Sydney & Auckland , Australia (October 16, 2007) – SAS, the leader in business intelligence and analytical software and services, plans to directly integrate SAS analytics, data integration capabilities and solutions into leading relational database management systems (RDBMS).

(The first such initiative – with Teradata – was announced last week. Please click here for more information).

This initiative will deliver improved accuracy, reduced data movement and more streamlined analytic processes to businesses with enterprise data warehouses to help speed the delivery of business intelligence throughout all levels of the organisation. Decision makers with faster access to analytical results will gain more insights into their businesses and make more agile and accurate decisions that comply with governance requirements.

“By leveraging the processing power of databases and running analytics where the data resides, SAS is giving businesses another way to be more efficient and effective by helping them balance and fully utilize their technology resources,” said Henry Morris, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Software and Services Research, IDC. “Accelerating the development and execution of analytics within a relational database will give customers a flexible, powerful means for implementing predictive analytics and information analysis in one location.”

“This initiative is so very timely”, said Michael Belakhov, general manager, Enterprise Business Intelligence for SAS Australia and New Zealand, adding, “With the parallel pressures of rapidly growing data volumes in every type of organisation and the need for managers to make informed decisions faster than ever before, the ability to accelerate analyses by cutting down on the preliminary steps will be a real breakthrough benefit”.

Businesses today are challenged by the need to harness the value of increasing amounts of data to make fast and accurate decisions. SAS will address these challenges by enabling appropriate analytics, data integration and business intelligence functionality to execute within database engines and integrating these applications seamlessly with business intelligence services and analytic solutions across the enterprise. The goal of this initiative is to provide customers with increased flexibility and a cost-effective approach to further leveraging their enterprises’ data warehousing investments with SAS In-Database Processing, which will make it easier for them to focus on business opportunities that will help them succeed.

“As databases mature to become data appliances for distributed computations, the time has come to extend the power of SAS Analytics and data transformations inside the database engine,” said Keith Collins, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, SAS. “As more customers leverage data and analytics as corporate assets, they are asking for our help in managing the analytical life cycle from discovery to execution. Blending the best of SAS with the core strengths of databases makes businesses more efficient and responsive to changing market environments.”

For example, in efforts to address compliance issues, banks are responsible for identifying suspicious activity, maintaining financial integrity and reducing operating costs, as well as for detecting and reporting criminal financial activities anywhere in the organisation. Now, with the predictive models of SAS integrated within a relational database, banks can identify and address suspect patterns or anomalies quickly, while also speeding up the process of refining detection measures and logic to more accurately report exceptions throughout the enterprise. In addition, SAS® In-Database Processing will give retail companies another way to analyse their data to understand and anticipate customer behaviour, meet customer needs, build more profitable customer relationships and gain a holistic view of a customer’s lifetime value.

This global initiative is occurring in a phased rollout involving technical integration milestones with leading RDBMS platforms. More information can be found here: http://www.sas.com/technologies/architecture/in-databaseprocessing/index.html.