SAS unveils 10 business intelligence solutions

New and enhanced solutions built on SAS® Enterprise Intelligence Platform meet industry needs in financial services, manufacturing, retail and telecom

SAN FRANCISCO (March 27, 2006) – SAS, the leader in business intelligence (BI), announced three new and seven enhanced software solutions at its annual SAS® Users Group International (SUGI) conference, attended by more than 4,000 people.

The enhanced solutions are the result of SAS’ commitment to meeting its customers’ changing needs and solving specific business challenges in key vertical industries including banking and financial services, manufacturing, retail, and telecommunications. SAS invests almost a quarter of annual revenues (24 percent of $1.68 billion in revenue in 2005) in research and development, a scale unmatched among BI vendors.

The new and enhanced SAS industry solutions are:

For Financial services

• SAS Anti-Money Laundering – sifts through huge amounts of data to detect subtle patterns that may indicate suspicious behaviour; the latest version adds enhanced data integration capabilities through SAS Data Integration Studio and other components.
• SAS Credit Risk Management for Banking – for scoring, rating and managing credit and credit risk; the latest version adds improved reporting so information can be shared more easily throughout the bank.
• SAS Fair Banking – helps lenders ensure regulatory compliance while improving quality of their lending decisions; new version’s enhanced analytics help lenders better track global exposure.

• SAS Warranty Analysis – reduces warranty costs and improves quality by using warranty claims, call centre data and other sources to identify fraudulent claims, detect emerging issues and forecast warranty costs; the new version offers enhanced integration with standard desktop tools.
• SAS Service Parts Optimization – a new product from SAS, it allows organizations to provide the highest level of after-sale support by better forecasting demand for parts and optimizing inventories, thus increasing customer satisfaction and improving profitability.

• Marketmax®Allocation – improves inventory management with allocation and replenishment of basic, fashion and promotional merchandise; the new version offers support for advanced and user-defined allocations, and for industry-standard allocation methods.
• SAS Markdown Optimization – boosts profitability by determining which items should be marked down, by how much, when and in which stores; the latest version includes improved scalability for large-volume markdown and clearance events.
• SAS Promotion Optimization – helps maximize revenue by accurately predicting which items to promote, in which locations, at what price and via which promotional vehicles; the enhanced version offers more support for complex promotions, as well as improved event and scenario analysis and planning.

• SAS Revenue Assurance for Telecommunications – a new product shipping later this year, it enables communications service providers to manage their revenue streams and minimize revenue leakage.
• SAS Price Plan Optimization for Telecommunications – a new product shipping later this year, it helps providers improve operational performance and customer satisfaction by identifying price plans with the highest returns for the operator and the highest preference among customers.

“There are lots of software vendors out there claiming to provide analytics and BI offerings that, in reality, are little more than reporting or operational systems,” said Jim Davis, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at SAS. “No other vendor can offer the same depth and breadth of BI solutions as SAS. And we will continue to deliver constant, customer-focused innovation, as shown in the 10 products announced today.”

Like all SAS solutions, the 10 new and enhanced products are built on top of the industry’s foremost platform for business intelligence, the SAS® Enterprise Intelligence Platform. This platform integrates technology for:

• Data integration – consolidate and manage data from all available and relevant sources.
• Predictive analytics – answer key business questions and understand what will happen, as well as what has already occurred and why.
• Business intelligence – share intelligence quickly throughout the organization for faster and more accurate decision making.
• Storage – create intelligence from massive quantities of data through storage designed and optimized for BI and analytics.

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About SAS

SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 40,000 sites -- including 96 of the top 100 companies on the FORTUNE Global 500® -- to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organizations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know®. Visit us at www.sas.com.

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