News

SAS Updates Data Management Software

• By David Ramel
• 04/04/2014

SAS this week announced updates to its data management software that include Big Data virtualization.

The company said a new version of its SAS Federation Server will ship this quarter with new capabilities to create visual representations of Big Data on Hadoop, SAP HANA, Oracle, DB2 and other sources. Data virtualization, or federation, lets users access integrated data views without having to touch the original data sources.

"This data-as-a-service approach provides easily consumable access to shared, secure enterprise data to speed and simplify data preparation," the company said. "SAS has also beefed up security, data masking and data governance within SAS Federation Server to ensure proper policies, access and restrictions for sensitive data."

The company has already updated its SAS Master Data Management software, which now features embedded data quality, improved usability and pervasive data governance designed to improve cooperation between the business sides and the IT sides of organizations. "This helps organizations to implement MDM in a phased approach, delivering business value while using existing software to reduce integration costs," SAS said.

The enhanced data governance features workflow-based remediation that lets team members route and fix data issues with a common UI, boosting productivity and cutting down on data quality errors.

UI customization through the company's "MDM Tools," combined with deep linking, is expected to allow for quicker decision making, better team collaboration and reduced IT application integration expenses.

Also, SAS said, improved multi-domain hierarchy support boosts usability by letting users visualize relationships between business entities.