SAS joins IBM's service-oriented architecture community

SAS, the leader in business intelligence, has announced its acceptance into the IBM SOA Specialty programme after successfully completing IBM's rigorous SOA technical and business requirements.

This achievement enables the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform to integrate with the IBM SOA Foundation, which is a single, open set of software, best practices and patterns that provide users with what they need to get started with SOA.

SOA is a software approach that takes various tasks and organises them into interoperable, standards-based services. Earlier this year SAS stated it would continue enhancing its SOA-based Enterprise Intelligence Platform and solutions - which includes data integration, intelligence storage, analytics and business intelligence - by delivering collections of services that fully meet customer needs.

By qualifying for the IBM SOA Specialty, SAS is joining a community of partners that will make it easier for customers to find and deploy more SOA-based solutions.

Says Carel Badenhorst, Product Manager - Business Intelligence, SAS South Africa: "SOA lets IT departments decrease the cost and time needed to update and maintain corporate systems. It is therefore vital that SAS is SOA compliant. SAS is committed to helping our customers get the most out of SOA. This announcement is a reinforcement of this commitment."

In March of this year, IBM announced the IBM SOA Specialty in the PartnerWorld for Industry Networks, which provides technical enablement and a skills-building roadmap for partners who want to access the growing SOA market opportunity. For those business partners who achieve key milestones the Specialty will also provide SOA-specific marketing and sales benefits such as SOA Connection Events to meet directly with IBM SOA Sales specialists and discounted print advertising and telemarketing.

IBM Sales Connections, a consultative service in the PartnerWorld Industry Networks, helps business partners close SOA deals quickly by connecting them with the relevant IBM SOA and local field sales team.

Adds Badenhorst: "SOA provides great flexibility, and as such is becoming a more and more important architectural requirement in the public sector market. SAS is making the process of interacting with SAS's business intelligence applications a much simpler one, through the IBM WebSphere MQ interface, which will deliver higher system flexibility and agility within IT departments."

Through Web services and message-oriented middleware, the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform can easily integrate with a service-oriented architecture to bring added value and improved performance to any SOA fabric.

This level of integration allows business managers to quickly implement technology they need and deploy solutions required to support their business processes.

In addition, SAS can interoperate with third-party services by calling out from its platform or solutions as appropriate.