The Platform for SAS^® Business Analytics

Across organizations, more and more data is being generated, integrated and analyzed with the goal of providing timely, high-quality intelligence – ultimately to support decisions and business processes aimed at improving performance and the bottom line. IT is expected to support sustainable growth of the business through innovative uses of technology and information while managing the existing technology environment, avoiding disruption of services, reducing IT costs and mitigating enterprise risk exposures. 

SAS provides a flexible business analytics framework that can help organizations reduce the risk, complexity and burdens often associated with managing and effectively utilizing information assets by delivering broad and deep technology capabilities, methodologies, services and partnerships with:

• Industry and departmental solutions. Take advantage of packaged applications built on the platform for SAS Business Analytics – tightly coupled with industry domain expertise and data structures (models) tuned to the specific business and information technology processes used in each industry. Add solutions focused on solving the critical business issues unique to the line-of-business or functional area of the organization – from information technology to finance to marketing.
• Unmatched analytics. Support the entire analysis process – from raw data to the point of decision – however varied or complex for strategic, operational and tactical decisions. Empower the business with a range of techniques to collect, classify, analyze and interpret data to reveal new insights. Provide an added level of rigor where needed to decision-making processes in order to address specific problems with greater precision and confidence.
• Reporting in more places. Enable users to be more self-sufficient with simpler, role-based interfaces. Leverage right-time decision making through alerts and embedded analytics in reporting applications and business processes. Rationalize the myriad of reporting tools and still meet the individual needs of each department. Deploy reporting across the enterprise without burdening IT resources.
• Collaborative data integration. Access and process the data you need. Improve data integrity at the source by embedding automated quality processes that consolidate, cleanse and standardize your data directly in your operational environments. Offer a collaborative environment with a common set of tools, promoting reuse and sharing to achieve faster results and lower costs. Deliver consistent, trusted and verifiable information across systems.

The platform for SAS Business Analytics provides the foundational technology on which the SAS Business Analytics Framework is built. It optimally integrates individual technology components within your existing IT infrastructure into a single, unified system. The result is an information flow that transcends organizational silos, diverse computing platforms and niche tools – extending the value of your existing systems and delivering new insights that drive value for your organization.

Key Characteristics of the Platform for SAS ^® Business Analytics

• Open – integrates with a wide variety of data and metadata sources to support information flow across diverse and disjointed IT environments.
• Standards-based – supports industry standard protocols, programming languages, models and communication interfaces.
• Complete – offers a full set of tools for creating, deploying, using, sharing, maintaining and administering BI applications.
• Accessible – provides more directly relevant and usable tools to a larger and more diverse audience across the extended enterprise.
• Extensible – enables customers to create their own solutions using standard development environments (such as Java) and well-documented application programming interfaces (APIs).
• Modern – supports distributing computing in a multiple-vendor environment with a modular component architecture.
• Unified – shares common security and administration services, data storage and management functions, query-and-reporting tools, analytic toolsets, publishing infrastructure and Web-based user interfaces across components and applications.
• Manageable – provides a single point of administration for the end-to-end intelligence platform.
• Compatible – fits into an organization’s IT practices, skills and methodologies in a way that leverages customers’ existing technology investments.
• Portable – allows applications to be moved between systems and platforms based on changing needs for growth and maintenance.
• Future-ready – scales to handle future growth and is customizable to support unique new applications. It is open and standards-based to support future technologies not yet defined.