Transform your business with enterprise intelligence

With the release of SAS® 9.2, it’s easier than ever for you to solve your business problems and stay ahead of your competitors

By Gaurav Verma

For 32 years, companies worldwide have turned to SAS to help them gain business intelligence that gives them a competitive edge. Now, SAS 9.2 gives customers even more power and flexibility to do this and more.

The new release of SAS software helps organizations gain the value they expect from SAS with more ease. SAS 9.2 was designed to help the business user become more self-sufficient and help IT deliver to the business more effectively – improving their credibility and reputations. 

SAS 9.2 helps transform businesses by delivering:

• Advanced analytics. Customers can analyze data in more ways with new algorithms and procedures, gain more insight through enhanced data and process visualization, and process large and complex data sets faster.
• BI in more places. Users will become more self-sufficient with simpler, role-based interfaces. They will be able to embed SAS results into business processes more easily through Web services and create and consume stored processes with more SAS products through a single metadata repository. In addition, they’ll have the ability to accelerate rollouts and simplify administration through a single interface.
• Collaborative data integration. Customers will be able to define components and reuse them as needed to streamline the design process. The use of electronic sticky notes will allow users to communicate with each other across the workflow more easily. Users will also be able to monitor the data integration process and troubleshoot failures more efficiently with alerts and automated recommendations for fixes. 
• Enterprise-class software improvements for IT. Users can streamline the deployment and configuration process with a new wizard-based interface and take advantage of standards for systems management, security and change management.
  

New capabilities and deployment opportunities
SAS 9.2 advances key analytics capabilities, including new and improved modeling capabilities, easy-to-use production-quality graphics, and a wealth of enhancements to many existing procedures. From new Base SAS and Output Delivery System (ODS) capabilities through to numerous new statistical methods, analytical capabilities and graphing capabilities, SAS 9.2 will deliver much-needed benefits to the SAS user community.

SAS 9.2 also features support for numerous new platforms and opens a new world of deployment opportunities on well-known and established hardware and operating systems.

The SAS 9.2 enhancements and benefits include:

• New analytic capabilities: Users will find hundreds of changes and enhancements to SAS/STAT®, SAS/ETS®, SAS/OR®, SAS/QC® and SAS Stat Studio.
• Statistical graphics created automatically by procedures: With SAS 9.2, analytics procedures now create production-quality graphics as automatically as they create tables. ODS Statistical Graphics are used in more than 50 Base SAS, SAS/STAT, SAS/ETS and SAS/QC procedures.
• More manageability for SAS® processes: SAS 9.2 enhances the manageability of SAS processes that will be executed in batch and improves the traceability of SAS programs. This mechanism offers tremendous value for program and batch auditing and tuning.
• Easier deployment: With SAS 9.2, customers can obtain their software electronically over the Internet, giving them more distribution options.
• Lower hardware cost and more choices with x86/x64 enhanced support: Through increased support for x64-based environments, SAS 9.2 technologies will be available as a 64-bit enabled application supporting 64-bit extended architectures. This will enable customers to build upon affordable and scalable commodity hardware.
• Improved output options: Users will receive universal printer support for TrueType font output to all supported operating environments, improved font support in ODS (including five new Latin fonts, eight multilingual Unicode fonts and eight monolingual Asian fonts), and improved distribution format options in both.

The value of analytics
As organizational information needs grow in complexity, enterprise intelligence software should not. Analytics that previously were available only to technical users can now be placed in the hands of all decision makers to drive accurate decisions and better results. SAS offers an integrated and comprehensive platform for fast implementation and deployment of reports and analysis, enabling organizations to quickly achieve optimal results.

SAS 9.2 continues to build on SAS’ core competency in the area of advanced analytics. It provides the addition of more advanced algorithms for data analysis across all of SAS’ core analytical products. With SAS 9.2, users will have access to more sophisticated analyses directly from their interface of choice without having to constantly seek assistance from IT.

A strong partnership
SAS’ success over the last three decades has been based on the partnership approach we create with our customers. The improvements offered in SAS 9.2 are a direct response to requests from our customers. We are committed to helping them fully optimize their use of SAS and realize the benefits provided in our latest release. With SAS 9.2, organizations can remove the barriers to productivity, create a culture of fact-based decision making, and drive even more value for their company.

Bio: Gaurav Verma, Global Marketing Manager for Business Intelligence at SAS, drives SAS’ global Enterprise Intelligence Platform marketing strategy and positioning. He focuses on persona-based marketing, awareness and messaging for SAS’ business intelligence and information management solutions.