SAS announces continued strong global growth for business intelligence

SAS®9, vertical solutions drive 12 percent YTD revenue growth

CARY, N.C. (Oct. 20, 2004) – SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today announced continued financial and customer success through the third quarter of 2004, with year-to-date revenue growth up 12 percent over 2003. Driving new business for SAS was the software company’s string of key solution launches that leverage the breakthrough capabilities of the SAS®9 Intelligence Platform, unveiled in the first quarter of 2004.
SAS customers continue their rapid adoption of the SAS®9 platform. From retail and financial services to telecommunications, manufacturing and the public sector, a sampling of organizations that have licensed or migrated to SAS®9 include Amazon.com Holdings Inc., American Express International, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Celebrity Cruises, Kraft Foods Global and Marriott International, all based in the United States; Orange and Pacifica, both of France; BBVA (Spain), Bell Canada, Statistics Norway and Telenor Direkte (Norway). These organizations join more than 9,600 other licensed sites that have already implemented SAS®9.

This week SAS announced the launch of SAS Financial Intelligence, an advanced portfolio of software solutions for the SAS®9 platform that helps organizations achieve more predictive, accurate and timely results from their finance functions. By using SAS Financial Intelligence, the finance department can deliver a comprehensive perspective for performance management and transform itself into a confident, trusted adviser that supplies valuable intelligence to the entire enterprise.

“We believe these strong revenue results reflect a growing recognition that our SAS®9 solutions take customers well beyond the realm of traditional business intelligence and enable them to confidently and proactively drive revenue growth and profitability,” said Dr. Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS. “To make this possible, the SAS®9 Intelligence Platform provides a powerful foundation for a suite of solutions that supports performance management across the enterprise, something other vendors have failed to deliver.”

Recent industry recognition

SAS recently received the following industry accolades:

• Software Magazine ranked SAS No. 1 in its Business Intelligence/Analytics category. Rankings are based on total worldwide 2003 revenues for technology companies with a software component.
• SAS was chosen as a member of the Supply & Demand Chain Executive 100, an elite group of supply-chain solution providers, consultants and other organizations that are leading the way in transforming supply and demand chains.
• CRM magazine ranked SAS as the CRM market leader in CRM Analytics and a market leader in Marketing Performance Management. In addition, Goodnight was inducted into the CRM Hall of Fame, and SAS customer AAA Mid-Atlantic won a CRM Elite award. In the CRM Analytics category, SAS was lauded as “the best vendor in terms of predictive analytics” and for having a large customer base that “remains among the most loyal in the category.” In the Marketing Performance Management category, SAS was deemed “the most recognizable name in the marketing arena, having parlayed its strength in innovation, data mining and analytics.”
• SQL Server Magazine named SAS Enterprise Miner™ software as the winner of the Best Data Mining Product category in the magazine’s first-ever Readers’ Choice Awards.
• CMP Media’s Intelligent Enterprise magazine named SAS the winner of three individual categories in its seventh annual Readers’ Choice Awards for Best IT Products. The magazine’s 80,000-plus subscribers chose SAS software as the winner in these categories: Best Data Mining (SAS Enterprise Miner); Best Text Analysis (SAS Text Miner); and Best Predictive Modeling and Planning (SAS/STAT® and SAS High-Performance Forecasting). SAS also finished in the runner-up position for Best Web Analytics (SAS Web Analytics).

About SAS®9
SAS®9 builds on SAS’ 28 years of expertise in data management and analytics. With SAS®9, SAS has created a new intelligence platform that will help companies do more with the resources, data and systems that they already have, giving greater numbers of people within those companies access to the predictive analytics and data management capabilities of SAS.
The powerful, integrated solutions on the new SAS®9 Intelligence Platform are helping to redefine performance management. Earlier this year, SAS launched SAS Marketing Automation, SAS Risk Dimensions, SAS Web Analytics, SAS Activity-Based Management and SAS IT Management Solutions. Earlier this month, the company launched SAS Supplier Relationship Management on the SAS®9 platform, followed this week by SAS Financial Management.

About SAS
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 ®.