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 Message
from SAS Canada’s president – Carl Farrell
2004
is a milestone year for SAS Canada in a number of different
ways.
After a significant amount of development effort, on March 30, 2004, SAS
released the SAS®9 platform. Users globally are demanding that software
products offer easy-to-use interfaces and points of navigation which can
be tailored to the individual user. Individual users want to be more empowered
and less reliant on IT departments; they want intuitive access to the full
range of software functionality. The economy will continue to drive IT
management's focus on reducing total cost of ownership across departments
and enterprises. SAS 9.1 will address these growing needs. This revolutionary
breakthrough from SAS combines new technology and architecture with more
than 27 years of proven technology and experience. It’s a giant step
forward for SAS, our customers and the entire business community: SAS is
moving beyond business intelligence as you know it.
We are proud to be the host country for the SAS User Group International
(SUGI) 29th annual conference in Montreal beginning on May 9. We are expecting
over 3,000 SAS users to attend and participate in more than 400 presentations,
papers and demos. Registration to date is significantly up over previous
years, and I am pleased to see that over 300 Canadian users have already
registered for this premier event. If you have not already registered,
I urge you to come join the best SAS minds in the world during what will
be an exceptional and diverse conference. Also be sure to check out the
entertainment on Tuesday evening – it will have a definite SAS Canada
flavor!
In 2002, I saw that the traditional SAS User Groups in Canada needed a
little help to re-establish themselves. SAS Canada embarked on a program
that, to date, has traveled to 13 cities, been involved with 37 meetings,
met with over 2,000 SAS users and helped establish five new user groups.
I am proud to say that today Canada has six user organizations representing
350 users, with another 300 users attending annual user sessions in their
local cities. I would like to thank the numerous volunteers who organize
these groups and all the participants who give their time to share their
SAS experiences with others, and the invaluable feedback that these events
provide to SAS Canada. Today, we have a vibrant and vocal user community
in Canada, and we will do our best to support it.
Please let us know if the Customer Value team can help you
with any of your SAS needs. Christy Hobley, Martha Casanova
or Wally Thiessen can be reached at: cvp@can.sas.com.
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Nova Scotia – a center for Business Intelligence
Over the past six years, the
School of Business at Dalhousie University has become renowned
for its talent pool in the business intelligence field. From the establishment
of the Marketing Informatics concentration for both graduate
and undergraduate
students, the school has seen a keen interest in the courses
offered within this area. Some newly developed MBA courses, such as Knowledge
Discovery
in Databases, have benefited from the introduction of SAS Enterprise
Miner (SAS’ award-winning data mining tool) in the syllabus. Students
develop not only technical skills by building models, for example, but
also business
skills that make them a hot commodity on the Toronto labor
market.
The centerpiece of these courses is a large, hands-on, data mining project
that uses real data. The extensive exposure students have to real business
problems – going through the knowledge discovery process, from the
identification of a business problem (or opportunity) to the creation of
a marketing strategy based on the data mining results – is extremely
valuable. Even though most companies are doing very little hiring, and
some are even eliminating jobs, businesses are increasing their investment
in business intelligence tools and personnel qualified to exploit them.
Dalhousie students have proven that the knowledge and skills they gain
through these courses and their hands-on experience with SAS Enterprise
Miner are invaluable assets. Graduates of the MI program are in high demand,
as companies recognize the program and the talent it produces.
Alex Filimon, the KDD instructor at Dalhousie, has also started offering
a Customer Relationship Management course at Acadia University that uses
SAS Enterprise Miner. Acadia is the first primarily undergraduate university
in Canada to offer this course to its students. This newly developed partnership
is a big step forward in improving Acadia’s Advantage program, which
provides students with laptops and gives them access to various business
software packages.
With these new developments and accomplishments, Nova Scotia has a chance
to develop and play a significant part in Canada’s knowledge-based
economy. The “only regret that I have,” says Filimon, “is
that most of our students leave the province after graduation. While this
is great for our reputation, I recognize that there is a need for more
education and training for local companies and business analysts. I’m
hoping that, together with SAS, we’ll build a strong community of
SAS users in Atlantic Provinces.”
BIO: Alex Filimon is currently conducting research on knowledge discovery
in medical databases. He is a partner with The Novus Consulting Group in
Halifax and a lecturer with Dalhousie and Acadia universities. You can
contact him at 902-489-2665 or afilimon@novusconsulting.com.
Spring User Session schedule now available.
The following is a list of events and locations.
If you are interested in attending, please register at this
link. (events
will be added to this Web site approximately 4 weeks prior to date).
Date |
City |
Location |
User Group & Contact |
| June 22 |
Whitehorse |
TBD |
Christy
Hobley (416-307-4645) |
| June 10 |
Saskatoon |
University of Saskachewan |
Christy
Hobley (416-307-4645) |
| June 9 - TBC |
Winnipeg |
TBD |
Christy
Hobley (416-307-4645) |
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Esmail Ramji – Edmonton
Company: Not Just Consulting Ltd.
