SAS introduced its new business intelligence (BI) platform in Johannesburg yesterday as part of a global launch. It promises to deliver 15 solutions for the platform by the third quarter of the year.
"SAS 9 is a big deal for SAS," said Bill Hoggarth, SAS SA MD. "We consider the new platform a significant breakthrough in technology that will further increase performance and drive down costs."
Hoggarth told journalists this latest release of SAS technology is the result of continual feedback from customers for at least the past 10 years on how to capitalise on the value of intelligence.
"SAS 9 provides the only fully integrated end-to-end solution for going beyond business intelligence as it has been known until now."
Hoggarth emphasised that SAS 9 is not about the past, but about the future. "A crossroads has been reached in BI. An increasing number of businesses are turning to intelligence to solve business concerns, but they are finding they can't generate intelligence fast enough to act on it."
Jim Davis, SAS senior VP and chief marketing officer, said SAS 9 is the most comprehensive release to date and is differentiated from other BI platforms by the inclusion of multithreading capability and enhanced predictive analytics, enabling businesses to identify trends before it is too late to take action, providing competitive-edge.
Hoggarth said SAS 9's multithreading capability enables users to work faster and analyse more data. "In some data-sorting tasks, SAS 9 has been shown to perform 40 times faster than its forerunners.
"There has been an explosion of consumers and data, resulting in an increased demand for complexity. In response to that demand, SAS 9 is built on the cornerstones of usability, manageability, interoperability and scalability."
Hoggarth said SAS 9 offers enhanced analytics, speed and flexibility of being able to sit on top of any infrastructure to use existing data systems to the maximum. The new platform also provides a single point of control through a new management console and makes use of a variety of customised user interfaces (UIs) to deliver the right intelligence to the right people.
"The development of role-specific UIs has been verified in testing as a successful way of opening the power of SAS to all levels of an enterprise, and not just the CEO."
SAS 9 is fast, predictive, flexible and user-friendly, he said, but not necessarily suitable for every business, and although Hoggarth agrees the value of predictive BI is potentially great for small and medium enterprises, the present focus is on the enterprise space.
However, he noted that company size is not as important as total cost of ownership, business value and return on investment when it comes to considering a SAS implementation. "We have some small companies among our clients who spend 25% of their turnover on intelligence because it is core to their business, such as companies involved in fraud detection and prevention."
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