SAS acquires IDeaS

Industry leaders team up to focus on the future of price and revenue optimization

Revenue management has become a standard practice in the travel and hospitality industries for the past 30 years. But the rise in e-commerce and economic factors like rising fuel costs are shrinking margins and intensifying competition. Today's approach needs to move beyond managing revenues and more toward optimizing profits with forecasting and predictive technologies.

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With that in mind, SAS has acquired Integrated Decisions and Systems (IDeaS). The marriage of SAS' advanced analytics and platform technologies with IDeaS' revenue management and Software as a Service approach will offer a platform for quickly driving value for companies – in the hospitality industry and beyond.

News announcements

• SAS agrees to acquire software firm IDeaS (August 4, 2008) – SAS adds IDeaS' travel and hospitality specific revenue management solution to its already extensive portfolio. The bold move will broaden SAS' hospitality offerings and enable SAS to build price and revenue optimization solutions for other industries.
• New SAS Profit Optimization Global Practice to improve customers' bottom lines (August 4, 2008) – SAS' new Profit Optimization Global Practice uses powerful techniques pioneered by the airline and hospitality industries. The new business unit, with a team of industry experts, will apply advanced analytics to revenue management for more scientific and proactive optimization of profitability than traditional methods.

About IDeaS revenue optimization

Founded in 1989, IDeaS is the premier provider of enterprise revenue management and optimization solutions. IDeaS invented critical decision solutions that enable global organizations to understand, anticipate and react to consumer behavior in order to maximize company-wide revenue or profits.

IDeaS offers proven solutions that:

• Determine correct pricing for perishable capacity, products and/or services.
• Analyze market behavior and capture revenue opportunities.
• Expand competitive set performance.
• Forecast business demands.
• Manage and control distribution channels.

Glossary of terms

• Revenue optimization: The overall discipline managing risks under current and anticipated market conditions to sell the right product, to the right customer, for the right price, at the right time, and through the right distribution channel.
• Revenue management (Historically referred to as yield management): "The process of understanding, anticipating and influencing consumer behavior in order to maximize revenue or profits from a fixed, perishable resource (such as airline seats or hotel room reservations)." (source: Wikipedia)
• Price optimization: A decision-making process for determining the optimal pricing for a product. Dynamic pricing, often an element of a price optimization strategy, is the ability to dynamically change the price of a product based on market conditions.
• Profit optimization: The discipline of optimizing profitability by using advanced analytics to understand and predict customer behavior.

Read more about price and revenue optimization

Steve Pinchuk, General Manager, Profit Optimization at SAS has published several articles about revenue and profit optimization in the Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management. All five articles are available here to help you learn more about revenue and profit and optimization.

• "Revenue management's ability to control marketing, pricing and product development: Part I " Vol. 1, No. 1, 2002 (PDF)
• "Revenue management's ability to control marketing, pricing and product development: Part II " Vol. 1, No. 2, 2002 (PDF)
• "Future of revenue management" Vol. 1, No. 3, 2002 (PDF)
• "Should revenue management be called displacement optimisation?" Vol. 6, No. 4, 2007 (PDF)
• "Futures: A system profit optimisation" Vol. 7, No. 1, 2008 (PDF)