SAS Enterprise Guide 2.0 empowers users

SAS, the leader in business intelligence, recently shipped Enterprise Guide Version 2.0, a powerful Windows client application with an easy-to-use interface that allows companies to better leverage business intelligence resources to worldwide customers.

Enterprise Guide now delivers a greater depth of intelligence across businesses even more easily and quickly, enabling more effective and insightful decision-making. As the single point of access to SAS' dynamic capabilities, Enterprise Guide omits the need for programming for business analysts. Programmers, statisticians and business analysts prefer this interface, which allows them to tap into the power of SAS and drastically reduces time previously spent coding or programming to deliver results.

"Customers use Enterprise Guide to create and exploit business intelligence quickly," said Dr Jim Goodnight, president and CEO of SAS. "Using Enterprise Guide, organisations leverage the next generation of business intelligence - rapidly pushing the power of SAS analytics across the enterprise using existing platforms and data sources. Customers tell us that Enterprise Guide is worth its weight in gold because it delivers intelligence to the right people at the right time so that they can make better, faster business decisions."

"Version 2.0 of Enterprise Guide will enable us to make business intelligence available to an even broader audience within the bank, without increasing IT resources to do so," said Claudio Campana, information manager at Banca del Gottardo, one of Switzerland's leading banks. "In particular, the new scheduling functionality considerably reduces the time it takes us to deliver information to multiple channels. Timeliness of information delivery is particularly key to us in our competitive environment of financial services."

Enterprise Guide 2.0 provides greater ease of use, taking analytical processing power to the next level with the following new features and capabilities:

* Additional guided tasks to lead users quickly and easily through analyses and reporting.

* Role-based task display that decreases the complexity of the user interface, leading to increased productivity and reduced overall learning time.

* Integrated scheduling that allows end users to refresh and disseminate reports automatically at regular intervals, leading to better knowledge exchange (and reduced IT workload).

* Increased flexibility to adapt to the needs of the enterprise by supporting the development of custom tasks using familiar development environments such as Microsoft Visual Basic or .Net. These custom tasks enable common organisation-specific analytic and reporting requests to be encapsulated alongside existing SAS tasks.

Enterprise Guide is an important business intelligence component of the SAS Intelligence Architecture, the foundation for obtaining high-quality and consistent information rapidly and easily. This is accomplished by integrating data warehousing, analytic intelligence and business intelligence functions into a single, cohesive platform. Enterprise Guide is also certified by Microsoft's Data Warehousing Alliance and SAP's Business Warehouse program.

"Enterprise Guide makes using analytics easier, more efficient and more effective, thereby speeding the delivery of business intelligence to support business decision-makers," said Jim Davis, SAS senior vice-president and chief marketing officer. "Our customers want automation and reliability, and with Enterprise Guide 2.0, they get just that. Key facts, patterns and trends about a business that were previously a mystery are now driving better business decisions."