Customers rate SAS higher than "core" vendors Hyperion, Cognos, Business Objects and others

Sydney, Australia  (Feb 14, 2007) – SAS, the leader in business intelligence, announced BPM Partners’ Pulse Survey findings ranked SAS higher in overall customer satisfaction than other core vendors in performance management, beating out Hyperion, Cognos, Business Objects, OutlookSoft and Cartesis. Specifically, early results show SAS scoring 4.0 on a 5-point scale in overall customer satisfaction, citing strength in SAS’ product functionality and product quality.

BPM Partners is the leading independent authority on business performance management. The 2007 BPM Pulse Survey included more than 500 responses across industries and geographies. Final results of the survey will be published in April.

“SAS is one of the core vendors that offers a complete solution on a proven technology platform,” said Craig Schiff, CEO of BPM Partners. “SAS’ offering of business intelligence, profitability management, human capital management and predictive analytics extends beyond the traditional budgeting, planning and financial consolidation components of performance management, enabling clients to leverage operational analytics as their BPM activities extend throughout the enterprise.”

Adam Stott, General Manager, Financial Intelligence, SAS Australia and New Zealand, notes, “While most other vendors have acquired consolidation, budgeting, forecasting or reporting companies and stitched their offerings together to supposedly form an integrated solution, SAS has built its solutions from the ground up. SAS solutions share business rules and work together seamlessly, providing real business value across the enterprise. SAS is setting the standard for future performance management solutions.”

Among the 17 applications and tools vendors, only SAS, Hyperion, Cognos and Business Objects include all of the core and BPM 2.0 ready capabilities listed in the Annual Business Performance Management Software Buyers Guide. Of the four, SAS distinguished itself by rating the highest of these in customer satisfaction.

In the analyst firm’s newly published Buyers Guide, SAS covers all the components BPM Partners considers essential in a performance management offering. In fact, SAS® for Performance Management links SAS business solutions with industry-specific solutions, supported by prebuilt data models, processes and techniques in banking, insurance, communications, retail, manufacturing and others. SAS business solutions span finance, customer and IT intelligence, and include solutions for marketing performance management, profitability management, human capital management and others. These solutions share a common business intelligence infrastructure. And the entire performance management process can be monitored and managed through SAS’ industry-leading score-carding capabilities. Benefits include:

Better align resources with strategies. Predictive score-carding capabilities tie traditional scorecard features such as traffic lights and speedometers to powerful predictive analytics.

Synchronise financial and operational strategies. With one integrated solution for financial consolidation, planning, budgeting, reporting and dashboards, SAS provides financial transparency, allows companies to link budgets with strategic goals, and improves the speed and quality of their reporting and decision making.

Respond quickly to business and market changes. At-a-glance dashboard visuals ensure efficient access to an organisation’s current status, and strategy maps set up cause-and-effect relationships based on the company’s unique environment.

Ensure a single view of enterprise information. SAS for performance management offerings are all built on the SAS BI platform, which offers unmatched data integration, storage, business intelligence and analytics, so decision makers can be confident that their choices are made using accurate information, thus better delivering expected results.

Identify the true value of customers, products and channels. Profitability management creates highly accurate profitability metrics from detailed transactional data that drive strategic decision making and instill confidence in performance management programs.

Reduce costs without compromising profitability. SAS provides activity-based management to deliver a complete operational view of cost and cost drivers.

“Among the best-of-breed vendors, Hyperion Solutions, Cognos Inc. and SAS Institute Inc. are ranked the top three in terms of revenue size,” according to Kathleen Wilhide, Research Director of BPM and Compliance at IDC in Framingham, MA .^[1]

[1] IDC, Worldwide Business Performance Management Applications 2006–2010 Forecast and 2005 Vendor Shares, Doc #203414, Sept. 2006.

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