SAS delivers near real-time ETL functionality

IT shops, faced with declining budgets and staff, as well as increases in data volumes and computing power, demand that new software quickly integrates into their existing operational infrastructure.

In response, SAS is providing near real-time data warehousing and significant integration capability through adapters to the market-leading message-queuing platforms.

"These adapters are delivering SAS data collection, transformation and storage functionality in near-real-time," says Andr Zitzke, solutions architect at SAS Institute, SA.

IT managers face the challenge of creating an IT platform that provides support for a wide breadth of software products and solutions to facilitate getting the right information to the right people, at the right time so they can make informed decisions.

"At the same time, IT managers live in a world of distributed systems and resources where they are often frustrated by the need to deliver information in a timely manner throughout the enterprise using computers and software systems that do not, or cannot, easily communicate with each other," says Zitzke.

This incompatibility often causes new systems to be put in place and IT departments have to spend a great amount of time on workforce retraining to use the new software.

"SAS provides a platform, based on industry standards, that lays the foundation for standardised communications and effective information distribution to more efficiently address these issues."

Support for message queuing platforms enables SAS software's information delivery capabilities to be leveraged within various enterprise scenarios. These include near real-time operational data collection, transformation and storage; application integration; asynchronous/mobile synchronisation and event notification.

Application messaging architectures provide two key benefits. They allow interoperability among loosely coupled, asynchronous and disconnected applications so applications are guaranteed fulfilment of requests for service or event delivery. Secondly, message queuing platforms greatly benefit environments that are heterogeneous in nature, as are most IT shops.

Access to these message queues is provided through the Common Messaging Interface (CMI) in SAS Integration Technologies. The CMIs include messaging functions that are common to market-leading message-queuing platforms, IBM Websphere MQ, Microsoft MQ and TIBCO TIB/Rendezvous.

SAS integrates with these through adapters provided in its SAS Integration Technologies product.

An ideal sector for use of SAS near-real-time ETL offering is the financial services industry where, for example, high-risk customers who are profitable and have high lifetime value through cross- and up-selling potential can be targeted. To identify optimal sales opportunities and maximise customer profitability, organisations can implement a CRM solution that combines interactive voice response, message queuing and SAS near-real-time ETL technology. The solution will trigger the delivery of customer-specific and relevant marketing intelligence to front line agents in less than a second, consequently reducing the workload for the agents and enhancing customer relationships and brand loyalty.

SAS is the only vendor of business intelligence software able to provide technology and solutions that deliver proven value across the whole process of generating intelligence - which SAS calls the Intelligence Value Chain. From data to strategic intelligence, SAS delivers benefits throughout the entire intelligence creation process, which includes planning, ETL, storage, analytics, and BI query and reporting.