") such as social media, mobile shopping and ecommerce, figuring out what to do with the information is becoming more daunting...

For those who can make sense of the explosion of data, there are job opportunities in fields as diverse as crime, retail and dating.

What is Big Data? A meme and a marketing term, for sure, but also shorthand for advancing trends in technology that open the door to a new approach to understanding the world and making decisions. There is a lot more data, all the time, growing at 50 percent a year, or more than doubling every two years, estimates IDC, a technology research firm. It’s not just more streams of data, but entirely new ones. For example, there are now countless digital sensors worldwide in industrial equipment, automobiles, electrical meters and shipping crates. They can measure and communicate location, movement, vibration, temperature, humidity, even chemical changes in the air...