First Look - JMP Pro

I got my first look at JMP recently. JMP originally stood for "John's Macintosh Project" apparently but is now a major business unit of SAS that has operated independently since 1989. It has about 180 employees and 250,000 users worldwide. The product has long since supported both Windows and Mac platforms and is a full SAS client. Critically JMP is an all in-memory solution for desktops that is highly interactive and highly usable. The JMP family consists of JMP, JMP Pro (a 64 bit version with some more advanced features) plus two joint JMP/SAS products aimed at healthcare - JMP Genomics and JMP Clinical.

JMP is focused on exploratory data analysis and visualization. Recent enhancements in the area of interactive data mining and predictive analytics add more automated predictive analytic model building techniques to its visual discovery. Visualization of data to build understanding is important to all phases of analysis of course- discovery, development and deployment. JMP delivers visualization that is optimized for discovery. As an in-memory product it is very responsive and limited only to the amount of memory you have on the desktop. It is extensible with visual, coding and wizard-driven options and comes pre-integrated with SAS, Excel and R.

JMP Pro is a 64 bit extended version of JMP with enhanced neural net, decision trees and modeling platforms along with more advanced methods and an ability to generate SAS score code. JMP Pro is now shipping with SAS Enterprise Miner (reviewed here) and is apparently going to be the basis for a new SAS Enterprise Miner interface. This, SAS hopes, will help create more analytic bandwidth by making modelers more productive and more able to do new exploration during the development of their models - taking advantage of their local compute power with JMP Pro's in-memory architecture.

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