SAS BI on Demand [SaaS]

The SAS Institute provides five on-demand applications in a Software as a Service [SaaS] model.

The business intelligence [BI] vendor is providing BI on-demand through a series of modules, two modules have a marketing focus.

SAS released a BI module based on its full on-premise BI platform, along with:

• Supplier relationship management
• Marketing automation
• Veridiem marketing relationship management
• Anti-money-laundering [Revenue Assurance]

"We are looking at this as a way to augment customers implementing an SAS-based solution quickly at the right cost and with the right quality," said Richard Roach, senior director of SAS Solutions Ondemand.

The applications are available on a leased basis, in a multi-tenant environment, providing economies of scale for customers willing to share a server. The applications are also available as a single tenancy for customers concerned about security.

The on-demand applications allow companies to get BI projects up and running quickly, and offer SMBs an affordable BI solution.

A survey from AMR found that among companies considering investments in BI [dashboards and scorecards, analytic applications, analytic infrastructure and planning, and allocation and budgeting tools], between 17% and 22% said they would prefer to license the software on-demand.

BI has seen some on-demand applications already in the area of Web analytics. SAS has its own on-demand Web analytics tool and is joined by pure-play Web analytics vendors such as San Diego-based WebSideStory Inc. and Orem, Utah-based Omniture Inc.

"There's really an opportunity to do more of this," said Henry Morris, group vice president and general manager for integration, development and application strategies at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC. "I think you'll see it in conjunction with on-demand applications. Once people have the data, they can deliver it in that form as well."

Richard Roach said that SAS's on-demand BI tools can work in conjunction with data from SaaS vendors such as San Francisco-based Salesforce.com, through that company's application program interfaces or simply by bringing that data into the SAS systems.

SAS will house the applications in its own data centers and provide a 99% uptime guarantee with its service-level agreements.

Pricing is based on the number of users, the volume of data customers want to access, and security requirements. SAS is certified in the SAS 70 auditing standard (not affiliated with the company), a major source of comfort to financial companies worried about data encryption, Roach said.

"[Moving the data is] pretty straightforward," Hagerty said. "A lot of companies are wary to pass data outside the firm, but because they've couched this with the SAS 70 environment, that should alleviate their concerns."

The applications are available immediately, Roach said, adding that SAS will roll out more on-demand applications with an e-mail marketing tool that is likely to come soon.

SAS IntelliVisor

A hosted solution for Web analytics - companies transmit their data to SAS for analysis; they receive reports the next day that help them optimize their Web business.

SAS BI

Most online service providers can deliver basic reports that show current activity levels and historical trends. SAS takes that further to provide true competitive differentiation with analytical power that enables SMBs to "predict future outcomes of interest, explore and understand complex relationships in data, and model behavior, systems and processes".

This includes:

• Strategy Reports - provide clear focus on emerging opportunities
• Data Mining - reveals subtle but significant patterns in huge volumes of data— new
  insights for better business decisions
• Personalization - tailored customer segments to support highly email campaigns and test marketing
• Demand Forecasting - anticipate upcoming needs for product inventory, staffing and distribution readiness
• Data Warehouse Services - organize and feed back relevant information from the
  database for businesses to perform their own ad hoc analysis

SAS Solutions OnDemand are hosted on the SAS® Enterprise Intelligence Platform—a highly scalable data warehousing, data quality, analytical modeling and reporting
environment.

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