SAS Goes Beyond BI™

At SAS Forum International 2005, SAS detailed how business intelligence (BI) and business analytics software helps organizations around the globe discover more about their customers, supply chains, finances and overall operations. More than 2,000 attendees convened in Lisbon to share their successes, learn from peers and experience the latest SAS technologies that will help them chart a course to improved global competitiveness, increased customer satisfaction and greater profitability.

"In a time of rapid change, success or failure depends on how quickly information becomes knowledge and knowledge fuels decisions," says SAS CEO Jim Goodnight. "Business intelligence and business analytics help create this knowledge and intelligence for faster, more accurate decision making."

"Business intelligence and analytical technologies are behind the discovery of new opportunities, revealing targeted insight into each and every customer, for example, or detailed understanding of risk exposure in different countries and business units," says Art Cooke, president of SAS International. "Companies that can effectively use BI and analytics to leverage their existing resources – people, technology, data, etc. – can play a commanding role on the global business scene, regardless of their size."

A platform for enterprise intelligence
SAS and its latest SAS®9 technologies provide the most powerful and effective platform for enterprise intelligence on the market today. The SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platformgoes beyond the traditional definition of BI. It enables organizations to easily gather data, regardless of source, transform it into high-quality information, analyze it, and then make it securely and easily available to all users. With its unmatched data integration, easy-to-use business reporting and unparalleled analytics, the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform is completely scalable, providing the flexibility to accommodate thousands of users and terabytes of data.

Like the Portuguese explorers of old, businesses today need to see beyond the horizon, to predict with accuracy where they are heading, what obstacles await them and what steps they can take to reach their goals. The SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform delivers powerful technologies to meet this need.

Targeting business and vertical needs: It’s about time
Using the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform as a foundation, SAS®9 offers targeted business solutions that support enterprise intelligence, customer intelligence, financial intelligence, supply chain intelligence and more, as well as turnkey solutions for such vertical industries as financial services, life sciences, retail, manufacturing and others.

With its support of open industry standards, the SAS platform enables its host of powerful business and vertical industry solutions to be easily shared and integrated. By ensuring that consistent business information is spread across the enterprise, SAS allows companies to maximize the effective use of their existing hardware, software, data and people. It also helps organizations track their performance and align their efforts around corporate goals.

Finally, the interoperability provided by the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform enables IT departments to react more quickly to changing business and IT needs, minimizing the time to intelligence and to bottom-line results.

"Time is a level playing field: Every organization, regardless of size, industry sector or geographical location, has just 1,440 minutes in a day," says Jim Davis, chief marketing officer at SAS. "The competitive edge goes to those who can not only get information faster, but to those who have the time to analyze a situation fully before making a decision."

Today’s manager must be able to analyze the past, predict the future and then apply both to present-day decisions. On top of that, he or she must be able to quantify these decisions and show measurable performance to stakeholders, regulators, employees and industry influencers. These requirements are why performance management is such a growth area today.

Enhanced performance management
Performance management involves aligning business and IT processes, linking tactical operations with strategic goals. And SAS has made great strides in the performance management space in the last year, with increased demand for its flagship performance management solutions: SAS Strategic Performance Management and SAS Activity-Based Management. Worldwide first quarter sales for SAS Strategic Performance Management were up 20 percent over the same period in 2004, while sales of SAS Activity-Based Management jumped 43 percent over last year. At SAS Forum International, SAS announced its success in performance management and unveiled an enhanced version of SAS Strategic Performance Management (see related story).

The rise of business analytics
In a recent survey of CIO magazine subscribers involved in the purchase of business intelligence (BI) and/or data mining software, a full 88 percent indicated BI is a business priority for their organizations. Additionally, 56 percent of respondents to this survey by IDG Research Services Group stated that BI is a "critical" or "high" business priority.

Why are analytics and BI so hot? Because companies can see a quick return on their investments. For example, financial services firm Dreyfus cut its mutual fund customer attrition in half (see related story), while office supply retailer Staples cut the costs for each marketing campaign by 25 percent.

Major industry analyst firm IDC refers to the combination of data management, BI tools and analytics as business analytics. According to its  Business Analytics Software Competitive Market Map:

"Business analytics software comprises tools and applications for tracking, modeling, analyzing and delivering data in support of decision-making processes. Recent trends in the business analytics (BA) software market have created a competitive environment where software vendors from different backgrounds find themselves in competitive and collaborative situations spanning the extraction, transformation and loading (ETL), data warehouse management, end-user BI tools and enterprise applications technologies."

SAS’ Value Proposition
Analytics and BI software are no longer the exclusive domain of quantitative and statistical experts. With the right enterprise intelligence platform, business people from the factory floor to the board room can tap the power of data mining, forecasting and other predictive analytic technologies, along with data integration, data quality and reporting technologies.

Many vendors are jumping into the market (or into the marketing) for analytics and BI, including ERP vendors and query and reporting BI tools providers. Yet too often, the "intelligence" that these vendors provide – basic reporting on what happened last year, last quarter or even last week – falls woefully short of the scope, integration and predictive analytic power companies need to remain competitive.

One vendor stands out from the crowd however: SAS, with its 29-year history as an enterprise BI and analytics software leader. SAS’ powerful, integrated enterprise intelligence platform provides unmatched scope in predictive analytics, data management and BI software.