In today's dynamic academic environment, educators face daunting challenges and exciting opportunities. With budget shortfalls and calls for greater accountability, you must be creative to move forward while reducing total costs, implementing efficient and effective academic programs, and maintaining trust. Educators at all levels are under increasing pressure to take a holistic view of their organizations. Institutions need to share information and collaborate across all internal organizations to move confidently and successfully into the future. Many institutions are establishing enterprise architectures to address these issues.

Enterprise architecture is a "blueprint" for a common computing system across the enterprise, based on a vision that bridges "where it is" to "where it wants to be." The SAS Intelligence Platform strengthens an enterprise architecture by adding the intelligence advantage – access to the information that is needed to make the most informed decisions.

At SAS, we understand the critical role of accurate, timely data and how integrating that information results in intelligence that benefits education. After all, our solutions have been helping education improve learning, services and institutional management for nearly three decades.

Are you optimizing your information to drive educational excellence?
For many educators, a lack of data is not the problem. The true challenge is that they have an abundance of information that is located in separate systems for finance, student, HR, course management, alumni management, scheduling and other areas. As a result, it becomes difficult to bring information from all these systems together into one comprehensive view that puts administrators, faculty, researchers, policy makers, students and others on the same page. Perhaps you have the data you need, but it’s stored in different areas that you’re unable to access and consolidate. Or maybe you can access your data, but you don’t have a viable way to store and manage it. Many institutions may already be storing their data, but find it difficult or impossible to report and analyze the information or measure and share results via the Web through a dashboard or portal. No matter where you are on the path toward refining your information capabilities, SAS can help you take the next step to meet your goals.

The solution – Bringing it all together with SAS
SAS®9 provides an integrated, open and extensible intelligence platform that serves as the foundation for creating and delivering accurate, in-depth intelligence across the institution and to all levels of education. The SAS Intelligence Platform is a low-risk framework that can grow and be customized into new applications to meet your future needs. This framework allows you to make the most of your existing IT investment since it integrates with a wide variety of data sources, ensuring a smooth flow of information across campus, departments or organizations. The SAS Intelligence Platform provides an unmatched ability to turn administrative, teaching and research data first into information, then into insight, allowing effective decisions to be made with confidence.

The SAS Intelligence Platform includes the following flagship offerings:

• SAS Enterprise ETL Server offers a platform-independent extraction, transformation and loading solution that includes a range of access engines, a multithreaded transformation engine, integrated metadata management, data cleansing and a graphical interface.
• SAS Intelligence Storage provides a dedicated platform designed from the outset to efficiently disseminate information for business intelligence and analytic applications – whether from SAS or third parties.
• SAS Enterprise BI Server empowers users by giving them access to information in the format they need, when they need it. It provides appropriate interfaces for various user skill levels and needs, enabling users to generate their own answers while IT retains control over the quality and consistency of the data.
• SAS Analytic Technologies deliver the industry's widest portfolio of analytics, algorithms, mathematical data manipulation and modeling capabilities. SAS takes the mystery out of these high-end statistical techniques by coupling them with a wide range of user interfaces and graphics.

The SAS Intelligence Platform serves as the foundation for our full suite of domain-specific solutions for financial intelligence, human capital management, student recruitment and retention, advancement and fundraising, IT management, procurement management and performance management.