Hong Kong 15 April 2005 -
SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today announced it is shipping a newly enhanced version of the SAS® Enterprise BI Server, a major component of the
SAS®9 Intelligence Platform, to users worldwide. SAS provides the industry's most comprehensive offering, complete with easy point-and-click reports, while at the same time delivering more breadth and depth than conventional BI vendors such as Business Objects and
Cognos. SAS creates a higher level of business intelligence by making fast and simple access to information available to a wide range of enterprise users.
SAS Enterprise BI Server delivers reports on time, on demand and on target, reducing the time spent looking for answers and making more time available for driving decisions and results. Since SAS Enterprise BI Server delivers critical information in intuitive ways, users can take those insights to make better decisions faster.
No other BI provider delivers OLAP storage and mapping capabilities integrated with a BI tool offering. In this enhancement, SAS created a more sophisticated level of analytics-driven business intelligence with easy and fast access to data for users everywhere in the enterprise.
"SAS brings BI to the masses with simplified user interfaces, so now everyone at every level of an organization can use this information to solve challenges quickly and easily," said Dawn Kung, Regional Director, SAS Greater China. "In addition, our BI offering is built to support IT's need to manage and maintain data and applications efficiently."
SAS announced additional developments related to the SAS Enterprise BI Server:
- The SAS Enterprise BI Server now includes SAS OLAP Server and new OLAP clients at no extra cost. With these new additions, SAS becomes the first and only BI provider to deliver OLAP storage packaged with a BI tool offering. By including the OLAP server and storage, users can create cubes and view multidimensional data within the end-user report environment.
- SAS and ESRI Corp. have integrated the SAS Enterprise BI Server with ESRI's ArcGIS server, delivering BI tools integrated with geographic visualization.
- SAS is offering an integrated version of Platform Computing's JobScheduler for use with SAS Enterprise BI Server. This enterprise job scheduler automates the execution of the entire project flow, from data integration through reporting and analytics.
The enhanced SAS Enterprise BI Server delivers an integrated and comprehensive suite of BI capabilities - including reporting, query and analysis,
OLAP, integrated analytics, visualization, and Microsoft Office integration - all using consistent metadata across the suite. Using targeted BI interfaces that support individual needs, the SAS Enterprise BI Server empowers all information producers and consumers.
"The SAS Enterprise BI Server is SAS' foray into mainstream business intelligence. I was impressed by both its power and ease of use," said Cindi
Howson, president of ASK, a BI consultancy. "SAS has done well to analyze the needs of different user types and focus on the distinct needs of casual users and business analysts.
"All too often, users spend too much time trying to access data in different places and formats," Howson continued. "Of the major BI vendors, SAS was the first Web-based tool to allow users to create a dashboard style report that can seamlessly pull data from multiple data sources, whether relational, OLAP or stored processes. Multiple data sources can also be defined at the metadata or Information Map level, providing re-usability and control when these multiple data sources need to be accessed on a recurring basis."
According to a recent AMR Research report, "Customer Service, Reputation Aid SAS's Entry Into the BI and Financial Intelligence Sectors (Jacqueline Coolidge, John
Hagerty, October 28, 2004), "SAS®9's Intelligence platform, which underpins all its analytic applications, was designed to meet the needs of the full spectrum of reporting and analysis users from a single, integrated environment. SAS engineers concentrated heavily on creating a simplified user interface, and it shows. The architecture was designed for scalability and integration."
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