SAS has pulled together existing and new technologies to deliver SAS Decision Manager, a platform that integrates predictive analytics, business rules and data management to support decision making. The platform is also being built into other SAS products with the first to host the technology being SAS High-Performance Risk.
The risk solution uses the platform and event processing to speed up calculations and is available immediately. SAS Decision Manager is being used by early adopters in the financial services sector and will be production ready towards the end of July.
Decision Manager is designed for all those involved in decisions, be they business analysts, modelling specialists, IT people or managers who evaluate the return on investment of decisions. According to Madhu Nair, SAS senior manager for information management, “We wanted to automate decisions, especially high-frequency operational decisions, and we wanted to address the needs of all the people taking part in making decisions.”
With this in mind, SAS has included newly developed business rules for business analysts, these can be purchased separately as SAS Business Rules Manager, in Decision Manager, as well a visual data builder to help IT staff prepare and deploy data. Drawing on its existing product set, the company has integrated the SAS Model Manager for data modelling into the platform, as well as SAS Data Management and SAS Visual Analytics, which are used here for business managers to understand decision flows.
Nair says: “Before, users would have had to buy the components separately, then integrate and maintain them. SAS Decision Manager is a single, tightly integrated platform that bridges the gaps between people involved in decision making and allows companies to make faster, more accurate decisions.”
Existing users of SAS business analytics can upgrade to SAS Decision Manager, or it can be purchased as a stand-alone solution. The platform is also being incorporated into other SAS solutions, with initial integration designed, in part, to mature the technology before it became a stand-alone product. To date, the technology forms part of SAS High-Performance Risk and SAS Real-Time Decision Manager, a customer intelligence tool dedicated to high-volume, inbound customer channels, but further integration is planned.
