Year: 2009

S A S GOOD LIFE UNDER SIEGE – NYT

There was a time when when the word NYT invoked that’s where we read about news and politics. In 2009, the most happening news on statistical software came from NYT ( KD Nuggets and the Journal of Statistical Software are not too happy about that either).

The latest article calls SAS as a software giant under siege-and it’s Good Life under threat.

[tweetmeme source=”decisionstats”]

This inspired me to an old movie poster I saw once- It’s also called Under Siege.

Given the fact that the under siege SAS earned 2.4 Billion Dollars last year alone

and the market capitalisation o New York Times is 1.25 Billion Dollars.

Why doesn’t DR Goodnight buy the New York Times itself for 600 million dollars and have enough change left over for………. err a Happy Thanksgiving.

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LIES

TRUE LIES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AND STATISTICS

 

Analytics and BI for small biz

I saw a story on Warren B and Goldman S creating a 500$ million pool for small business owners.

  • The program will contribute $200 million to community colleges, universities and other institutions to provide small- business owners with practical business education.

  • Goldman Sachs repaid the $10 billion it was given last year under the taxpayer-funded Troubled Asset Relief Program, plus dividends. The firm continues to benefit from federal guarantees on about $21 billion of long-term debt.

  • Buffett, known as the “Oracle of Omaha” for his investing prowess, is the second-richest American. Berkshire, which invests in companies ranging from retailers to insurers, paid $5 billion in September 2008 to acquire preferred stock in Goldman Sachs that pays a 10 percent dividend. Berkshire, based in Omaha, Nebraska, also gained five-year warrants to buy $5 billion of common stock at $115 per share.

  • ( NOTE Curent Price of GS shares is 172$ – thats a 50% profit on 5 Billion~ 2.5 Billion for Mr Buffett but he is probably waiting for long term capital gains ax rates to kick in before encashing his patriotic  “Buy American. I am” warrants (see NYT op ed by him  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/opinion/17buffett.html )
  • A better analysis of the above Bloomberg story was given on Bloomberg itself at http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=asjp51YPDwJU
  • A small thought- could smaller businesses gain from efficiencies of programs like SPSS, SAS and R. Or would they be better off with customized GUI’s linked to their POS data.

Anyways a need for analytics for small businesses in inventory management, and sales planning could help. Joe the Plumber could do with some ETS and Regression Models as well.

However apart for Salesforce.com applications this field seems to be totally vacant for analytics. What are IBM SPSS, SAS, or even other stats packages doing for small businesses. or even developing Salesforce.com applications for their own equivalent software

The market could be an interesting one to atleast do a test in. Unless you don’t believe in test and control.

See below the IBM Cognos by IBM itself and the third party app by Pervasive for SAP Integration-

Citation-

http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016YGYEA2

and

http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016am1EAA

SAS Scoring Accelerators

One of the most interesting SAS product launches of 2009. I am currently reading SAS Enterprise Miner and I am quite impressed – in fact we have a 1500 processor HPC cluster , besides access to Kraken, the 3 largest HPC in the world. It is interesting to see possible application uses for that. Of course I am currently fiddling with R based parallelized clustering on them.

SAS® Scoring Accelerator

Citation-

http://www.sas.com/technologies/analytics/datamining/scoring_acceleration/index.html

Quickly and accurately process and score analytic models built in SAS® Enterprise MinerTM

What is SAS® Scoring Accelerator?
SAS Scoring Accelerator translates and registers SAS Enterprise Miner models into database-specific functions to be deployed and then executed for scoring purposes directly within the database. SAS Scoring Accelerator is a separate product that works in conjunction with  SAS Enterprise Miner.

Why is SAS® Scoring Accelerator important?
SAS Scoring Accelerator automates the movement of the model scoring processes inside the database. Faster deployment of analytic models means more timely results, enabling business users to make important business decisions. Better-performing models help ensure the accuracy of the analytic results you’re using to make critical business decisions.

For whom is SAS® Scoring Accelerator?
SAS Scoring Accelerator is specifically for organizations that use SAS Enterprise Miner. It is designed for chief scoring officers and IT to score analytic models directly inside the database.

Key Benefits:

 

  • Achieve higher model-scoring performance and faster time to results.
  • Reduce data movement and latency.
  • Improve accuracy and effectiveness of analytic models.
  • Reduce labor costs and errors by eliminating model score code rewrite and model revalidation efforts.
  • Better manage, provision and govern data.

 

Key Features:

Export Utility:

  • Functions as a plug-in to SAS Enterprise Miner that exports the model scoring logic including metadata about the required input and output variables.

Publishing Client:

  • Automatically translates and publishes the model into C source code for creating the scoring function inside the database.
  • Generates a script of database commands for registering the scoring user-defined function (UDF) inside the database. Scoring UDFs are available to use in any SQL expression wherever database-specific built-in functions are typically used.
  • Supports a robust class of SAS Enterprise Miner predictive and descriptive models including the preliminary transformation layer.

SAS Scoring Accelerator interfaces with the following relational databases:

  • SAS® Scoring Accelerator for Teradata
  • SAS® Scoring Accelerator for Netezza