SAS' Profile
SAS Institute is a privately-owned Cary, North Carolina-based (US) provider of business analytics, which operates through 200 offices across 100 countries in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Africa. It employs nearly 10,000 people and has recorded revenues of over $1.5 billion (USD) in 2004, which was an increase of about 14 percent over 2003.
SAS believes it is uniquely positioned to provide companies with a suite of software products that, when integrated, provide more complete business insight from both a historical and a forecasting view. Specifically, SAS can provide companies with easy access to any data source, enabling it to more efficiently process the data and generate reports—both historical and predictive—in the format that the user wants.
SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence (BI) software and services that create enterprise intelligence. Its data warehousing (DW), extract, transform and load (ETL), and data mining software gather, manage, and analyze enormous amounts of corporate information to find patterns in customer data, manage resources, or target new business. SAS solutions are used at more than 40,000 sites—including 96 of the top 100 companies on the Fortune Global 500, and is used in almost every major US government agency . It has enabled companies to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers and to execute better, more accurate, and informed decisions.
Having been a leader in deep-dive analytics since the mainframe era, SAS has lately focused on sustaining its technology leadership, in part through a number of well thought-out acquisitions and by expanding its entrenched presence in some vertical markets. To that end, the vendor offers a range of products, solutions, and services for a number of different industries, including automotive, banking, energy, utility, financial services, government, education, healthcare, insurance, life sciences, manufacturing, media, entertainment, retail, and telecommunication.
SAS has made notable in roads into the enterprise realm and can no longer be described as a mere BI vendor. Its product portfolio now spans more than one hundred products (some grouped and integrated, while others remain as standalones), and extends far beyond data mining tools, embracing a gamut of applications, from geographical and statistical visualization to fraud detection and DW administration tools. Products include CRM, financial intelligence, human capital management (HCM), IT management, patent intelligence, performance management, process intelligence, risk management, scorecarding, supplier relationship management (SRM), supply chain intelligence, value chain analysis, warranty analysis, and Web analytics. SAS also provides services like consulting, technical support, and training and it has a number of subsidiaries, including DataFlux, which provides software for data management, and Marketmax, which offers products for advanced retail planning and analytics.
In addition to the Fortune 500 and many other large, multibillion US enterprises, which have historically been its stronghold, SAS has also been focusing on selling its products into midsize enterprises. The vendor has already saturated the mainframe-based portion of the global 2000 marketplace, where the sales of upgrade products is limited by the tendency of very large organizations to customize their data analysis programs. To enrich its coffers, SAS is departing from its traditional scientific and analytical applications, and the high-end of the market, to become more attentive to low-end analytics through a simplified Web-based query-and-reporting tool.
This is Part one of a multi-part note.
Part Two will discuss alliances, partnerships, and acquisitions.
Part Three will present a marketing analysis and make user recommendations.
SAS 9—The First-Time Unified Enterprise Intelligence Platform
In fact, SAS might still be the only vendor that completely integrates data warehousing, analytics, and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For nearly three decades, since its founding in 1976 , SAS has been giving customers around the world its trademark "The Power to Know" mantra. Similar to Amdocs' delivery of a unified platform, SAS delivered the united SAS 9 platform much earlier, in 2004. The SAS 9 platform has enhanced analytics and refined user interfaces (UI) that provide fresh insights for solving business problems and driving competitive advantage. SAS touts this software as the most significant release in its long history, reportedly being faster, more efficient, and easier to use than its predecessors. More importantly, SAS9 marks the company's move from point technology solutions to enterprise-wide technology solutions. The new platform connects all SAS applications so that they work together transparently. It also communicates with other data sources and programs.
The platform also boasts enhancement of what may possibly be the most tightly integrated optimization and predictive analytics capabilities available, making it even easier to answer complex questions that cannot be addressed by traditional BI tools. Enhanced analytics in SAS 9 include a comprehensive set of capabilities like predictive and descriptive modeling, forecasting, simulation, optimization, and design of experiments. The platform takes advantage of analytical advances, equipping users with additional and enhanced predictive modeling capabilities, predictive modeling markup language (PMML) scoring code to ease deployment on analytics. It also provides a Web-based model repository to enable reusability. Now with new Java interfaces, SAS Enterprise Miner, and SAS Text Miner, these analytics tools should enable forward-thinking organizations to analyze both structured data and unstructured text more easily.
