Cloudera
SAS-Unlocking the Value of your Data

Ever since the term ‘smart’ has been coined in the technology landscape, technologists are incessantly enhancing the functionalities of all sorts of devices thus making them work smarter. These smart devices generate a large volume of data (big data) that can bring useful insights to businesses. Further, these insights roll in business intelligence that improves customer service, extends product pipelines, helps fight cybercrime and fraud, and meets compliance. By all odds big data analytics sounds like a lucrative deal, but it encompasses dwelling challenges of storing and computing that are far beyond the capacities of traditional systems. In this scenario, SAS has emerged as a technology that helps businesses in divulging significant trends and insights in a cost effective manner. But when the data is scattered across multiple platforms, gathering, filtering and transforming it into information is still a complicated process. Integrating SAS’s business driven analytics with Hadoop’s economic scalability of storing and analyzing the data, Cloudera unites the capabilities of SAS and the power of Hadoop to help customers manage their entire analytics life cycle. “By bringing the most powerful analytics, SAS, we help organizations unlock the value of data stored in client’s enterprise data hub (EDH). This allows them to make better decisions faster,” says Thomas J. Reilly, CEO, Cloudera.

The firm offers a fully functioning Enterprise Data Hub (EDH). The offerings of Cloudera and their partnership with SAS bestows improved data access and data preparation for analytics, decreased time to analytic value, and enhanced accuracy. Utilizing SAS, clients can access and integrate data from Cloudera’s EDH and push SAS processing in the Hadoop cluster. On top of that, they can even lift data into memory and perform highly scalable and distributed computing.

Blurring the line between the programmers and business users, Cloudera’s SAS based solution helps businesses make precise decisions by analyzing all the structured and unstructured data sets. “SAS Data Loader for Hadoop eliminates the complexities of writing MapReduce code, with a simple, point-and-click interface that empowers business analysts to prepare, integrate and cleanse big data faster and easier than ever,” explains Reilly.

SAS and Cloudera enable customers to achieve competitive advantage by gaining value from all of their data

The SAS access engine pulls data directly from Hadoop cluster allowing SAS data analytic engines to leverage Hadoop infrastructure.

Even a considerable growth in customer base can bring data management and business intelligence challenges. Cloudera touched upon a success story when one of the privately owned Tier-1 UK insurers was experiencing similar challenges in processing its growing data volumes in a timely manner. The insurer adopted Hadoop environment after realizing that its existing infrastructure is incapable of using the data volume. Integrating Cloudera’s EDH and SAS Analytics, the insurer is now able to analyze tens of millions of quotes in fractions of time and provide real time price updates.

Among the major mechanisms, the SAS/ ACESS allows SAS to access the data sets stored in Hadoop. It also supports Cloudera’s platform CDH 3U2 along with CDH 4.01 and higher. The SAS High Performance Analytics (HPA) provides computational framework that can operate on data stored in CDH. It helps creating analytical models using entire data sets, without down-sampling.

The team at Cloudera is constantly delving in to integrate SAS products with Hadoop that allows its clients to leverage best of the both worlds. “SAS and Cloudera enable customers to achieve competitive advantage by gaining value from all of their data,” says Reilly.