SAS claims leadership for SOA based on intelligence platform, solutions

SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today announced new capabilities extending SAS's industry-leading support for service-oriented architecture (SOA) within the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform and across its range of solutions. With the SAS offering, the benefits of SOA can be realised without having to carry out all the integration work that comes with cobbled-together platforms or solutions.

The SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform is built on an SOA that brings together data integration, intelligence storage, analytic intelligence and business intelligence on one comprehensive platform. The benefit of SAS's complete platform is that it allows line-of-business managers - such as those in supply chain, customer service or product development - to quickly implement technology they need and deploy solutions required to support their business processes. SAS can also interoperate with third-party services by calling out from its platform or solutions as appropriate.

In future releases of the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform, SAS will further its leadership by enlarging its library of ready-to-use SAS data, storage, reporting and analytical services, offering pre-packaged industry- and function-specific services, automating the process of propagating changes across services, and expanding integration with third-party vendor services. SAS will also move aggressively to make many of these available out of the box as Web services.

Today, SAS is extending its support for SOA with its new SOA-based customer data integration (CDI) technology, which enables companies to intelligently synchronise, consolidate and manage customer information from across an enterprise in an effort to create a single view of the customer. SAS's CDI offering delivers more than 100 data services out of the box that can be exposed in a SOA including granular services and service bundles that combine to execute a complete business function.

In addition, SAS is providing a new real-time data quality solution, based on SOA, that allows organisations to link data quality with their operational applications through the use of Web services to improve data quality from the start and save the cost of having to tidy it up later.

"SAS has earned a well-deserved reputation for providing technologies and solutions that integrate with our customers' IT environments. SAS is fully SOA-compliant, already delivering the widest range of services on the market today with the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform and solutions. SAS is dedicated to helping customers realise the promise of SOA without the pain," said Mark Torr, Technology Strategy Director for SAS in Europe, Middle East and Africa. "In 2006 and beyond we will continue to enhance our SOA-based Enterprise Intelligence Platform and solutions and deliver collections of services using the right technology to fully meet our customers' needs."

SAS already provides thousands of services as a part of its platform and solutions as well as easy-to-use tools for customers to create their own services. SAS services can be called from a variety of places, including applications and embedded processes.

SOA is a software approach that takes various tasks and organises them into interoperable, standards-based services. These services can be requested in their most granular form, combined to create composite services, and shared or reused to meet changing business needs. This services approach helps enterprises more effectively integrate data and applications for customers, partners and suppliers, and reduce the time, money and resources needed to manage IT infrastructures.

Today's announcement was made at SAS Forum International, the largest enterprise BI conference outside the United States, attended by more than 2 000 business leaders, managers and IT professionals.