To refresh our memory, data mining is a class of database applications that look for hidden patterns in a group of data that can be used to predict future behavior. For example, it can help retail companies find customers with common interests. True data mining software does not just change the data presentation, but actually discovers previously unknown relationships among the data. This knowledge is then applied to achieving specific business goals.
These tools are used to replace or enhance human intelligence by scanning through massive storehouses of data to discover meaningful new correlations, patterns, and trends by using pattern recognition technologies and statistics. Hence, it is popular in the science and mathematical fields but it is also increasingly being used by marketers trying to glean useful consumer data from their Web sites. Going one step further, predictive analytics is data mining that uses pattern recognition, statistical, and mathematical techniques on large amounts of data to support decision-making by forecasting the outcomes of different scenarios. SAS has been the leader in this area, with its software's ability to learn from the past, manage the present, and predict the future. It then makes that intelligence available to all constituencies within the organization.
Its rich suite of integrated data mining algorithms is now enhanced with a rather easy-to-use Java interface, allowing business analysts, IT specialists, and quantitative experts to extract business knowledge from vast data stores and then create results that can be integrated within operational systems. SAS Enterprise Miner is ideal for analytical CRM and financial decision-support initiatives, monitoring compliance, detecting fraud and money laundering, and for quality improvement in manufacturing environments. On the other hand, SAS Text Miner discovers and extracts knowledge from text documents, and is used to analyze a myriad of data, including information from call centers, customer or employee surveys, competitive intelligence, and patents. SAS Text Miner can also help detect emerging product issues. SAS 9 also supports several additional languages, expanding its usefulness globally.
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
SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/sas-striving-to-sustain-leadership-18104/
SAS Institute is a privately-owned Cary, North Carolina-based (US) provider of business analytics, which operates through 200 offices across 100 countries in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Africa. It employs nearly 10,000 people and has recorded revenues of over $1.5 billion (USD) in 2004, which was an increase of about 14 percent over 2003.
SAS believes it is uniquely positioned to provide companies with a suite of software products that, when integrated, provide more complete business insight from both a historical and a forecasting view. Specifically, SAS can provide companies with easy access to any data source, enabling it to more efficiently process the data and generate reports—both historical and predictive—in the format that the user wants.
SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence (BI) software and services that create enterprise intelligence. Its data warehousing (DW), extract, transform and load (ETL), and data mining software gather, manage, and analyze enormous amounts of corporate information to find patterns in customer data, manage resources, or target new business. SAS solutions are used at more than 40,000 sites—including 96 of the top 100 companies on the Fortune Global 500, and is used in almost every major US government agency . It has enabled companies to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers and to execute better, more accurate, and informed decisions.
Having been a leader in deep-dive analytics since the mainframe era, SAS has lately focused on sustaining its technology leadership, in part through a number of well thought-out acquisitions and by expanding its entrenched presence in some vertical markets. To that end, the vendor offers a range of products, solutions, and services for a number of different industries, including automotive, banking, energy, utility, financial services, government, education, healthcare, insurance, life sciences, manufacturing, media, entertainment, retail, and telecommunication.
SAS has made notable in roads into the enterprise realm and can no longer be described as a mere BI vendor. Its product portfolio now spans more than one hundred products (some grouped and integrated, while others remain as standalones), and extends far beyond data mining tools, embracing a gamut of applications, from geographical and statistical visualization to fraud detection and DW administration tools. Products include CRM, financial intelligence, human capital management (HCM), IT management, patent intelligence, performance management, process intelligence, risk management, scorecarding, supplier relationship management (SRM), supply chain intelligence, value chain analysis, warranty analysis, and Web analytics. SAS also provides services like consulting, technical support, and training and it has a number of subsidiaries, including DataFlux, which provides software for data management, and Marketmax, which offers products for advanced retail planning and analytics.
