SAS BI Solutions

SAS is a leader in business intelligence and analytical software and services. With 43,000 customer sites using SAS software, SAS have been providing customers around the world "The Power to Know" since 1976.

SAS solutions aim to "improve performance through insight from data, resulting in:

• Faster, more accurate business decisions
• More profitable relationships with customers and suppliers
• Compliance with governmental regulations
• Research breakthroughs
• Better products and processes

In November 2009 SAS BI For Performance was rated the leader in business performance solutions by research firm Forrestor in their Q4 2009 report. Read more

Only SAS offers leading data integration, storage, analytics and business intelligence applications within a comprehensive enterprise intelligence platform.

SAS Products & Solutions

Corporate Performance

• Activity-Based Management
• Analytics
• Business Intelligence
• Enterprise Intelligence Platform
• Financial Intelligence/BPM
• Performance Management

Regulatory & Compliance

• Anti-Money Laundering
• Regulatory Compliance
• Risk Management

Product & Customer

• Customer Relationship Mgmt.
• Drug Development
• Merchandise Planning
• Service Intelligence
• Supplier Intelligence

IT

• Data Integration & ETL
• IT Management

Industry Solutions

SAS® Business Intelligence provides industry tailored solutions in:

• Aerospace
• Automotive
• Banking
• Communications
• Education
• Energy & Utilities
• Financial Services
• Government
• Health Insurance
• Healthcare Providers
• Hospitality & Entertainment
• Insurance
• Life Sciences
• Manufacturing
• Media
• Retail
• Small to Medium Business

How SAS BI Solutions Outperform Competitor Solutions

BI solution suites are developed in one of two ways:

1. BI vendors consolidate their product offerings by re-architecting products that were not meant to work together. And the cost of doing so is being born by the customers.
2. Solutions are designed and developed from scratch as integrated suites. SAS is one of the few vendors who have taken this path.

SAS currently stands as a strong independent vendor after the consolidation of 2007.
Most other vendors still lack all the analytical, modeling and information management capabilities that SAS offer and that add ongoing ROI.

SAS has also worked closely with Teradata to incorporate its analytical capabilities within the powerful Teradata Active Data Warehouse.

SAS Website

Also See Combining SAS BI Analytics On Teradatas ADW

SAS Strengths and Weaknesses

In the Gartner 2008 BI Magic Quadrant Report, the following strengths and weaknesses were identified in SAS BI Solutions:

Strengths

• SAS dominates in advanced analytic solutions in terms of its range of capabilities or number of advanced analytic deployments.
• SAS has a strong packaged analytic application program - solutions extend well beyond reporting and key performance indicator (KPI)-centric deployments, to include more advanced analytic applications applied to particular business problems such as fraud detection.
• SAS has a strong brand and associated support structure that spans all major geographies.
• SAS Stored Services provide an effective way to embed advanced analytical functionality within reports, dashboards and other easy-to-consume applications.
• SAS's integration of JMP with the platform provides an in-memory analytics offering with strong visualization capabilities that could be positioned for a broader class of business analysts than the traditional SAS user, though it would need to simplify JMP's interface.
  

Weaknesses

• SAS is recognised as difficult to use - many data manipulation and advanced analysis tasks require SAS programming language; a significant barrier to user adoption.
• SAS is less well known for traditional reporting and dashboard-centric BI deployments, therefore failing to meet basic BI vendor selection requirements.
• SAS BI Server lacks key features - Web-authored pixel-perfect reporting, out-of-the-box support for cascading prompts, and incremental cube updates. Watch for resolution of these issues in the 9.2 release, expected by mid-2008 [with the exception of pixel-perfect reporting in the browser].
• SAS reputation for promoting a proprietary architecture - unavailable programming interfaces (APIs). The recent Teradata relationship to integrate SAS with Teradata ADW will resolve this major issue.
• SAS's subscription-based pricing model - does not suit buyers requiring perpetual use rights.

Next: Teradata BI Solutions

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