SAS, the leader in business intelligence (BI), unveiled a number of new features customers can expect in the latest technologies becoming available on top of its latest 9.2 release of its coveted SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform (EIP), at the SAS Forum South Africa.
“Customers around the globe are calling for a solution that is pervasive, easy to use, promotes productivity and that is both easy to maintain and install as well as a good fit for existing IT standards. We believe that the latest technologies becoming available on the SAS 9.2 platform will answer these demands,” states Mark Torr, Director at SAS Global Technology Practice.
In discussing usability enhancements, Torr stated: “No matter how much we as technologists say the front-end does not matter, it does, and I believe that the latest SAS 9.2 technology will answer calls for improved productivity while delivering the IT benefits of increased interoperability, manageability and scalability.”
The first technologies of SAS 9.2 were launched in March 2008 at SAS Global Forum and the new technologies highlighted by Torr are scheduled for release in late Q1 2009. Some notable enhancements for those who have to install and manage a SAS platform environment will include the ability to download the software electronically and significant improvements to the installation and configuration.
“BI has moved from a departmental requirement to one that is more strategic in an organisation, and it is as a result of this that we seeing it move from being something often deployed in a department in an organisation to being something that is deployed and handled by IT,” adds Torr. “It is with this that we have had to embrace the notion of making our software easier to maintain and manage. In addition, the pervasive usage we needed to support meant that we needed to include 'whizz bang' user interface features, such as additional support for Flash.”
Through its Teradata partnership, 9.2 will also incorporate the results of the in-database initiative that started out with SAS 9.1.3, where access to data and time to data will be greatly improved from a proximity perspective, enabling the more speedy retrieval of information. Web Services are also being taken to a whole new level with the imminent release, and 9.2 will also offer enhanced grid computing features and integration capabilities with third-party IT monitoring tools including integrated runtime and monitoring capabilities.
“The old argument that SAS is difficult to use and needs a specialist to run is now one of the past. With 9.2, we are offering functionality coupled with advanced analytics that our competitors are nowhere near being able to provide,” he says.
Significant enhancements have been made to the integration of the product with the Microsoft Office suite, and as opposed to dumping data into Excel and hoping it works, Torr says the improvements now mean that your BI system is directly linked to your Office applications for integrated access to data.
“The release will see some of the biggest enhancements ever made to our EIP environment and truly answer the call for a solution that is a lot more user-friendly and significantly easier to deploy. With a new, more intuitive front-end, and the ability to now provide proper analytical insights into your data, we believe that the enhancements we have made with 9.2, at both its core and at an IT level, has a lot to offer customers looking to make BI a pervasive component of their enterprise systems,” ends Torr.
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