SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today announced major new enhancements to its market-leading enterprise data integration platform. With the creation of SAS Enterprise ETL Server, SAS is delivering a powerful end-to-end enterprise data integration and management platform for designing, managing and improving data warehouses, and greatly simplifying the extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) process.
The announcement was made at a press conference at SeUGI 21, this year's annual SAS European Users Group International conference.
Data integration is the single biggest obstacle to achieving return on data warehousing and business intelligence software investment. A recent European survey commissioned by SAS among 500 marketing directors from companies across France, Germany, UK, Italy and the Netherlands revealed that 66% of European organisations believe that data quality and integration issues are impacting company profitability.
"Data integration today, quite ironically, is about much more than just integrating data," said Doug Laney, vice-president of technology research services at Meta Group. "Our research indicates that organisations are increasingly on the lookout for enterprise-class solutions that encompass robust metadata management, embody data quality features, include built-in analytic functions and demonstrate a tangible 'awareness' of popular business application data structures."
The SAS Enterprise ETL Server is the latest roll-out in the SAS 9.1 suite of tools which began 31 March, with the announcement of its business intelligence server. SAS Enterprise ETL Server is a high-performance data integration software product that synthesises corporate information from a wide range of data sources in a timely, cost-effective manner, and manages metadata over the project lifecycle.
The Enterprise ETL Server gives IT departments suffering from poor data quality and widely inconsistent data representations a single version of the truth through integrated data quality. The product provides a single point of control for managing the ETL process, leading to significantly reduced maintenance and deployment costs, as well as seamless application and metadata interoperability and scalability. In addition, the new data integration platform helps economically-impacted IT departments, which demand that new software quickly integrate into their existing operational infrastructure, by providing near real-time data warehousing and integration capabilities.
"SAS Enterprise ETL Server will increase the return on our data warehousing investment," said Kris Vranken, Data Warehouse Program Manager at global stainless steel producer Ugine & ALZ, an early adopter of the product. "The SAS Metadata Server makes it easy for the people that understand the data stored in our 10 different environments to classify it in a central repository which is then available both to programmers building applications and to business users who need to understand the meaning of the information (such as a field within a table) they need to access. Having more metadata that is more accurate will increase confidence in, and the use of, our data warehouse as a central source of business intelligence for ALZ."
"SAS is committed to building on its strong foundation of analytic intelligence by adding tools that simplify and expedite the ETL process, providing faster implementation and ease of administration by IT and enterprise users," said SAS President and CEO Jim Goodnight. "We believe the full return on investment in business intelligence comes from the combination of data integration and predictive analytics that other vendors simply cannot offer. With this platform, SAS has leapfrogged the competition and is the only vendor able to provide an end-to-end data integration and data quality solution integrated into a business intelligence platform."
Building upon an existing set of world-class data manipulation tools, SAS Enterprise ETL Server features three new products: SAS ETL Studio (a newly-enhanced solution formerly known as SAS/Warehouse Administrator), the new SAS Metadata Server and the updated SAS Data Quality Server.
SAS ETL Studio: A critical component of the ETL process, SAS ETL Studio is tailored in three personas to meet the various needs of IT professionals by simplifying the data management process and integrating with various data sources. It allows ETL designers, project managers and systems architects to navigate and understand complex data integration issues, all while leveraging full access to SAS analytics.
ETL Studio synthesises corporate data from disparate "silos" of information in a fast, cost-effective manner. The ETL process is usually the most time-consuming and difficult to design and operate of any of the development activities in the data warehousing and business intelligence "value chain". ETL Studio can access and integrate almost any data source, from mainframe to PC files to ERPs, can execute on nearly any platform and can easily access analytic components including data mining.
"With SAS, we gather data from multiple sources for integration and loading onto one platform. The resulting data warehouse produces intelligence that marketing analysts and business executives use to ensure that Sprint can identify, acquire and retain loyal customers," said Flint Craver, marketing information manager at Sprint Business Services Group. "We use SAS to administer a multi-terabyte warehouse and know SAS to be highly scalable and manageable. I'm happy to hear of the addition of wizards and templates in the SAS ETL Studio because that will make administration even easier."
SAS Metadata Server: New to the market, SAS Metadata Server manages all business, technical and process metadata, providing information about all data sources (including those not in SAS), content, business rules and authorisation. Metadata Server, along with all other SAS 9.1 products, is fully compliant with the Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM) standard, and includes bridges to interoperability with third-party vendors. SAS is a pioneer in open metadata initiatives and is the only business intelligence vendor that allows metadata to be shared and exchanged throughout the entire intelligence value chain in an enterprise, from ETL and storage to BI and analytic applications. Organisations can now build one version of the truth, eliminating redundancy, lowering support costs, minimising work when changes are made and significantly reducing errors.
SAS Data Quality Server: Powerful and easy to use, SAS Data Quality Server runs on any platform and is geared for IT professionals to implement changes and data quality metrics across the enterprise network. It eliminates or reduces inconsistencies in corporate data faster and more accurately and allows duplicate records to be removed or integrated. Expanded support for international data cleansing is now available for many languages. New data profiling operations enable organisations to detect data errors as well as interpret and infer the structure of legacy databases or text files. SAS Data Quality Server allows business and IT users to complete data quality and data integration projects in record time.
SAS is distinct in combining ETL, data quality, job scheduling and metadata management with integrated analytics and business intelligence, and SAS Enterprise ETL Server's ETL Studio accomplishes this faster than ever.
Now at early adopter sites, SAS Enterprise ETL Server will ship to customers in a phased release beginning 31 August.
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SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 40 000 sites - including 90% of the Fortune 500 - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions, and to drive organisations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For more than 25 years, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know.
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