Thought Leader Interview

Jim Davis, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for SAS, is responsible for providing strategic direction for SAS products, solutions and services and presenting the SAS brand worldwide.

Davis joined SAS in 1994 as an enterprise computing strategist focused on IT issues. He later served as program manager for data warehousing, one of SAS' first global projects to incorporate customer feedback in the development process. It was in this role that he began to develop the model for continuous communication among engineers, marketing experts and customers that he champions today. From there he was promoted to Director of Product Strategy and then vice president of Worldwide Marketing before assuming his current role.

Denis Pombriant: Jim, analytics has been an important topic for large and small enterprises for decades, but today the subject is taking on extra significance. What's driving the renewed interest?

Jim Davis: I believe a number of factors. I think we're all aware of the data volumes that are out there today, and some estimates have data doubling every 18 months. Some people say it's doubling every two years. We can debate that all we want, but I think the fact of the matter is there's just a tremendous amount of data out there, and people understand that if they can make sense of that information, it can give them not only the ability to just remain competitive in the markets, but also help them float through the down markets as well. So that's one piece.

I also think, if there has been a silver lining in the dark economic cloud that we've been dealing with the past couple of years, it's been the need to be more efficient, be more fact-based in our decision making. I think that silver lining in the cloud has been analytics, and creating an awareness of what analytics can do for an organization, taking it into the enterprise well beyond where it might have been in the past. I think it's going mainstream.

High-end analytics used to require expensive computing power. I think, when we look at storage and computing power now, it's cheap compared with where it's been in the past, so more people can use it. If we look at the last couple of years, not only have businesses become smarter but consumers have become smarter as well. So the way in which we deal with consumers of our products has to be much more targeted.

And then, there's also the issue of transparency in an organization, particularly in financial institutions and measuring risk, based on some of the issues and problems that we've had in the past few years with financial institutions. Nobody wants to go through that again. So there's a lot of demand for calculation of risk, making sure that something like we've experienced doesn't happen again.