Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ), SAS Institute Japan, and ZEAL Corporation, announced a trilateral collaboration to offer their new ‘Cloud Analytics Solution’ for SMEs.
The firms said SMEs are often “confronted with a shortage of data utilization skills and IT assets.” This solution enables customers to analyze and visualize the data necessary to conduct business on the cloud computing.
The Cloud Analytics Solution unifies the strengths of each company; the self-service analytics and business intelligence (BI) products of SAS, the BI systems architecture and operations technique developed over many years of ZEAL, and the cloud computing platform and its operations technology of IIJ.
In recent years, medium-size enterprises have been searching for a way to more actively utilize accumulated data in their respective business activities, such as the resolution of various business challenges and investment decisions for emerging market opportunities.
The use of analytics for this purpose is indispensable in solving challenges like forecasting, rather than simply analyzing and summarizing historical data within a BI framework. However, the introduction of data analytics needs the sufficient human resources, data management, and system infrastructure. Most medium-enterprises have found it difficult to deal with these operational burdens in comparison with well-established large enterprises.
The Cloud Analytics Solution negates the need for cumbersome hardware procurement and subsequent software selection. It provides a 'total solution' for the customer's data analysis needs, including both the design and operation of optimal statistical analysis. The customer simply needs to prepare the data, and then harness the actual business knowledge obtained.
This trilateral collaboration between IIJ, SAS and ZEAL will provide customers with the new Cloud Analytics Solution incorporating SAS's data analysis environment which combines and embeds their BI system introduction and data analysis consulting services and their self-service data exploration product called "SAS Visual Analytics” with IIJ's cloud service called "IIJ GIO Service.”
The data analysis environment consists of a proprietary cloud computing environment which combines the Apache Hadoop Ecosystem allowing analysis operations on large data sets, and the Greenplum Database. This combination is designed to fully optimize the features of the SAS Visual Analytics service.
Additionally, ZEAL will support a series of cycles from KPI decisions to effects measurements on data utilization.