SAS Forum South Africa: The future of business intelligence

SAS Forum South Africa kicked off today in Johannesburg, with central themes hinging on the changing face of business intelligence (BI) and how to make the most of your BI investments. The curtain was also raised on the imminent new release of SAS's Enterprise Intelligence Platform, SAS 9.2.

Opening the proceedings, SAS CEO Dr Jim Goodnight delivered a message for South Africa: “In the 13 years since SAS South Africa opened offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town, we have seen the company grow from strength to strength with staff numbers increasing more than ten-fold.

“Even with the backdrop of global economic turbulence, SAS South Africa continues to thrive, and there is now no better time to leverage your business assets. I would like to thank all of our sponsors for this event, and also make mention of the SAS User Group that is being launched at this year's SAS Forum. We wish you all the best in your endeavours, as well as extend our support and resources wherever necessary.”

Looking ahead at the future of BI, SAS Vice-President and SAS Fellow, Allan Russell commented on the changing face of the market. He highlighted the importance of understanding what you hope to achieve with BI and how to marry that into an ultimate goal of being able to make better business decisions.

“The future of BI for SAS is simple, we need to continue to enhance the technology platform to support all styles of BI, and help organisations make faster and more strategic decisions,” states Russell.

Russell also added that BI needs to add value to the business process, yes through improved decision making, but also through assisting human operators of the technology as well as assist in self-improving processes. He says the only way this can be achieved is not by merely reporting on your data, but by the combination of robust analytics and governance.

Speaking on the launch of SAS 9.2, scheduled for final release in March 2009, Mark Torr, Vice-President of Strategy at SAS, said the new release will address many of the concerns that SAS is a programming system. To this end, the enhancements include a number of automated functions and processes in addition to an easy to use drag-and-drop interface.

“SAS 9.2 has been designed to improve productivity, interoperability, manageability and scalability within your enterprise system environment,” states Torr. “BI as a function has moved from being departmentally owned to being a technology/IT function within an organisation and because of this that we have had to develop our own technology accordingly.”

While many of the commercial components of SAS 9.2 were launched in March 2008, the full version will be available to customers in March 2009.

“In this release you will see a lot of enhancements to the core of the technology at an IT Level as well as a number of enhancements at a client level. We have received positive feedback about these new attributes and we have no doubt that SAS 9.2 has a lot to offer our clients,” adds Torr.

While the message is clear that BI still carries a strong reporting component, the overarching message concurred that BI needs to provide your organisation with true intelligence, quickly and efficiently.

“Yes, BI is about reports but in my opinion BI will become invisible to the organisation as it starts being used as a day-to-day component of organisational workflows,” ends Russell.