SAS History: Over 30 years ago, Esmail was severely burned
in a house fire. Despite the many obstacles he had to overcome as a burn
victum, Esmail completed a university education and has had a successful
career in the information technology field. He has been a user, trainer
and strong supporter of SAS for more than 20 years. In late April 2004
he began a walk across Canada and will be visiting numerous burn units
across the country in hopes of raising money to assist in the rehabilitation
of burn victims and other people with similar disabling disfigurements.
For more on Esmail, including his “Techie Tip,” click
here |
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Prior to joining SAS in January 2004, Stephen Wong was employed
by TD Canada Trust, Technology Solutions with the role of IT
Manager. From 1996 to 2000 he held the position of Consultant
with SAS Canada and represented
SAS as a keynote speaker at Data Warehousing Conference in
the Telecommunication Industry in Buenos Aires, Argentina;
Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Mexico City.
For more on Stephen and his techie tips, click
here. | |
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Title:
Programming Techniques for Object-Based Statistical Analysis with SAS Software
Authors:
Tanya Kolosova and Samuel Berestizhevsky
Reviewed by: Kamran Jafry,
Senior technical systems analyst, RBC
Financial Group
Kamran Jafry is part of the technical group at RBC that provides central support for the bank’s SAS platform.
Reviewer's
Opinion: Several key areas really appealed to
me when looking at this book: being able to reuse code, taking
advantage of the Data Dictionary programmatically, utilizing
reusable macros, and data analysis using generic code
that can be modified easily to fit the user’s
needs.
Full
review...
If you would like to review a book,
please contact the Customer Value
team. |
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| –That SAS has commited $30 Million to new Canadian headquarters in Toronto?
(March 9, 2004) - Mayor David Miller joins SAS Canada President, Carl Farrell and
Economic Development Committee Chair, Councillor Brian Ashton in groundbreaking
ceremony and celebration of investment into community. Read on...
–You can easily find out what’s new in SAS 9.1 from new products to updates and enhancements
Go to the SAS®9 link from our support.sas.com website
–You can get up-to-date technical and business information by subscribing to SAS' e-newsletters. Click
here for details.
–For details on all of SAS' products and solutions, click here
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| –SAS®9 was launched on March 30, revolutionizing the business intelligence industry.
Do you know about all the new features that SAS®9 provides
for predicting and forecasting? Our one-day course, New Features in SAS System
9, focuses on multithreaded parallel processing, new SAS functions, Perl regular
expressions, enhancements to Base SAS procedures, Version 8 compatibility and
the new SAS libname engines to Microsoft Access and Excel.
Read
more…
–Coming soon!! Our July-December 2004 course schedule is currently being finalized and will shortly be downloaded to the Web.
Keep checking support.sas.com/training/canada to view the latest scheduled courses across Canada.
–Customer Relationship Management
Through Data Mining is returning to Canada.
Recognized industry experts, Michael Berry and Gordon Linoff are presenters for this course. They have most recently co-authored Mining the Web. They have also written two of the most widely read and respected books on data mining: Data Mining Techniques and Mastering Data Mining. With more than 20 years experience, both are CRM experts in applying advanced data mining techniques to generate true business intelligence. To register for the Toronto date, click
here...
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–Name That Photo contest - Congratulations to Emmy Pahmer who was the first person to send in a response to the Name That Photo contest.
The picture at the top of the last newsletter was
Olympic Stadium in Montréal, Quebec. Since its creation, the Olympic
Stadium has been the host of spectacular events, starting with the Olympic
Games of 1976. Professional sports, large-scale entertainment (rock concerts,
stunt car shows and large rallies) and trade shows constitute the types
of activities held throughout the year at the stadium. There are many ways
to describe the Olympic Stadium, but all would agree that it is nothing
less than impressive. Due to the 34 slanting consoles making up its skeleton,
the Stadium has an immense surface space available behind the stands.
Be the first to tell us where the picture at the top of this
newsletter is and win a prize!!! E-mail your guess to cvp@can.sas.com.
–
Suggestions/Comments
If you have any comments or suggestions for future editions of
this newsletter, please let the
Customer Value team
know!
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May Tang currently manages a team of biostatisticians at Aventis
Pasteur. May feels that pharmaceutical organizations spend enormous amounts
of time on countless tests during all phases of drug development. Only
a small number of these tests can be used for further studies.
SAS software enables
total data management, analysis, reporting and documentation,
thus reducing overall development timeframes. SAS integrates
effectively and efficiently
into other electronic file management processes, speeding
the launch of the approval and drug marketing phases substantially.
Find out 
