Sales of SAS Customer Intelligence grew 50% in 2007

Forrester Research reports that enterprise marketing platform solutions will grow "in excess of 20% over the next five years". *

This comes as no surprise to SAS, the leader in business intelligence: SAS Customer Intelligence solutions sales grew 50% in 2007.

"Awareness has mushroomed that an integrated suite of marketing solutions is pivotal to an effective marketing organisation," says Gerrit van Wyngaard product manager Customer Intelligence at SAS, South Africa.

Forrester reports that 83% of marketers "increasingly believe that a comprehensive marketing suite that supports the entire marketing organisation can make the difference".

In its Forrester Wave: Enterprise Marketing Platforms, Q1 2008 (January 2008) report, Forrester found that SAS "offers a strong, analytically-driven solution for relationship marketing". In the analytics and reporting sub-category, SAS received a perfect five, the only vendor to do so in any category.

Per Forrester, "SAS's platform offers best-in-class data mining and customer analytics capabilities. They also have significantly improved the performance and usability of its campaign management application. Customer references we spoke with were complimentary about the performance of the current version of marketing automation and optimisation. Recent improvements in workflow, configuration and analytics were designed to make the application more usable and support the casual marketer."

Additionally, Forrester reported that "direct marketers tell us that contact optimisation is near the top of their wish list of technologies," but that the market is currently underserved. The report identified SAS as one of the very few vendors that can provide the comprehensive contact optimisation that marketers desire.

Since Forrester completed its vendor evaluation, SAS has released a new version of its Customer Intelligence suite (December 2007) featuring SAS Real-Time Decision Manager, which helps marketers coordinate interactive marketing across multiple channels. This new solution uses analytically-driven decision logic to increase the effectiveness of every customer interaction.

Forrester writes that interactive marketing technologies, not yet part of Today's enterprise marketing platform, are "mostly delivered by smaller, niche vendors" and "that interactive marketers struggle to coordinate internal and external activities, centralise measurement and optimise spend".

While SAS Real-Time Decision Manager was not evaluated due to release timing, its capabilities directly serve the reported needs of the market.

SAS's goals to help marketers deepen customer insights, choreograph customer interactions and continuously improve marketing performance are what marketers need today. SAS Customer Intelligence solutions uniquely support marketers through a complete range of solutions including campaign management, optimisation, Web analytics, customer profitability, digital marketing and real-time decision management not currently available from other vendors.

*The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Marketing Platforms, Q1 2008 Suresh Vittal January 2008