Recognising the huge potential for enhanced decision-making from initial business intelligence (BI) implementations, many organisations are now trying to expand the use of BI internally. As more users will be exposed to BI functionality, vendors are focusing on improving their tools in terms of scalability, usability, interoperability and manageability.
Now, leading BI vendor SAS, which predicted the need for enhanced penetration of BI tools to more users some time ago, has developed a new generation of its powerful platform.
The end of March 2004 sees the global launch of SAS 9, which delivers unprecedented performance, openness and simplicity needed to give more people access to the power of BI.
SAS 9 is a scalable, enterprise-wide business intelligence platform that provides a common platform for the delivery of a unique insight into a company's operations, activities, customers and suppliers. Because it offers enterprise-wide intelligence, it ensures a higher level of decision-making efficiency, lowering costs and improving company wide performance.
"The power of SAS can now be accessed by users throughout the company via a Web-based front end," says Annemarie Cronje, solution architect at SAS Institute SA.
She explains that in the past, the huge power of SAS was really only accessible to analysts with business intelligence software on their own PCs. SAS 9, however, redefines the usability footprint, via intuitive "user-centric", web front ends. This extends the reach of analytical intelligence to all users of the enterprise, appropriate to their particular skill level and usage requirements.
"Even hugely distributed organisations can push the analytical ability throughout the enterprise," she says.
SAS 9 gives the ability to manage a company's business with confidence, by enabling it to target the most profitable customers, predict customer churn, optimise the supply chain, reduce risk and maximise potential.
"SAS business analytics now answers strategic questions for more people, across more departments, than any other applications suite," says Cronje. "Organisations can provide a strategy-focused view of the entire enterprise, including customer behaviour, supplier management, employee retention, financial performance and more.
"The full spectrum of information is integrated into a single system so that previously isolated specialists in statistics, finance, marketing and logistics are linked - providing the entire organisation with access to company-standard analytical routines and reporting templates," Cronje concludes.
Share
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 40,000 sites - including 96 of the top 100 of the 2003 Fortune Global 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 nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know(R).
Editorial contacts