According to a report by IDC, SAS is the only vendor in the top three worldwide to boost its share of the global Bl market. ACCORDING TO IDC's Worldwide Business Intelligence Tools 2006 Vendor Shares report, SAS's revenue from BI tools rose to $678,9 million, an increase of 16,6% over the previous year's sales figures. SAS's growth outpaced the overall market for BI tools, which increased 11,5% to $6,25 billion. Despite consolidation and increased competition for BI software, SAS was the only vendor of the top three in the IDC report to increase its market share in BI tools, growins from 10,4% in 2005 to 10,9% in 2006. The report also ranks SAS as the leading provider of advanced analytics, an honour held by the company for the tenth year in a row. "SAS's strength has always been in its advanced analytics, which is evidenced by the company's consistent leadership of this BI tools market segment," said Dan Vessel, vice president at IDC. According to Carel Badenhorst, product manager at SAS, the company's success is the result of 'sticking to its knitting'. "Our edge is that we are still doing what we started with 31 years ago. We stuck to, and expanded, our core competence - business intelligence -particularly in the form of analytics." He adds that SAS's biggest strength is that even non-statisticians can use one software package to quickly produce simple reports that can use very sophisticated analysis and forecasting models behind the scenes. "Analytics was traditionally something that was really only discussed at PHD conventions, but we've made it easy for everyone to use," he says. While many of the company's competitors are calling themselves leaders and purporting to offer end-to-end BI solutions, Badenhorst says that SAS's success is evidence in itself that users are deriving huge benefits from the system. SAS is rapidly expanding its ability to deliver its BI solutions to a broad spectrum of customers. In 2006, the company introduced a channel partner business unit for value-added resellers (VARs), systems integrators and independent software vendors. Expanded this year to serve customers around the world, this initiative now delivers SAS BI software efficiently and cost-effectively to small- to medium-sized and midmarket businesses.

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