by Angela Guess
CNN Money recently interviewed SAS CEO Jim Goodnight regarding the growing opportunities and level of competition in the field of Big Data. Goodnight stated, “We’ve been around for 35 years, and big data is suddenly sexy. Now we’re having to deal with larger and larger amounts of information. There are many industries who want to use this data to optimize. For example, we are working with Macy’s for markdown optimization. They have millions of items and they try to sell everything they can before the end of the season. This activity used to be done by hand, but now we can use data to forecast every item in every store and how much it should be marked down. We’re seeing a lot of growth in the financial sector too. We do risk computations for credit risk and market risk, these are things that all the banks are now taking another look at.”
When asked about SAS’s software-as-a-service deployments, Goodnight responded, “Cloud computing is not that new. Back in the early days of computing when mainframes cost several million dollars a piece companies rented time on the machines. Back in the 60s that was called timesharing, and now it’s called cloud computing. Virtualization has been around since the 70s at least so it’s been around. Cloud computing is just taking very cheap computers and sticking them together. But we support it. A lot of companies find that virtualization is a good way to cut down on cost. They can run different operating systems. There are a lot of companies that prefer to get the entire solution handled for them especially in these days of tight budgets.”
photo credit: Thechelseawise
