Report shows SAS clear leader in revenue for burgeoning software sector

17 August 2004 - Analyst firm IDC has recognized SAS as the revenue leader in marketing automation software. The IDC report ("Worldwide Marketing and Sales Automation Applications 2003 Vendor Shares: Mixed News for Vendors," IDC #31585, July 2004) examines the marketing and sales automation applications market for 2001-2003. It features a competitive analysis of vendors, including 2003 revenue and market share, as well as profiles of the leading vendors. The report also identifies the keys to future success for these leading vendors.

IDC estimates the total market size for marketing automation software applications at $1.49 billion in 2004. According to the report, SAS owns a 7.9 percent market share - the largest of any vendor - with $117.3 million in revenues in 2003. SAS' 24.1 percent growth greatly surpassed the overall market growth of 1.4 percent.

In its report, IDC described SAS as follows:

SAS Institute has come to the business side of the marketing world from a strong position in analytics and data management, and its marketing software shows that heritage. One of the central challenges of integrating analytics into an application for non statisticians is the level of sophistication that the software company chooses - too little and the users are forced to seek additional software to answer their questions, too much and the users ignore the analytics as rocket science (to the detriment of their questions). SAS has addressed this issue by carefully researching usability issues and by using a linked tabular and graphical approach to convey relatively complex concepts. SAS also integrates BI, metadata management, and its Enterprise Miner data-mining product into its marketing automation. 1

"IDC's report underscores SAS' leadership in marketing automation software, and validates our emphasis on bringing together data management and advanced analytics to help marketers succeed," said Jim Davis, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at SAS. "As the only vendor to provide marketing automation and business intelligence on a unified and highly extensible enterprise-class platform, SAS is extremely well positioned to build upon our market leadership, respond to emerging trends, and deliver value to our customers through SAS Marketing Automation."

The IDC report defines marketing automation as software for automating a wide array of marketing processes, including campaign execution, lead qualification distribution, brand management, collateral management, trade show management, and Web advertising.

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 90 percent of the Fortune 500 - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organisations 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^®. Visit us at www.sas.com.

1."Source: IDC."

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