SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform
These impressive analytics also include a diverse set of predictive, descriptive, and statistical analytics software to help decision makers anticipate how their actions will impact the future, and it turns almost every employee into a knowledge worker. SAS 9 also includes the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform as a foundation for future SAS horizontal and vertical BI solutions. Other main strands include a broad set of integrated software for data integration through the SAS Enterprise ETL Server; data warehousing through the SAS Intelligence Storage; and portal capabilities, and query, and reporting through the SAS Enterprise BI Server. These offer several UIs the opportunity to improve usability throughout all levels of the enterprise. SAS 9 data integration includes data quality and a common metadata repository for ensuring reliability of information across computing systems. SAS Enterprise ETL Server cleanses and integrates data into a common, usable data store that offers an available, consistent, and verifiable set of answers across the enterprise. In other words, the power behind the SAS 9 platform is tight integration, data quality, common metadata, and centralized management.
At the same time, SAS also announced plans to deliver seven software solutions that will take advantage of the SAS 9 Enterprise Intelligence Platform, to provide organizations with an integrated suite of solutions that addresses many key business challenges. Each of these solutions aims at helping user organizations go beyond BI as they know it, and ensure that more and more people within those companies—from the factory floor to the boardroom—can use the predictive analytics and data management capabilities of SAS. With SAS 9 and its new UIs and capabilities, SAS believes the group of potential users will expand so much that even more than 80 percent of the people in an organization will have access to BI solutions. The seven SAS solutions on the SAS 9 Enterprise Intelligence Platform are
* SAS Customer Intelligence address key areas such as marketing automation, marketing optimization, and customer retention. Designed to give organizations the insights they need to develop and implement smarter customer strategies and maximize customer profitability.
* SAS Risk Dimensions helps financial services firms and energy companies measure and analyze their risks, meet regulatory reporting requirements, and improve capital allocation. Risk Dimensions provide an open, flexible, and extensible environment for data management, risk analysis, and risk reporting. Additionally, SAS has aggressively pursued the opportunity to assist the banking and insurance industries in the pivotal area of risk management. In 2003, it acquired OpRisk Analytics, a provider of operational risk measurement and management solutions, to extend SAS' offerings for both corporate and consumer risk measurement and reporting. SAS also acquired RiskAdvisory, a provider of risk management and consulting software to energy companies. This acquisition has significantly enhanced SAS' ability to offer high-value energy risk management solutions to customers in industries such as oil, gas, and utilities. It also caters to financial services, as banks begin to sell energy into wholesale markets.
* SAS Strategic Performance Management translates company strategy into actions that can be measured and monitored throughout the entire organization. Results are then distributed via the Web to provide employees with the necessary information to analyze, collaborate, and implement strategy. SAS SPM helps executives improve performance while executing their strategic goals by focusing their entire organization on the initiatives and key performance indicators (KPI). KPIs are delivered via a Web browser and built-in filtering and alerts send out a call to action when performance is not meeting targets. Once notified, users can use SAS advanced analytics to discover why performance is not meeting targets, allowing users to take corrective action accordingly.
* SAS Supplier Relationship Management (SAS SRM) addresses procurement and purchasing as a vital link in the supply chain. Through data management and analytics, SAS SRM provides organizations with worldwide insight into suppliers, commodities, and procurement activities. With it, they can better understand their overall supplier landscape, minimize risks associated with suppliers, improve negotiation, and achieve substantial cost savings.
* SAS Activity-Based Management (ABM) integrates existing financial and operational systems to generate cost and profitability business models that support better overall decision-making. SAS ABM delivers advanced business modeling capabilities, a Web-enabled analysis and reporting interface, and data integration tools to retrieve and transform data from virtually any system. It enables strategic and operational decisions that maximize profit, reduce costs, and streamline processes by determining the cost of processes and the profitability of products, customers, and business segments. Built on a Web-based, multi-user, client-server architecture, the product goes beyond typical ABM tools by combining visual business modeling with advanced reporting and analysis, and data management, providing a more complete ABM solution.
* SAS IT Management Solutions helps companies better manage their IT organization and infrastructure and evaluate and control IT usage and costs. Combined with SAS' professional services organization and implementation partners network, these are the solutions that address the entire spectrum of IT services—systems, network, Web services, call centers and phone systems—from the data center to the desktop, across the enterprise and the Internet.