If you’re a small-to-midsized business (SMB), you know that you’re operating in a fast-paced, ever-changing business environment. Customers want their demands met instantly, and increasing competition multiplies the pressure you’re under. If you can’t deliver, you can be sure somebody else will. Fortunately, the technology landscape is changing the way you do business. Mobility, social media, and Big Data are leveling the playing field and making it possible for companies like yours to access more sophisticated technology, reach bigger audiences, target their messages, and innovate in their offerings. Yet nothing has changed the landscape so much as the cloud.

According to Dr. Barry Devlin of 9sight Consulting, the truth behind all the talk about big data and the possibilities it can offer is not hard to see, provided that organizations are willing to return to the principles of good data management processes.

SAS Institute is gearing up to make a self-service data preparation play with its new Data Loader for Hadoop offering. Designed for profiling, cleansing, transforming and preparing data to load it into the open source data processing framework for analysis, Data Loader for Hadoop is a lynchpin in SAS's data management strategy for 2015. This strategy centers on three key themes: 'big data' management and governance involving Hadoop, the streamlining of access to information, and the use of its federation and integration offerings to enable the right data to be available, at the right time.