The BI revolution continues

The business intelligence revolution continues. A little more than two months after it shipped worldwide, the SAS 9 Intelligence Platform is helping leading organisations around the globe run their businesses more profitably and confidently.

From retail and financial services to telecommunications, manufacturing and the public sector, a sampling of organisations that have licensed or migrated to SAS 9 include Amazon.Com Holdings Inc (US), American Express International, BBVA (Spain), Bell Canada, Celebrity Cruises (US), Kraft Foods Global (US), Marriott International (US), Orange (France), Pacifica (France), Statistics Norway, Telenor Direkte (Norway), and the US Department of Homeland Security. These join over 1 000 licensed sites that leverage the unique capabilities of SAS 9 to anticipate and plan for their organisations' changing business needs.

"While our customers span industries and geographies, they share one thing in common: the need to confidently and proactively drive revenue growth and profitability," said Dr Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS.

SAS 9 supports this demand by going far beyond historical query and reporting - where most BI vendors stop short.

"SAS 9 offers the most tightly integrated offering to tap into and support the intelligence process in organisations today," added Art Cooke, president of SAS International. "When faced with unrelenting competition and regulation, these are the forward-looking business intelligence solutions that executives depend on to move their organisations forward."

* Telenor Direkte has chosen SAS 9 to increase the efficiency of organising, maintaining and managing its direct marketing solutions. SAS 9 will simplify, automate and better document the processes for the data flow and reporting. Telenor Direkte will be in better condition to establish standardised solutions for managing the content in the data warehouse. In addition, the company can optimise the management and utilisation of metadata to support future growth.

* SAS is an important software supplier to Statistics Norway (SSB). With the transition to SAS 9, SSB has chosen to extend its solution portfolio with several SAS solutions. SSB is responsible for all official statistics in Norway. It has continuous challenges and increased demands in exploiting the continually growing amount of data, integration between solutions, demands for easily accessible information and effective utilisation of resources.

SAS 9 - released on 30 March - represents a true breakthrough in both business intelligence and performance management. SAS 9 is faster, more efficient and easier to use than its predecessors. It can accommodate changing organisational needs without any loss of efficiency. The new platform connects SAS applications so they work together transparently, and it also seamlessly communicates with other data sources and programmes. SAS 9 includes the SAS Intelligence Platform, a broad set of integrated software for unmatched data integration, easy-to-use business reporting and unparalleled analytics. It also boasts enhancement of the most tightly integrated optimisation and predictive analytics capabilities available, making it even easier to answer complex questions that cannot be addressed by traditional business intelligence.

Today's announcement came at SAS Forum International 2004, the most extensive business intelligence conference outside the US. Formerly known as SeUGI (SAS European Users Group International), the name was changed this year to better describe the conference's role as a forum for exchanging ideas, best practices and future directions in business intelligence.