With consumers barraged by communications that are frequently irrelevant, inappropriate or untimely, today’s marketers face a serious challenge: how to cut through the clutter, reach key audiences, and boost the efficiency and profitability of their marketing efforts. SAS has the answer: the latest version of its flagship enterprise marketing solution, SAS® Marketing Automation, and enhanced versions of SAS Marketing Optimization and SAS E-mail Marketing. These software solutions boast improved performance, refined user interfaces and a host of new features to make sophisticated marketing simple, effective and profitable. New features, marketing savvy customers SAS Marketing Automation provides comprehensive data management, campaign management and advanced customer analytics in one integrated, easy-to-use solution. The new version features notable enhancements such as performance capabilities with proven scalability, the solution’s ability to flexibly manage multiple lines of business -- be they product areas, customer segment, or geographies -- from the same system, improved real-time integration capabilities, a more powerful Web user interface for remote users and more flexible reporting and scheduling capabilities. Customers have noticed what SAS Marketing Automation can do. This year alone, more than 50 organizations have selected SAS Marketing Automation as the technology platform to power their marketing efforts. These customers include: MLB Advanced Media US Bank Automobile Association (AA) Old Mutual Telecom Italia Santander Bank Codan Trygg Hansa SAS Marketing Automation has been designed to take full advantage of SAS industry intelligence solutions to deliver faster implementations for industries such as banking, insurance and communication service providers. Other new features of SAS Marketing Automation include improved real-time integration capabilities, a more powerful Web user interface for distributed or remote users, and more flexible reporting and scheduling capabilities. Analysts report: SAS the market leader "2005 marks SAS' 29th consecutive year of growth and prosperity and we pass that success back to our customers by dedicating 25 percent of revenue to R&D each year to ensure our technology is the best," says SAS chief marketing office Jim Davis. "In fact, SAS spends more on R&D in a month than smaller competitors spend in an entire year. For organizations evaluating enterprise marketing software, the choice is clear. Only SAS - through the entire suite of SAS Customer Intelligence - provides a comprehensive marketing solution. Our software provides a complete view of the customer through robust data management, a deep understanding of customers through rich analytics, increased efficiency through the use of repeatable, automated processes in campaign design and execution, and closed-loop reporting and analysis to measure the effectiveness of campaigns." Leading IT market research and advisory firm IDC recently recognized SAS as the revenue leader in the marketing automation space in its report “Worldwide Marketing and Sales Automation Applications 2004 Vendor Shares: A Rising Tide" (IDC #33661, July 2005) (see related story) and the largest predictive analytics vendor in CRM in its most recent study “Worldwide CRM Analytic Applications 2004 Vendor Shares: Strength and Churn” (IDC # 33866, August 2005) (see related story). Both reports were authored by Robert Blumstein, Director of Research for CRM Analytics and Marketing Applications at IDC. SAS Marketing Optimization, SAS E-Mail Marketing In addition to SAS Marketing Automation, SAS also released the latest version of two other customer intelligence solutions: SAS Marketing Optimization and SAS E-mail Marketing. SAS Marketing Optimization enables marketers to plan and prioritize all outbound customer communications to maximize effectiveness while balancing the organization's capacity to deliver and the likelihood that customers will respond. SAS Marketing Optimization is available as a stand-alone application or as an addition to SAS Marketing Automation. The latest version of SAS Marketing Optimization provides mathematically based optimization, not simple prioritization, and includes improved performance and out-of-the-box integration with SAS Marketing Automation. SAS E-mail Marketing provides everything an organization needs to plan, create, test, execute and track e-mail marketing campaigns. It gives marketers the ability to deliver large-scale e-mail campaigns in-house and coordinate these campaigns with other channels and marketing programs. The latest version of SAS E-mail Marketing includes a new, easy-to-use interface, integrated reporting, the integration of Microsoft FrontPage as a content editor, and additional platform support.