SAS 9 gets thumbs-up from Bloor

SAS 9 offers unrivalled integration across its broad offering, according to Bloor Research, the latest independent research company to give the world's first single, scalable business intelligence platform the thumbs-up.

Writing for the research organisation's IT-director.com, associate analyst Philip Howard notes that apart from how good each individual product within SAS 9 is, "that it is not the major strength of SAS 9. Its real strength is its integration.

"The point is that there is no other product that has this depth of integration across this breadth of offering." (Source: SAS 9, IT-director.com. Wednesday 31st March 2004.)

SAS is a software company that provides organisations with intelligence that enables increased profits, reduced costs, managed risk and breakthrough decisions that transform the way they do business. Its new platform, SAS 9, brings business and intelligence together in a whole new way.

The new software release has eliminated the complexity of sharing data and applications across the organisation. Targeted interfaces align with individual skill levels to provide intelligence in just the right business context.

"This marks the first time a single-source software vendor has been able to offer this level of intelligence integration through a single, scalable platform while providing a consistent and rewarding user interface experience," says Bill Hoggarth, managing director of SAS Institute SA.

As Howard points out in his article, SAS has now extended its focus to include power users and business users, whereas previously it was limited to specialists and business analysts.

Howard refers to the fact that SAS 9 includes sophisticated business intelligence capability as well as the more traditional data warehousing, data mining, ETL, data cleansing and data profiling. All of these are built on a single platform with a single metadata model that underpins it and supports XML for the interchange of information with other environments.

"The significance of this is both general and specific," Howard writes. "In the latter case, it means that corporate governance requirements, such as being able to trace the lineage of data, are very much simpler to implement, because you do not have to transfer data and metadata from one environment to another. This in turn makes auditing more complete and comprehensive.

"The other big advantage of this integrated approach, from a more general perspective, is that the whole SAS 9 environment should be much easier to manage, and therefore result in lower cost of ownership, compared to more fragmented environments. The chance to reduce the number of suppliers may also be appealing to some companies," Howard concludes.