In today’s data-rich organizations, information is stored in different source systems, on different platforms and maintained by multiple departments. As a result, business users struggle to understand what data they have, where it is located and how to retrieve it.

SAS helps companies get the information they need with the newest version of the SAS Enterprise ETL Server, which includes features that simplify core functions in the extraction, transformation and load (ETL) process and shortens the time required to get critical data into an organization’s business intelligence mix. With these enhancements SAS is delivering best-of-breed technology to ETL developers.

Experts - and users - weigh in
"According to most practitioners, ETL design and development work consumes 60 to 80 percent of an entire BI project," The Data Warehousing Institute reported ("Evaluating ETL and Data Integration Platforms: by Wayne Eckerson and Colin White, 2003). "With such an inordinate amount of resources tied up in ETL work, it behooves BI teams to optimize this layer of their BI environment."

"This TDWI research validates how essential ETL is to a company’s overall BI success," says Rob Stephens, technology director at SAS. "Using SAS Enterprise ETL Server, businesses can quickly and efficiently take a strategic step toward creating a cohesive enterprise intelligence platform."

"SAS ETL Server saves our company time and resources with regards to development, maintenance and execution of different tasks," says Tim Thranegaard, senior vice president at BRFKredit, a Danish mortgage credit institute. "We are able to deliver high-quality information to the business quickly, which allows us to make more efficient and confident decisions."

Jørgen Falkesgaard, project manager for the IT Competence department at Codan, one of Scandinavia’s most successful insurance companies, also appreciates the software’s new capabilities. "SAS’ ETL software speeds up the execution and brings our data to life much faster, with improved stability and manageability of better-quality data, reducing our development time and maintenance," he says. "SAS ETL Server enables us to handle the kinds of complex data transformations required by our business - fast, in an easy-to-use, wizard-driven environment."

SAS Enterprise ETL Server improves productivity by:

• Reducing the time and effort required for the ETL development cycle.
  
  
• Improving future maintenance by making it easier for developers to access a wide variety of external data files, including legacy formats, without the need to write custom code.
  
  
• Providing wizard-driven user interfaces, simplifying how metadata is captured at the transformation level. This capability makes it easier to track and maintain data in the warehouse, regardless of the source. It also greatly improves overall consistency and authenticity of information in the data warehouse at the ETL level.
  
  
• Allowing critical ETL routines in the development cycle to be performed in real-time through messaging queuing products (i.e., IBM WebSphere MQ, Microsoft MQ and TIBCO TIB/Rendezvous), as well as through Web services – resulting in a more efficient ETL process.
  
  
• Providing data lineage and impact analysis capabilities that go beyond what other ETL tools can deliver, making the ETL process more transparent to both IT staff and decision makers within the company while reducing ETL development costs.

SAS Enterprise ETL Server maintains a full history of changes made during a project’s life cycle, allowing for instant reconciliation against other sources of information and ensuring knowledge continuity in the event of personnel changes. This history also ensures that information derived from the ETL process is correct and trustworthy.

"As a recognized ETL leader, SAS continues to find innovative ways to deliver value at the initial phase of a company’s business intelligence process," adds SAS’ Stephens. "SAS’ ETL offering allows organizations to integrate information in ways that make enterprise intelligence immediately accessible any time, any place and in the most appropriate form – regardless of the source."

SAS Enterprise ETL Server is an integral part of the SAS Intelligence Platform, which is the foundation of the SAS®9 family of technologies and solutions.