Performance management draws 2,600 attendees to SAS customer conference

HSBC wins 2006 Enterprise Intelligence Award

Heidelberg, Germany (May 23, 2006) – HSBC, one of the world’s largest financial services groups, won the 2006 SAS Enterprise Intelligence Award “for a project that successfully detected more fraud and did it faster,” said SAS CEO Jim Goodnight.

George Lennox, Manager of Group Credit and Risk at HSBC, accepted the award on behalf of the company. “The project was delivered on time and on budget, and has exceeded expectations,” Lennox said. “It is detecting fraud and it’s doing it six times faster.” Excellence Awards in the SAS® Enterprise Intelligence Platform category also went to AA (UK) for Data Integration, PBS (Denmark) for Intelligence Storage, ICICI Bank (India) for Business Intelligence and Allianz Portugal for Analytical Intelligence. The awards were presented at SAS Forum International, the premier international event for enterprise business intelligence.

SAS also honoured organizations for best-practice implementations of SAS solutions, including Office Depot, The Netherlands, for SAS Customer Intelligence; UK-based Standard Life for Financial Intelligence; Volvo Truck Corp., Sweden, for Supply Chain Intelligence; Erste Bank, Austria, for Risk Intelligence; and ING Bank, Netherlands, for Human Capital Intelligence. Industry Excellence Awards went to SITA on behalf of the South African government, to Santander Cards and to debitel. The Academic Award went to the University of New South Wales.

“Our objective is to help organizations do things never thought possible before with data,” said Art Cooke, President of SAS International. “With these awards, we honour customers who can show how their enterprise business intelligence solutions are enhancing organizational performance, increasing return of investment or improving their competitiveness.”

Nearly 2,600 attendees worldwide visited SAS Forum International in Geneva May 16-18, confirming that business intelligence (BI) remains very high on the agenda of executives and other professionals. More than 200 customer and expert presentations highlighted the conference. “SAS software helps leaders understand what is going on in their organizations,” said Allan Russell, Senior Vice President for Strategy, SAS International, at the technology plenary. “However, it has become just as important to measure and align goals and predict the future state of operations to improve the performance of their organizations across disciplines such as HR, marketing, finances and CRM.”

At SAS Forum International, the leading BI vendor announced a series of new solutions, as well as enhancements to four cross-industry solutions for human capital management, financial management, activity-based management and strategic performance management. A new solution for revenue assurance in the telecommunications industry and new software capabilities for banks and insurance companies also were announced. Additionally, SAS claimed leadership as the first technology vendor to supply a full spectrum of service-oriented architectures for every aspect of business intelligence, including data, analytics, reporting and composite services for business areas. Finally, Sun Microsystems and SAS set a new benchmark, performing tests showing that SAS Enterprise Data Integration Server can outperform other vendors’ tools for extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) by more than 250 percent.

As Cooke stated in the opening business plenary, “The conference is all about time – the time needed to process data and turn it into intelligence. ERP and data warehouse systems are not delivering the intelligence promised.”

In his welcome address, Royce Bell, CEO of Accenture Information Management Service, acknowledged the importance of data and analytic capabilities to make smarter business decisions: “Stop pouring data in front of people. Start to do the analysis underneath it. Present information intelligently so people make intelligent decisions.” Accenture was the platinum sponsor of SAS Forum International. Detica, HP and Intel were gold sponsors. More information and photos are available at http://support.sas.com/events/sasforuminternational2006/press.html.

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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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