SAS Expands Data Integration Initiative

At the SAS Users Group Meeting in San Francisco (SUGI 31), SAS announced a major corporate initiative to extend its capabilities and market leadership in data integration (DI) - the transformation of disparate, poorly connected islands of information into an enterprisewide environment that provides high-quality, up-to-the-minute information.

In his book Simplicity, business management expert and author Bill Jensen states that the most conservative estimates show business information doubling every three years, while some estimates say data doubles every year.

Data integration is crucial because many large businesses find themselves with operational data - e.g., point-of-sale transactions, RFID data, call center interactions, bank transactions - scattered across multiple platforms and variations of technology, making it very difficult to stay in sync across enterprises and to harness live data.

To tackle the problem, companies have built up a hodgepodge of vendor and home-grown software - such as relational database management systems, ETL, data quality and a myriad of data integration systems - that is often incompatible, redundant and underperforming. The result? Information that is shared across organizations is often contradictory, inconsistent and inaccurate.

Increased investment in DI
SAS intends to increase its research and development investment in data integration by 15 percent each year in 2006 and 2007. By doing so, SAS will advance a universal data integration platform that helps companies reduce both the cost and complexity of information management.

In 2005, SAS invested 24 percent of its $1.68 billion in revenues in companywide R&D, a percentage unrivaled among major software vendors.

The increased investment is intended to help customers bring together data integration technologies (the kind typically needed in real time for operational business applications) with the technologies needed for business intelligence and decision support.

SAS' DI initiative will also include:

• Upcoming enhancements to SAS Enterprise Data Integration Server software with expanded data quality technology for profiling, monitoring, cleansing and verifying data correctness - capabilities aimed at promoting consistent, accurate information and credibility in business intelligence applications.
• New customer data integration (CDI) technology that enables companies to intelligently synchronize, consolidate and manage customer information from across an enterprise. This solution supports organizations' efforts to create a single view of each customer across the entire enterprise.
• A special data integration focus team that deploys at customer sites worldwide to assess their data integration issues and deliver solutions that mesh with their existing systems and produce quick results. This team will work in concert with the hundreds of SAS professionals who support data integration through research & development, education, training, consulting and support.
• A data integration focus as part of SAS' global Business Intelligence Competency Center program, which helps create cohesive enterprise intelligence strategies for better decision making.
• On-demand Web seminars where professionals interested in improving their data integration systems can expand their knowledge and understanding.

The new data integration technologies and resources from SAS will help companies quickly attain and manage consistent and trusted data throughout the organization.

SAS Data Integration offers a comprehensive data integration solution that includes technologies for connectivity and metadata; data cleansing and enrichment; extraction, transformation and loading (ETL); migration and synchronization; data federation; and master data management.

With these capabilities, organizations have the flexibility, reliability and agility to respond quickly to new data integration requirements, consolidate vendors, standardize on one integration solution for both operational and business intelligence applications, and reduce the overall cost of data integration.

Intrawest: a case study in DI
Intrawest, a world leader in destination resorts and adventure travel, uses technologies from SAS and DataFlux to address its data integration issues. Like many companies in this market, Intrawest was created through a series of acquisitions over many years, but the company had difficulties creating a 360-degree view of its customers because Intrawest had never consolidated customer data from the different companies.

But that has all changed. The company has recently consolidated its customer information using data integration software for master data management from SAS and DataFlux to create a more holistic and historical view of its customers. From the time anyone enters one of its resort properties, Intrawest wants to extend the best offer to each customer, based on that particular customer's profile and behavioral information. Intrawest examines all its customer databases, finds duplicate customer information, merges it and determines how to market to them most effectively.

"SAS and DataFlux have helped us track our customers' behavioral patterns and develop a more useful, reliable view of each of our customers," says Anne Donohoe, director of customer relationship marketing at Intrawest. "Now we can fine-tune our marketing efforts to develop targeted offers that take into account each of our customers' behaviors, lifestyles and values."

"Most organizations struggle because other vendors cannot deliver all the critical elements of a comprehensive, effective data integration solution," says Jim Davis, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at SAS. "SAS Data Integration helps solve a broad range of issues in the enterprise as data volumes explode and are further complicated by mergers, acquisitions and the ongoing need to modernize aging systems."