SAS Institute unveiled its SAS 9 business intelligence
platform yesterday.
The platform includes data integration, enhanced analytics, and
refined user interfaces designed to drive BI beyond the traditional
querying and reporting domain of the high-end business analyst to
users throughout the enterprise.
The company also released details of applications designed to
exploit the new platform, including suites for marketing
automation, financial management, strategic performance management
and supplier relationship management.
The BI platform, which is now shipping, includes data
integration through the SAS Enterprise ETL Server, intelligence
storage, advanced analytics, portal functionality, and query and
reporting via the SAS Enterprise Business Intelligence Server.
SAS 9 data integration supports data quality and a common
metadata repository designed to ensure the reliability of
information across IT systems, while the ETL server is designed to
cleanse and integrate data into a common, usable data store to
offer consistent answers to BI questions.
Enhanced analytics include predictive and descriptive modelling,
forecasting, simulation, and optimisation to make it easier to
answer complex question that cannot be addressed by traditional
BI.
The SAS data mining and text mining software have been fitted
with new Java interfaces designed to allow enterprises easier
analysis of both structured data and unstructured text. The
interface is designed to allow data mining users to extract
business knowledge from vast data stores and then create results
that can be integrated within operational systems.
SAS Marketing Automation will be the first in SAS' family of
customer intelligence applications to be launched on the new
platform. These apps will be tailored to address marketing
automation, marketing optimisation, and customer retention. They
are designed to give organisations insight to develop and implement
smarter customer strategies while boosting profitability.
All seven of the new applications for SAS 9 are scheduled to be
available this year.
Heather Havenstein writes for InfoWorld