In addition to the Fortune 500 and many other large, multibillion US enterprises, which have historically been its stronghold, SAS has also been focusing on selling its products into midsize enterprises. The vendor has already saturated the mainframe-based portion of the global 2000 marketplace, where the sales of upgrade products is limited by the tendency of very large organizations to customize their data analysis programs. To enrich its coffers, SAS is departing from its traditional scientific and analytical applications, and the high-end of the market, to become more attentive to low-end analytics through a simplified Web-based query-and-reporting tool.
This is Part one of a multi-part note.
Part Two will discuss alliances, partnerships, and acquisitions.
Part Three will present a marketing analysis and make user recommendations.
SAS 9—The First-Time Unified Enterprise Intelligence Platform
In fact, SAS might still be the only vendor that completely integrates data warehousing, analytics, and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For nearly three decades, since its founding in 1976 , SAS has been giving customers around the world its trademark "The Power to Know" mantra. Similar to Amdocs' delivery of a unified platform, SAS delivered the united SAS 9 platform much earlier, in 2004. The SAS 9 platform has enhanced analytics and refined user interfaces (UI) that provide fresh insights for solving business problems and driving competitive advantage. SAS touts this software as the most significant release in its long history, reportedly being faster, more efficient, and easier to use than its predecessors. More importantly, SAS9 marks the company's move from point technology solutions to enterprise-wide technology solutions. The new platform connects all SAS applications so that they work together transparently. It also communicates with other data sources and programs.
The platform also boasts enhancement of what may possibly be the most tightly integrated optimization and predictive analytics capabilities available, making it even easier to answer complex questions that cannot be addressed by traditional BI tools. Enhanced analytics in SAS 9 include a comprehensive set of capabilities like predictive and descriptive modeling, forecasting, simulation, optimization, and design of experiments. The platform takes advantage of analytical advances, equipping users with additional and enhanced predictive modeling capabilities, predictive modeling markup language (PMML) scoring code to ease deployment on analytics. It also provides a Web-based model repository to enable reusability. Now with new Java interfaces, SAS Enterprise Miner, and SAS Text Miner, these analytics tools should enable forward-thinking organizations to analyze both structured data and unstructured text more easily.
To refresh our memory, data mining is a class of database applications that look for hidden patterns in a group of data that can be used to predict future behavior. For example, it can help retail companies find customers with common interests. True data mining software does not just change the data presentation, but actually discovers previously unknown relationships among the data. This knowledge is then applied to achieving specific business goals.
These tools are used to replace or enhance human intelligence by scanning through massive storehouses of data to discover meaningful new correlations, patterns, and trends by using pattern recognition technologies and statistics. Hence, it is popular in the science and mathematical fields but it is also increasingly being used by marketers trying to glean useful consumer data from their Web sites. Going one step further, predictive analytics is data mining that uses pattern recognition, statistical, and mathematical techniques on large amounts of data to support decision-making by forecasting the outcomes of different scenarios. SAS has been the leader in this area, with its software's ability to learn from the past, manage the present, and predict the future. It then makes that intelligence available to all constituencies within the organization.
Its rich suite of integrated data mining algorithms is now enhanced with a rather easy-to-use Java interface, allowing business analysts, IT specialists, and quantitative experts to extract business knowledge from vast data stores and then create results that can be integrated within operational systems. SAS Enterprise Miner is ideal for analytical CRM and financial decision-support initiatives, monitoring compliance, detecting fraud and money laundering, and for quality improvement in manufacturing environments. On the other hand, SAS Text Miner discovers and extracts knowledge from text documents, and is used to analyze a myriad of data, including information from call centers, customer or employee surveys, competitive intelligence, and patents. SAS Text Miner can also help detect emerging product issues. SAS 9 also supports several additional languages, expanding its usefulness globally.
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
SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/sas-striving-to-sustain-leadership-18104/
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