SAS Global Forum 2016

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This was my first global conference of this kind. I have attended academic conferences but those were not in this scale.  I feel proud to be a part of such a large community.
SAS has opened itself to open source technologies by adopting new architecture called SAS Viya. 

My takeaways from the conference are
1.       Open and Cloud ready SAS Viya architecture is designed for varied skillsets to solve all types of business problems. Initial offerings come with point and click interface and programming features. This means I need to add more skillsets quicker than others to keep myself valuable. For more details, click http://www.sas.com/en_us/news/press-releases/2016/april/sas-viya-sgf16.html  and http://www.sas.com/en_us/software/viya.html. Personally, I am excited about this as I think new architecture opens the door for more innovation. There are lot to learn about this to be able to use it efficiently.

2.       Data visualization is in high demand. SAS had booths for not only SAS Visual Analytics but for also ODS graph, office analytics etc. SAS VA is a popular product. I spent more than an hour at SAS VA booth and saw lot interest among attendees in VA and its capabilities.  I think we have developed a good expertise in SAS VA from the tools point of view. SAS will launch VA 8.1 sometime in Q3, 2016.  It will have one interface for report designer, explorer and visual statics with html5. Now we can create histogram and Sankey diagram in the reports. I was disappointed with the booth manager as he was not able to share any information around resolving known issues. Customer Intelligence 360’ was another popular product in the conference.

3.       Though I am not an industry expert I could observe that SAS is evolving itself by adopting next generation technologies to serve its customer better. Improving Forecast Server to handle different types of time series is a small example besides big bang architectural changes in the form of SAS Viya. This tells me that I should keep improving irrespective of how old and good I am. 
4.       I attended sessions of SAS customer (Lenovo, SunTrust Bank) success story and SAS user group. Lenovo presented LED project which was very well taken among the audience. Lenovo declared more than 50% reduction in warranty and call center cost.  I also attended presentation on multistage forecasting and Pricing.   (Please follow the link to see the conference proceedings http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings16/index.html# .

5.       I also spent some time at other SAS partners’ booths. We are providing end to end solution to the client to solve their business problem. We have expertise in developing custom analytical solution, industry solution deployment and infrastructure management. I observed that others do not have expertise in all the three areas.

6.       I met with product managers of SAS OR/Simulation Studio, Text Mining, Forecasting Server. It was good experience to meet them and ask questions. There are new features in Simulation studio, new algorithms added in SAS OR etc. Some of the issues I had with Forecast server/SAS Simulation Studio were resolved. In fact, they informed about Forecast Server Client which can create time series segments automatically and based on its type will use different types of forecasting models. I already requested our support team to install in our SWAN server.  On Text Mining, Anurag and I explained the kind of work we have done for Lenovo and we expressed our disappointment with SCA that it cannot be used for term level sentiments. They told us that score code from SCA can be modified to get the sentiments at term level.  The score code uses some packages about which we do not have any information. So, I showed my reservation and requested from some documents. They said they working on documentation which will be available later.

7.       I also visited booths of some universities who were academic sponsor for the event. I tried to learn what are the courses they teach in MS in Analytics program. Duration of the program ranges from 12-18 months.  



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