CBR Magazine Names Top 10 BI Providers

In its widely anticipated new rankings for 2005, Computer Business Review (CBR) has ranked SAS among its "Top 10 Most Influential Business Intelligence Vendors."

CBR also included SAS for the second consecutive year as one of its "Top 10 Most Influential Enterprise Applications Vendors." The rankings are included in CBR’s "Top 10 Most Influential Special Issue," available in print form and online at www.cbronline.com in mid-July 2005.

"SAS continues to build upon its expertise in advanced analytics by delivering an easy-to-use, customized business intelligence platform that’s packed with rich reporting and analysis capabilities for business users, analysts and IT alike," says Madan Sheina, consultant editor for BI technologies at CBR.

"SAS customers will benefit from integrating analytics and data management with an array of conventional BI capabilities," Sheina continues. "Importantly, large companies seeking to standardize enterprise BI and complex analytics on a single platform and vendor now have a new choice in the market."

The rankings
CBR's team of experienced sector analysts nominated, debated and finally selected the people and vendors they consider the most influential in the technology industry. This year’s selections were not ranked numerically.

The special issue ranks the most influential vendors in 11 key technology sectors: business intelligence; application development; enterprise applications; IT services; integration and middleware; management software; mobile and wireless; offshore services; security; servers and workstations; and storage.

The technology
The SAS Enterprise BI Server, SAS’ newly-enhanced BI platform, delivers an integrated and comprehensive suite of BI capabilities – including reporting, query and analysis, OLAP, visualization, and integration with Excel and other Microsoft Office applications – all using consistent metadata.

With targeted BI interfaces that support individual needs, the SAS Enterprise BI Server empowers information producers and consumers at various skill levels.

"SAS Enterprise BI Server gives companies today a competitive advantage by providing them with an open BI platform that includes easy-to-use interfaces. End users at all levels of an organization can obtain information quickly and easily to make decisions at the lowest overall cost to the organization," says Anne Milley, director of technology marketing at SAS.

"We are helping these companies better integrate technologies and functions across the enterprise in part by providing appropriate BI interfaces and tools for users at many different levels," continues Milley. "No other BI provider offers such power and extensibility in a single platform, and that makes all the difference to customer success."