-- Company also recognized as a leading "Enterprise Applications" influencer --

For the second year in a row, Computer Business Review (CBR) has ranked SAS, the leader in business intelligence, among its "Top 10 Most Influential Business Intelligence Vendors."

In its widely-anticipated new rankings for 2005, CBR also included SAS for the second consecutive year as one of its "Top 10 Most Influential Enterprise Applications Vendors."

The rankings are included in CBR's "Top 10 Most Influential Special Issue," published in print form and online at www.cbronline.com in mid July.

"SAS continues to build upon its expertise in advanced analytics into the mainstream business intelligence market by delivering an easy-to-use, customized BI platform that's packed with rich reporting and analysis capabilities for business users, analysts and IT alike," said Madan Sheina, consultant editor, BI technologies at Computer Business Review (CBR).

"SAS customers will benefit from integrating analytics and data management with an array of conventional BI capabilities. Importantly, large companies seeking to standardise enterprise BI and complex analytics on a single platform and vendor now have a new choice in the market."

CBR's team of experienced sector analysts nominated, debated and finally selected their choice of the most influential people and vendors in the technology industry. This year's selections were not ranked numerically.

The Special Issue ranks the most influential vendors in 11 key technology sectors, including business intelligence, application development, enterprise applications, IT services, integration and middleware, management software, mobile and wireless, offshore services, security, servers and workstations, and storage. It also ranks the 10 most influential people in the industry over the last year and the 50 largest companies in the sector.

The SAS® Enterprise BI Server, SAS' newly-enhanced BI platform, delivers an integrated and comprehensive suite of BI capabilities - including reporting, query and analysis, OLAP, visualisation, and integration with Excel and other Microsoft Office applications - all using consistent metadata. With targeted BI interfaces that support individual needs, the SAS Enterprise BI Server empowers information producers and consumers at various skill levels.

"SAS Enterprise BI Server gives companies today a competitive advantage by providing them with an open BI platform that includes easy-to-use interfaces. End users at all levels of an organisation can obtain information quickly and easily to make decisions at the lowest overall cost to the organisation," said Anne Milley, director of technology marketing at SAS.

"We are helping these companies better integrate technologies and functions across the enterprise in part by providing appropriate BI interfaces and tools for users at many different levels. No other BI provider offers such power and extensibility in a single platform, and that makes all the difference to customer success."