Rival analytic firms SPSS and Teradata, a division of NCR, announced similar lifecycle management for analytic models products earlier this year.

All the products provide governance for the modeling lifecycle from creation to optimization to tweaking the model through production deployment, according to James Kobielus, principal analyst at Current Analysis. Neither IBM nor Oracle has a model managing tool to date, added Kobielus.

One of the major headaches SAS Model Manager will resolve, according to Mary Crissey, analytical marketing manager for SAS, is version control.

"It identifies the draft version from the production model," said Crissey.

Other features include audit logs to track when a model was deployed and used or upgraded by whom and the ability to take live feeds for "scoring."