Following the recent launch of its SAS 9 Intelligence Platform, SAS - the leader in business intelligence - has announced the general availability of the first customer intelligence software solution based on this platform: SAS Marketing Automation 4.
Bob Blumstein, director of research for CRM analytics and marketing applications at IDC Research, says: "SAS has a history of delivering customer intelligence software that successfully builds off of the considerable strengths of the company's analytic capabilities.
"With enhancements that include marketer-friendly campaign development and analytics, SAS Marketing Automation 4 provides organisations with a strong, well-rounded solution that marketing professionals can leverage to maximise value and return from their efforts," he adds.
SAS Marketing Automation is part of the SAS Customer Intelligence suite, a set of integrated solutions that allows companies to easily understand their customers, apply that customer knowledge appropriately, and measure the value of sales and marketing activities.
"By sharing a common platform for data management and business intelligence, SAS delivers the only comprehensive, end-to-end solution that empowers marketers to better analyse, segment, profile and target customers, resulting in superior marketing campaigns and customer profitability," says Retha Keyser, product manager at SAS Institute, SA. "This allows marketing organisations to optimise their most valuable marketing resource - their skilled professionals - and clearly demonstrate measurable value from their marketing investments."
Forrester Research analysts Elana Anderson and Eric Schmitt reviewed the solution in March, and note in their report: "SAS shakes up marketing automation. SAS Marketing Automation 4, and its sister products in the Customer Intelligence family, will provide SAS with the potential to seize a leadership position in the marketing automation software market." (http://www.sas.com/solutions/crm/market.html
"When developing the SAS 9 platform and the solutions that run on it, we focused on extensibility," says Keyser. "With SAS Marketing Automation, for example, our customers do not have to re-engineer their business processes to fit their software. Rather, our solution helps them overcome key business and technical challenges while leveraging existing technology investments. In addition to extensibility, we also designed SAS Marketing Automation to address the key areas of managing marketing processes, empowering marketers and integrating across the enterprise."
Benefits to organisations using SAS Marketing Automation 4 include:
* SAS Marketing Automation 4 reflects SAS's detailed understanding of the campaign management business process, offering the appropriate capabilities for different types of users.
* New user interfaces specific to various marketing roles empowers business users rather than analytic specialists, to create targeted customer intelligence.
* SAS's leading database-marketing capabilities are built into the open SAS Intelligence Platform, providing interoperability with existing infrastructures, other SAS solutions and other operational platforms.
* SAS Marketing Automation provides central control over metadata, business rules and data management logic, simplifying compliance with pricing regulatory and legislative requirements.
* Security measures, including audit trails, can be implemented more easily with global contact rules administered from a single point of entry and available globally to all business users and marketers.
* Chief privacy officers can create and enforce common compliance rules across campaign processes.
* An overview of all campaigns is consolidated to ensure that all campaign activities are done correctly and in the right sequence.
SAS Marketing Automation is one of the first of seven software solutions this year that will take advantage of the new SAS 9 Intelligence Platform. It will be followed by offerings for risk dimensions, performance management, financial management, activity-based management, supplier relationship management and IT management. SAS will deliver all its existing solutions on the SAS 9 platform.
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