Sydney, Australia (October 2, 2007) – SAS cited a report released today by a prominent analyst firm that strengthens the company’s reputation as an outstanding vendor of a broad, comprehensive range of enterprise intelligence solutions.

According to IDC’s “Worldwide Business Analytics Software 2006 Vendor Shares and 2007-2011 Forecast”1 report, SAS’ sales of business analytics software rose to US$1.59 billion in 2006, an increase of 14.0 percent over the previous year’s revenues in this category. In fact, SAS’ growth was the highest among the top four business analytics vendors featured in the report, with the company now holding an 8.2 percent share of the overall market.

IDC’s definition of the business analytics software market includes 11 data warehousing and performance management tools and applications segments. In 2006, IDC ranked SAS first in worldwide advanced analytics and data warehouse generation tools revenue and second in sales of worldwide CRM analytic applications. SAS is also prominently positioned among the top five vendors in the query/reporting/analysis, data warehouse management and services operations analytics market segments.

“SAS is the only one of the top five business analytics vendors that focuses almost exclusively on business analytics,” said Dan Vesset, Program Vice President, Business Analytics Solutions for IDC. “SAS’ focus and solution diversity contributed to the company achieving the third-highest momentum of the vendors in the business analytics market in 2006.”

According to IDC, the business analytics software market reached $19.3 billion in 2006, representing a growth rate of 11.2 percent. The authors expect the worldwide business analytics software market to continue to grow at a healthy compound annual growth rate of 10.3 percent over the next five years. Furthermore, IDC has made the following predictions about the future of business analytics:

• Business analytics solutions will increasingly incorporate functionality for unified access and analysis of structured data and unstructured content, business process management, collaboration and workflow management functionality.

• A broader set of organizations (in all geographic regions and of all sizes) is beginning to look at business analytics not just as a set of reporting functions, but as a means to gain competitive advantage through better decision management and process optimization.

• As consolidation among the leading business analytics vendors continues, a new generation of software vendor will target specific market segments with innovative new solutions.

SAS is well-positioned to capitalize on these trends, propelled by the company’s reinvestment of almost a quarter of its revenues – 24 percent in 2006 – in research and development. SAS already facilitates integration of unstructured data into the established processes of business intelligence (BI) and information extraction and analysis of structured data.

SAS offers targeted business solutions that go far beyond simple query-and-reporting tools to support enterprise intelligence, customer intelligence, financial intelligence, supply chain intelligence and more – as well as turnkey solutions for various vertical markets, such as financial services, life sciences, healthcare, retail, manufacturing and others.

And SAS continues to address innovative new channels for delivering business analytics through offerings like SAS® Solutions OnDemand, which include Web analytics, business intelligence, marketing automation, supplier relationship management, anti-money laundering and academics. These solutions offer repeatability, low risk and fast time to solution with minimal investment.

HP uses SAS’ advanced analytics and business intelligence – including SAS Enterprise Miner™, SAS Text Miner and SAS Enterprise BI Server – to examine huge volumes of e-mail, customer surveys, warranty claims forms and feedback to learn more about customer attitudes and create new marketing opportunities. SAS helps HP uncover underlying themes or concepts contained in large document collections, automatically group documents into topical clusters, classify documents into predefined categories, integrate text data with structured data to enrich predictive modeling endeavors, and provide a basis for marketing and other business decisions derived from insightful customer information.

“SAS Analytics help us combine revenue and product data from HP’s customer data warehouse with the textual information received through our call center," said Randy Collica, Senior Business Analyst at HP. "By doing so, we can better understand demographics and revenue data about our customers, and then go to the next level to build successful categories and strategies for more consumer-centric marketing campaigns.”

“At SAS, we believe that business intelligence does not stand alone, data integration does not stand alone, and advanced analytics does not stand alone,” said Jim Davis, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at SAS. “This report really drives home the point that forward-looking enterprises must adopt a strategic approach toward information management to extend the value of existing IT investments, promote gains in efficiency, differentiate themselves from the competition, mitigate risk and comply with governmental regulations.”

For more information on the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform, please visit our Website.

¹Source: IDC. Worldwide Business Analytics Software 2006 Vendor Shares and 2007-2011 Forecast: Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing and Analytics Applications Software Points to Continued Strength, report #208699, September 2007.