Bull and SAS strengthen partnership in business intelligence for ERP environments

HEIDELBERG, GERMANY  (Apr. 07, 2006)  –  SAS, the global leader in business intelligence (BI), and Bull are strengthening their partnership with a joint initiative destined for the implementation of advanced BI solutions around ERP (enterprise resource planning) in Europe.

Building on the two companies' respective expertise in complex infrastructures and BI solutions, Bull and SAS will enable organizations to improve their business performance and strategic management using data collected from an ERP system.

A number of major customers have already decided to implement SAS®9 with direct access to an ERP system like SAP, with the aim of controlling their businesses more effectively and adding a layer of intelligence on top of their ERP data. This implementation is seen as a particularly effective approach when processing large volumes of data. Most recently, Bull and SAS have worked together to develop a benchmark for Electricité de France (EDF), which has enabled this very large company to optimize response times of its global infrastructure by a factor of 10 and to validate its solution, initially used for some 170,000 business customers and eventually by 3 million customers.

"The quality and performance of SAS solutions running on Bull servers enable very large volumes of data to be processed, enabling us to optimize our marketing programs and control our activities in the business marketplace more effectively," underlined Philippe Futtersack, Project Manager in the CRM Analysis Department of EDF's Commercial Division.

In the area of BI and ERP systems, Bull capitalizes on the expertise of its consultants in Europe; it has also established SAS and SAP centers of excellence which are charged with defining and specifying architectures. These centers are also involved in the implementation and optimization of applications running on Bull NovaScale, Escala and Express5800 servers. Bull experts work in close collaboration with the support and R&D teams at SAS and SAP.

"We are delighted with the evolution of our partnership with SAS," said Florence Bergeret, Director, Global Strategic Partnerships at Bull. "To define their architectures or to optimize their solutions, our customers can rely on our SAS and SAP competence centers that provide a unique interface for the deployment of fully integrated and optimized solutions."

Tonny Dierckx, Director, Intelligence Architecture for Europe, Middle East and Africa at SAS added: "Building on SAS 9.1 and its 'Powered by SAP NetWeaver' certified integration, the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform in combination with Bull's robust servers provides compelling reasons for selecting SAS as BI vendor of choice for SAP users."

According to a recent industry analyst report, SAS provides the most complete business intelligence platform available in the market.

About Bull, Architect of an Open World

 As one of the leading European IT companies, Bull delivers open, flexible and secure information systems. The group helps public- and private-sector customers transform their information systems, applying its know-how and expertise in three main areas:

• Capitalizing on its extensive mainframe experience, Bull designs and produces robust, innovative and open servers, based on industry-standard technologies.
• Building on its alliances with leading ISVs and long-standing involvement with Open Source, Bull develops and implements flexible and interoperable application infrastructures which give business processes the freedom to evolve.
• Bringing together recognized expertise in end-to-end IT security, Bull secures data and exchanges that are so critical in preserving customers' business integrity. 

Bull has a particularly strong presence in the public, healthcare, finance, telecommunications, manufacturing and defense sectors. Its distribution network and business partners cover more than 100 countries worldwide. For more information, visit www.bull.com. 

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