SAS Institute has announced that it sees record growth in the demand for new data warehousing applications, even though IT budgets are experiencing little to no growth in the current economy. Second only to the Internet, users view data warehousing's ability to access and cleanse disparate data and format that data for business intelligence uses as the key to achieving real ROI, especially during current economic conditions.
"Even in a weak year for IT expenditures, we see sales of our data warehousing offering growing at a feverish pace," says Frank Nauta, SAS worldwide director of data warehousing strategy.
Based on sales of its SAS/Warehouse Administrator, SAS has seen a 66% growth in data warehousing worldwide in FY 2000, and better than a 15% growth in 2001. "In the Americas market, the data warehousing trend is even more significant," says Nauta. "SAS Americas saw data warehousing demand grow at a rate of 87% (FY 2000 over FY 1999), and 66% YTD in 2001. The demand for data warehousing is now in its fifth consecutive year, and as users turn more to customer relationship management (CRM), we anticipate that this trend will continue."
SAS South Africa MD Bill Hoggarth maintains that the international picture is repeated here in SA. "In a year which has seen layoffs, closures and profit warnings galore, SAS in SA has not only grown its overall revenue by well over 60% compared to last year, but we have also grown our staff complement significantly, and will continue to do so. We attribute this development to local businesses' faith in our data warehousing offering.
"South African companies are recognising the business imperative of accurate, timely information, and hence of data warehouses, business intelligence systems and analytical applications. So far this year we have been successful in securing at least six multimillion-rand contracts, two of them worth close to R10 million each," says Hoggarth.
Recent studies by The Data Warehousing Institute and from Deloitte Research point to the growing recognition of the importance and business potential of data warehousing and the related area of decision support. In surveys of the most important technologies, IT managers ranked data warehousing second in 2000-01, elevating it from fifth place in 1998-99.
According to Nauta, data warehousing is the number two IT/business user priority, with the Internet first and e-commerce third. "Decision support, or rather business intelligence, a foundation of SAS software, recently moved into the fourth position. Because we see ever-increasing pressure for improved ROI," he adds, "SAS, through its commitment to R&D continues to add and integrate new functionality such as data quality and DRM (distributed resource management) to its product offerings.
"CRM is today's business goal, and to be successful, companies must excel at managing customer information," says Nauta. "Data warehousing captures customer information and cleanses that data to correct differences and inaccuracies between data sources and data models. "Finally, data warehousing formats the data for analytical CRM, data mining and other business intelligence processes. Business users take this customer information, and analyse the data to understand customer preferences, create customer profiles, and predict customer behaviour."
Share
Editorial contacts