Minding its own business: SAS taps own strengths to manage IT resources

With a technical infrastructure spanning offices in nearly every major city in the world, SAS puts tremendous demands on its own IT systems, which must function efficiently to meet the business needs of the world's largest privately owned maker of software solutions.

For SAS, the only solution up to the task is its own SAS IT Resource Management.

"Without our infrastructure up and functioning, people can't do their jobs," explains Eugene Bridges, SAS's director of enterprise systems support. "If I'm not getting responses back from the customer-address appliance, or from the pricing contracts, or even our e-mail - if we can't converse in a timely manner with our customers - it has a direct impact on our bottom line."

With the ability to handle more than 1 000 sources of unique service components, SAS IT Resource Management provides an all-encompassing approach to IT service reporting across the enterprise. The solution enables IT to speak to business by aligning IT direction with the corporate bottom line, while bridging organisational gaps. The SAS solution addresses the entire spectrum of IT services - systems, networks, Web servers and phones - with award-winning data warehousing and analysis that provides reports for all levels.

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it," is Bridges' mantra, borrowed from MXG software developer/consultant Barry Merrill, and the rationale behind SAS IT Resource Management's intelligence overlay. Particularly useful are some of SAS's higher-level graphic utilisation displays and the exception list with drill-down capabilities that allow users to sift through mountains of data to decide where employees should concentrate their efforts.

"You can buy specialised products for mainframe analysis and a specialised product for Windows and Oracles analysis - or anything like that - but SAS gives you the ability to process all of those data types and show all of your data in one place," explains Pete Cregger, a senior IT manager in charge of SAS's applications architecture team within MIS. "With SAS, you're maximising your IT dollars because you're not having to buy product after product after product."

At almost any given time, more than 4 000 users are logged into SAS's technical infrastructure. Just as SAS employees in the Pacific Rim are logging off for the day, workers in the Middle East, Europe and Africa are logging on, followed half a workday later by SAS employees in the Americas. With SAS IT Resource Management, Bridges can see from one location what's happening around the globe.

"By being able to see cause-and-effect events that show how activities in one location may or may not affect what's happening somewhere else, you reduce your average time for problem resolution," Cregger says. "And being able to pull all of this disparate data into one view allows you to take measurements and feed them into SAS Strategic Performance Management to contribute to enterprise-wide business goals and best practices."

Bob Bonham, SAS's director of information and technology services, continuously monitors 1 000 computing and telecommunication devices. In an hour, he may accumulate thousands of records about systems performance. SAS's reporting capabilities help him see what he needs to see in a timely manner, which allows for proactive monitoring.

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"I don't want my customers calling me and sending me e-mails when things are not operational - that's wrong," Bonham says. "With SAS IT Resource Management, we can couple the instrumentation about our environment with our team's logging systems in an intellectual property that tells us how well we're doing as a customer service organisation."

SAS offers a historical database that accelerates root-cause analyses of problems with graphical views of trends. That's important to managers when they're targeting predicted changes or performance improvements because it provides measures for gauging whether desired results were reached. If not, they can perform more analyses to develop a plan for improving workload utilisation and performance.

"SAS IT Resource Management helps us look over time to see whether all our fine-tuning is making a difference," Bonham says. "If you don't have that ability when you get into incremental performance tuning, you can go in circles and not make a change. When you have a better view of what's going on, you're going to solve those problems faster than normal."

The ability to predict changes in performance becomes a powerful management tool, Bridges says. "You can target predicted changes and later measure them to see if you got desired results," he explains. "If not, you go back in and do additional analysis, looking at it before and after and coming to an understanding of what your next step and your plan should be to improve the utilisation and performance of your workload."

The SAS solution promotes better use of time among staff, whose salaries represent a vast chunk of the IT budget. With so much information and so many customers, Bridges, Bonham and Cregger need business analytics and intelligence to make all that data digestible. SAS IT Resource Management summarises it into intelligence with pre-developed reports and built-in algorithms that reduce the need for staff involvement in the reporting process.

"Reducing the data allows me to direct the staff to places where I'm going to see a return from them analysing and making changes and recommendations," Bridges says. "That way I'm better utilising staff, and I don't need to have as many people."

Using SAS IT Resource Management gives SAS an edge over the competition because it creates a leaner organisation. For every $1 spent on IT, companies typically must sell $10 worth of software. The solution also ensures SAS's employees that they have sufficient resources to do their jobs - that, for example, applications and the network are responding with timely information that sales representatives need to close deals.

"If we can do more with less, which we're doing, then that makes us more efficient and generates more revenue toward R&D and producing a better product, which makes us more competitive," Bonham says. "Being able to look at our resources to ensure they're helping with performance and being able to do capacity planning proactively help the rest of SAS's employees with their productivity."