Visual Analytics gives business users a new way to access and analyze Big Data without having to rely on IT and data analysts, said Randy Guard, senior vice president of product management.

The technology supports improved decision making by allowing business users to spot business trends and opportunities much faster than they were able to previously, Guard said.

Visual Analytics allows business users to explore magnitudes more data from internal and external sources, he said. Instead of basing decisions on a sampling of data, enterprise can run analytics on entire data sets, he said.

Much of the increased speed comes from the technology's in-memory architecture that allows enterprises to run multiple terabytes of data directly in memory, he said.

In beta tests, Visual Analytics was able to complete tasks that used to take 20 to 30 hours in less than five minutes, he said.