SAS honoured with 2009 Asia Pacific Frost & Sullivan ICT Award for Business Intelligence

SAS’ continued effort in the development of business analytics in the BI industry is truly commendable says Frost & Sullivan.

SYDNEY, Australia  (16 Jun 2009)  –  Frost & Sullivan has named SAS, the leader in business analytics software and services, as the 2009 Business Intelligence Vendor of the Year in Asia Pacific. The award, which is conferred as part of the 2009 Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific ICT Awards, marks the fifth time that SAS has received this honour in the six year history of the awards program.

“As business operations today evolve to become much more complex, the Business Intelligence (BI) Software must continue to re-invent itself in order to stay relevant and effective in enterprise management and decision making,” said Chengyu Wu, Cheri, Research Analyst, Asia Pacific ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan.

“BI has long moved on from being a traditional, simplistic query and reporting tool to a much more advanced and sophisticated, yet high value adding business analytical tool for businesses of today. SAS has been a visionary in this segment by consistently differentiating itself by creating new niche technology solutions through incorporation of intelligent business analytics such as real-time analytics and predictive modeling in its BI package. Its comprehensive BI framework has met the high customer expectations and gained increasing recognition in the industry. We believe that SAS’ continued effort in the development of business analytics in the BI industry is truly commendable.” 

“Our ability to meet the high expectations of customers across industries to deliver in-depth, real-time and tailored business analytics solutions has allowed SAS to continue to lead in the region as the 2009 Asia Pacific Business Intelligence vendor of the Year,” said Don Cooper-Williams, Executive Director, SAS Asia Pacific.

The Asia Pacific Frost & Sullivan ICT Awards are an acknowledgement of companies that excel in their business segments, and are noted for their efforts to improve the industry as a whole. The contenders of the 2009 Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific ICT Award for Business Intelligence (BI) Vendor of the Year were evaluated and recognised for exemplary growth, performance, innovation and achievements in 2008.

According to Frost & Sullivan, SAS clinched this award due to several factors: its innovative focus on developing niche business analytics solutions which has been widely acknowledged and seen in the highly comprehensive Business Analytics framework for its customers; ability to attract and benefit from an extensive customer base in the region; and ability to retain a remarkable growth in its revenue, as evidenced in the sound collaboration between its development and marketing teams.

To win the 2009 Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific ICT Award for Business Intelligence (BI) Vendor of the Year, SAS provided a focus on Business Analytics, a comprehensive BI Framework, meaningful customer relationships and a continued track record of sustained growth.

Channeled Focus on Business Analytics

As the leader in Business Analytics, SAS aims to assist its clients to evolve from the traditional report-driven model to a more intelligence-driven paradigm. This commitment is shown from SAS’ continued strategy of re-investing its growth back to further enhancing the strength and depth of its analytic solutions. This is done by allocating up to 22% of their revenue to R&D, a percentage that is unmatched by its competitors.

SAS is also the pioneer of several niche Business Analytics solutions such as fraud detection, social network analysis, sustainability and profitability management. In 2008, the SAS version 9.2 further leveraged the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform to provide more value as a package to its customers, advanced techniques for data analysis, simpler role based interfaces for enterprise-wide users, faster data processing and improvements in enterprise applications.

Comprehensive BI Framework

SAS continues to provide one of the most comprehensive & fully integrated BI frameworks to its customers, delivering support for a wide range of BI activities from common functions such as data integration, query and reporting, to further in-depth analytical solutions that are based on statistics, predictive modeling, forecasting, econometrics, text mining, experimental design, visualisation and optimisation. SAS also offers a full spectrum of customisable BI solutions for 17 different industries, including Financial Services, Government, Services, Communication, Health and Life Sciences.

In 2008, the successful acquisitions of Teragram and IDeaS expanded both the portfolio and capabilities of SAS in terms of their text mining and revenue optimisation functionalities.

Extensive and Entrenched Customer Relationships

SAS has a wide spread of customer base across 113 countries including 14 across Asia Pacific. In 2008, despite the economic downturn that impacted the region, 363 new customers signed up to SAS, with many deals in excess of US$1 million.

In addition to new customers, SAS’ retention rates remain high across the region, indicating strong dependence on software that is delivering insight into managing in these difficult times.

Remarkable Track Record of Sustained Growth

Over the last three decades, the industry has witnessed the exponential revenue growth of SAS, which achieved a staggering figure of $2.26 billion in revenue in 2008. SAS Asia Pacific recorded 8.5% revenue growth in 2008 from 2007 and represents approximately 11% of SAS' worldwide revenue.

As the largest privately held pre-packaged software company, SAS has been gaining increasing market share in the Asia Pacific market, well out-performing the growth of its other markets with a double-digit growth rate, despite the current economic downturn. This has contributed significantly to the improved overall performance of SAS over the year.

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