In a recent product review from BI Pipeline, Jacques Surveyer takes an in-depth look at SAS Enterprise BI Server, exploring strengths, areas for improvement, and how it measures up against the competition. Analyst validation "SAS has presence right now in the core BI marketplace," writes Surveyer, noting recent analyst reports and "is emerging as a force to be reckoned with." Forrester Research ranks SAS second - and growing fast - in the data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) market. And IDC ranks SAS first in the data mining software market. Key advantages "Basic analytics goes well beyond reports, charts and cubes," writes Surveyer. "Being able to carry out problem analysis, basic testing and modeling is critical to many organizations. Base SAS, which sits at the core of SAS Enterprise BI Server, provides a wealth of financial, forecasting and statistical analysis tools critical for problem-solving and competitive agility. Knowing where you are is important. But being able to forecast where you and the market are heading takes BI to the next level. SAS is clearly positioned best among the BI vendors to deliver that capability." Like all vendors, SAS is working on improvements in some areas, but Surveyer concludes: "….in the arena of basic analytical processing and making its own data and results available to its BI users, SAS Enterprise BI Server has industry-leading capabilities. "The key advantage is SAS Data Access [SAS/ACCESS] and SAS Procedure [SAS PROC] language which allows developers and end users to readily customize access to the complete inventory of SAS applications. Thus, SAS has system-wide BI integration capabilities and reach that most other vendors can't match. If you are into BI for the long haul, SAS has to be on your short list."