First of all, on behalf of all of us at SAS Canada, we hope you had a great summer and had the opportunity to enjoy some great weather. It’s hard to believe that fall is now upon us! As we move through the rest of the year, it is exciting to see the large number of users group meetings planned across the country, and I encourage you to attend the meeting in your area.

I am very proud of the work that SAS does in partnership with our customers to find new ways to meet the ever-changing needs of users in Canada. We now have user group coverage from coast to coast with executive committees set up in virtually all of the regional users groups. We have added a number of special interest user forums, such as Activity Based Management and Health and Data Mining, to better meet the unique needs of users in these areas. On the horizon is a new Platform Users Group in Ottawa, with a special focus on business intelligence and data integration topics, established as a direct result of requests from our users and the growth of the SAS® Enterprise Platform solutions.

Another initiative we are excited about is the expansion of our Academic Program. As most of you know, SAS has been part of the university landscape for many years; however, we recognized that in order to better support students learning about the value of analytics and specifically learning about SAS in school, we need to make more of an investment in this area. Additions to the program are still being finalized; however, the focus of the program will be to support faculty and researchers in developing their use of SAS in the classroom and in their research work. We are also keen to expand SAS usage beyond such traditional areas as mathematics, sciences, health sciences and social studies, for example: SAS usage in undergraduate and graduate business programs.

As we move into our planning cycle for 2008, I am looking forward to developing new initiatives coming from SAS Canada in support of our users. If you have any thoughts or creative ideas around how we can continue to improve and grow our user support programs, please feel free to send me an e-mail at cameron.dow@sas.com.

Thanks for being a great SAS customer!