For businesses wanting more from their data, it pays to be prepared

With 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being created every day, organizations need better ways to prepare it for analysis. Analytics leader SAS is now offering SAS® Data Preparation to provide analytics professionals and business users an interactive, real-time self-service application that will ease the burden of readying data for analysis.

"Business analysts and data scientists require intuitive, self-service tools to structure their data for reporting and analytics. Waiting on IT or other data specialists to provide data is no longer an option given the pace of innovation," said Ryan Schmiedl, Vice President of Product Management at SAS. "SAS Data Preparation offers an intuitive user experience so that analysts can quickly and efficiently prepare data for specific analytic tasks and unburden IT from ad hoc requests. Plus, the automatically generated data management processes can then be reused by others, including IT."

Designed with analysts in mind, and using the fast processing power of SAS® Viya®, SAS Data Preparation helps report builders, data scientists and data analysts blend, shape and cleanse data for analysis, identifying errors and providing data on demand so that organizations can make faster data-driven decisions.

SAS Data Preparation also helps users to profile and identify problems, preview data and set up repeatable processes to maintain a high level of data quality. It then integrates individual data preparation right into analytics and reporting pipelines.

"As companies work to reduce the time spent on data preparation so they can increase the time spent on analytics, they are looking for easy-to-use data preparation software," said Paige Bartley, senior analyst for Data and Enterprise Intelligence at Ovum. "With the introduction of SAS Data Preparation, business users can now take data prep into their own hands without leaving the SAS ecosystem, reducing the burden on IT while maintaining the governance controls and processing capabilities that the SAS platform offers for data."