SAS Institute SA will be launching the SAS Business Intelligence Portal offering to the South African market, providing organisations with a set of tools that ease deployment of business intelligence information to users across the enterprise. Franc Trivella, chief technology officer at SAS Institute SA, says: "The SAS Business Intelligence Portal provides an enterprise-wide information delivery vehicle that puts the highest quality information in the hands of the right person when it is needed.
"Right now, end-users have access to tools such as ERP applications, data mining and warehousing software, and OLAP that create, transform and analyse business information. The Business Intelligence Portal fills the gap in the present business intelligence market for tools that are geared towards the consumption of information."
The SAS Business Intelligence Portal, which integrates with other SAS technologies such as the Data Warehouse, Enterprise Miner and OLAP tools, provides end-users with secure and personalised access to information through a browser. The portal includes all the tools users need to acquire, manage and view packaged information, including graphs and reports.
It provides knowledge workers with the ability to tap into real-time information through the use of dynamic reports, interactive query capabilities and OLAP.
The product allows companies to establish portals that provide the foundation for creating communities of interest that surface only the information and applications a particular group of knowledge workers requires.
A new publishing framework in the portal automates the process of information distribution, allowing packages of information to be sent directly to a user or user list via e-mail, to a message queue, to a channel for delivery to subscribers, or to an archive. This framework allows end-users to select which information they would like to have access to by subscribing to channels.
IT users are able to view metadata through the business intelligence portal, giving those responsible for administration a powerful set of tools for management and maintenance of the warehouse data and processes.
The SAS Business Intelligence Portal is built on a flexible n-tier topology that separates the database, back-end processing, and client components of the system, easing deployment and integration. This architecture allows companies to deploy multiple clients - including PCs, thin-clients and handheld devices - to exploit the functionality in the middle tier.
The product is designed to support common industry standards such as LDAP, HTTP, HTML, and HTTPS. This provides a high level of integration between the portal and products from other vendors, such as Microsoft's Active Directory.
Future enhancements of the SAS Business Intelligence Portal will include integration of the middle tier of the portal with collaborative tools from vendors such as Microsoft, Lotus and leading knowledge management vendors.
Trivella says this will encourage communication and collaboration throughout the enterprise, while enhancing decision support.
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