Data is the fuel and analytics the engine of new economy: Oliver Schabenberger

Automation, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the way companies think about, and use, software analytics, insists Oliver Schabenberger, executive vice-president and chief technology officer of SAS Institute Inc., a global analytics solutions provider. "It's fascinating to think what happens when you apply these technologies to compete not only in new spaces but also in existing ones--how do we augment what we have already been doing," Schabenberger observed during a recent interview in Mumbai. Pointing out that ML is not a new space for companies, he acknowledged that it is AI, depending on "how you define it", that is "somewhat of an emerging area for us". Schabenberger cited the example of cognitive computing, where SAS has had solutions such as sentiment analysis, content categorization and entity extraction from text for decades. "But now," he said, "new technologies are being brought to bear in the same spaces--around deep learning, for example. That changed the accuracy with which we could solve some of these tasks."