A survey among the 2 000 attendees of the recent SAS European User Conference in Vienna, SeUGI revealed that SAS analytics and data integration capabilities are viewed as key to achieving return on investment (ROI) from business intelligence software.
Over 95% of the respondents said return on their SAS software investment met or exceeded their expectations, with 68% of respondents identifying that SAS's predictive analytics capability was essential or important in driving that ROI.
99% of the respondents viewed accurate data as essential or important in the ability of business intelligence (BI) applications to deliver ROI, and 91% cited SAS's data access and integration capabilities as essential or important criteria determining their choice of SAS as their BI vendor.
These results support the findings of a recent independent European-wide survey, commissioned by SAS, that 66% of European organisations admit dirty data impacts company profitability and that 74% of companies in the financial services and telecommunication industries are doing, or planning to do, something this year to improve data quality.
"In an uncertain economy, companies need to be able to predict and manage customer demand, not just react to it, in order to ensure revenue growth," says Richard King, Marketing Director for SAS International. "Equally, companies cannot cut costs effectively without predictive analytics - they need to understand how, where and why costs are being incurred to be able to model the impact of cost savings and changes to business processes. SAS continues to lead the market in providing packaged analytic applications that address these issues with solutions tailored to specific industries. "
Predictive analytics delivers high ROI and is a key differentiator for SAS as most BI vendors either have no predictive analytics capability, or have the tools but not the intellectual capital to apply predictive analytics into vertical and lines of business applications.
"All major IT industry analyst houses recognise the importance of data quality to the return on BI investment yet many vendors do not offer or integrate data quality into their BI tools and applications," said King. "We are pleased to see a recognition by our customers of our unique ability to access, transform, cleanse and manage data needed for analytical applications."
The major hurdles companies across the board are encountering in successfully implementing business intelligence projects were identified as resource skills (48%), budget (46%), systems integration (47%), management buy-in (32%) and dirty data (47%).
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SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 39 000 sites - including 90% of the Fortune 500 - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organisations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For more than 25 years, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know. Visit us at www.sas.com.