Analytical Intelligence Comes of Age

by Art Cooke

In a down-turned economy, the business intelligence (BI) market is one of the few technology sectors still experiencing growth. This is a result of the increased need for financial transparency, the need to increase revenue from an existing customer base and the drive to cut costs. BI is now becoming a strategic issue, as evidenced by the continued increase in director-level attendees at SAS events such as seugi, the annual European conference for SAS users.

Many BI vendors have focused only on the query and reporting tools needed to give management a view of how their company has performed.

In today's economic climate, leery investors are looking increasingly at a company's ability to sustain growth over the long term rather than whip up quarterly miracles that may have no foundation for long-term revenue generation. The market is also now rewarding companies with effective cost-management capabilities.

Companies are realizing that they now need to be able to predict and manage customer demand, rather than react to it, to achieve or sustain revenue growth. They also know that they cannot cut costs effectively without understanding how those costs are incurred and the impact across the organization of cutting costs in a specific area.

SAS has always stood apart from traditional BI vendors in offering the predictive analytics that enable companies to address both these issues. Our recent focus on packaging the application of predictive analytics to specific business problems has been driven by customer feedback from many channels, including events such as seugi.

Which brings me to the importance of events like seugi and SUGI, its American counterpart, as opportunities for:

• Interaction between our customers and all facets and levels of SAS employees.
• Helping us to learn more about customer successes and current customer needs.
• Our customers to network with peers across every sector and industry.
• Giving our customers the best venue for seeing what's new at SAS and what services we offer to get the most out of their existing IT investments.

We take what we learn from these events back to our Research and Development Division, where we reinvest 25 percent of our annual revenues in order to remain technologically ahead of the other BI vendors. It's a cyclical process, which keeps us focused on you, our customer.