Then, it was time for the start of the main SAS Global Forum 2012 conference. In the Walt Disney Dolphin hotel (see picture below - right), about 3400 attendees came to exchange their experience with SAS, and to learn about the new (and upcoming) features in 9.3 (and 9.4). As always, the opening keynote is a big spectacular show. The conference was opened by Dr. Jim Goodnight (CEO of SAS). He set the stage for the main themes during the conference: Big Data, In-Memory processing, massively parallel configurations, visual analytics.

Then, Jim Davis (CMO of SAS, @Davis_Jim see picture below - right) gave a talk emphasizing the importance and impact of the new HPC techniques. Click here if you want to view the opening session again.

Next, we attended the academic reception. We would like to extend special thanks to Julie Petlick (@juliepetlick, see picture below) for her great efforts in coordinating the SAS student ambassador program.

Below, you see Dr. Jerry Oglesby again, presenting the strong SAS strategy towards the academic world, as well as the certification programs.

It was remarkable to see Dr. Goodnight’s passion for the technology during his demo of the HPC capabilities.

Next, the conference chair Andy Kuligowski (see picture below) gave a dynamic presentation.

Then, it was time for the entertainment part of the opening ceremony.

On Monday morning, sessions started at 8 am with a Technology Connection keynote presentation. The conference chair Andy Kuligowski (see picture below) opened the keynote session, followed by a motivational speech.

Next, SAS employees (see below) provided a role play of a realistic business case using high-performance visual analytics. More importantly, release dates for the many new products were given (see below).

Another highlight at SAS Global Forum is the exhibit floor. Many well-known hardware vendors had a booth. More importantly, every important SAS product has its own demo area to enable one-on-one discussions with SAS experts.

Code doctors help you diagnose problems in SAS code, and prescribe the treatment. On the show floor, there was even a full-fledged TV studio.

Then it was time to attend the first “normal” session: A panel session on assortment planning in retailing (see below). During this session, I was reminded of the fact that I do not like panel sessions.

Then, Alexander Soria (Zappos, see picture below) presented how they use social media analytics. He gave some good examples of how Twitter interventions can help create positive buzz on the internet: E.g. by providing free pizza in the middle of the night to an “unsuspecting” tweep.

During lunch John Sall (co-founder of SAS, see picture to the right) told the story of the early days at SAS. Everything started with the SAS Project in NCSU’s Cox Hall (5th floor).

Next, Jonathan Levine (Marriott International, see picture below) presented the paper “Developing a Predictive Model for Customer Trip Purpose to Be Integrated into Enterprise Strategy and Analytics”. More specifically, they used a predictive model to estimate the likelihood that a stay was for business.

The Red Hat team (see picture below) at SAS Global Forum 2012 presented interesting performance tests. E.g. a minimum of 18 % performance increase in RHEL version 6.2 compared to version 5.3. Moreover, the choice of the file system has an important impact on performance (see slide below).

Next, we visited one of the many great talks by our good colleague Prof. Dr. Goutam Chakraborty’s (Oklahoma State University, see below - right) students. This one was about a SAS macro for clickstream analysis by Sumit Sukhwani & Satish Garla. Great work with lots of SAS code!

On Tuesday morning, I attended Sascha Schubert’s session on using survival analysis techniques in SAS Enterprise Miner.

Learning about SAS for Hadoop was one of my priorities at this SAS Global Forum 2012. Howard Plemmons (R&D Director at SAS, see picture below) presented a Super Demo on SAS/ACCESS to Hadoop. It allows users to define a libname … to read data stored in the HDFS Hadoop file system via Hive. But it goes way beyond this. It can also be used to load data into the cluster. Moreover, we can also run map/reduce jobs through this gateway.

During Tuesday’s lunch we listened to a talk about “Analytics in Sports” (a hot topic since the movie Moneyball).

Jodi Blomberg (Principal technical architect at SAS, see picture below) talked on using Twitter and Facebook for law enforcement.

Then, Philippe and I joined the SAS student academic dinner at Portobello in Downtown Disney.

Finally, the evening ended with the SAS Kick Back Party. Below, you see part of the Belgian delegation...

Next morning, it was time for Philippe’s big performance. He presented his paper “Including the Salesperson Effect in Purchasing Behavior Models Using PROC GLIMMIX” in the Statistics and Data Analysis Section. Later that day, Philippe received the best paper award for this piece of work.

Even the closing session of the conference was still well-attended. Above you see the SAS student ambassadors who were asked to stand up (by Dr. Jerry Oglesby on the podium).

Finally, to wrap up the conference, Chris Hemedinger (SAS, @cjdinger) shared his personal view on the conference.

... followed by a nice reception.