SAS MADE A slew of new announcements Thursday around its next-generation enterprisewide BI (business intelligence) software,
including new vertical solutions and industry intelligence models.
The company rolled out new solutions aimed at the banking and telecommunications industries to provide a portfolio of industry-specific
packaged applications, embedded domain expertise, and an extendable underlying architecture to give companies a fast track
on intelligence and a quicker ROI.
In addition, SAS announced that the latest release of its software -- Release 9.0 due out this summer -- will soon be available
for servers based on the forthcoming Intel Itanium 2 processor. SAS will release a production version of Release 9.0 on both
the Microsoft Windows 64-bit and HPUX 11i operating systems for Itanium 2-based servers later this summer. Intel plans to
introduce the Intel Itanium 2 processor mid-year.
SAS also announced a new global strategic alliance with Computer Sciences to develop and deliver BI solutions for analytical
CRM, strategic performance management, and data warehousing for public and private sector clients.
Finally, SAS announced the addition of activity-based costing functionality to its existing customer intelligence solutions,
designed to enable companies to gain a complete and accurate picture of customer profitability. The announcement follows the
acquisition of ABC Technologies in March.
All of these announcements were made at the SAS European Users Group International conference in Paris.
Initial application for the new Industry Intelligence Solutions will include credit scoring, customer retention and segmentation,
cross-and-up-selling, and marketing automation as well as a strategic performance management application designed to help
organizations track their overall performance.
"What we're doing is allowing companies within these industries to take this solution and get it up and running a lot faster,"
said Nell Schantz, SAS global strategist and CRM program director. "A lot of the planning, a lot of the warehousing time has
been greatly reduced. It will give them a lot faster ROI."
While many vendors are touting analytical CRM offerings, most are offering only basic reporting, Schantz said.
"That's not the type of analytics that we're talking about," she said. "We're talking about doing some in-depth analysis
on which of your customers is likely to leave or what is the propensity for a customer to buy a certain product."
The industry solutions include a common data model that defines business entities and processes for the given industry.
As the foundation, the industry-specific data model ensures rapid integration and implementation of the application components
as well as the sharing of consistent and accurate information across the enterprise, according to SAS officials.
SAS' newest industry-specific solutions underscore the company's continued success in calibrating its powerful analytic
and data management software with the changing needs of enterprises, said Bob Moran, an analyst at Aberdeen Group in Boston.
The new industry solutions clearly demonstrate a strong commitment to provide software that speaks the language of specific
industries and that solves their unique pains, he added
The new industry solutions are currently available. The next industry solution -- aimed at insurance companies -- is due
in September.
New features in Version 9 include:
-- Multi-threading technology designed to optimize computing resources to allow more number crunching with the same computing
power.
-- A standard development platform that makes shared services available to SAS and non-SAS programmers to speed development
time.
-- An improved intelligence portal designed to allow companies to share intelligence gleaned from analysis more readily.
-- Advanced analytical functionality including text mining and parallel data mining.
-- A new Java-based interface will streamline the consistent look and feel of SAS and extend user access capabilities.
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