Milano, 10 novembre 2006 – SAS, the leader in business intelligence, further bolstered its rich suite of solutions for the Enterprise Marketing Management market with new releases of key Customer Intelligence offerings. SAS® Marketing Automation and SAS® Marketing Optimization are now better than ever at cutting through the marketing clutter to help companies reach key audiences and boost the profitability of marketing activities.

"SAS Marketing Automation is a rock-solid product, and SAS continues to provide performance and functionality improvements to support our growing needs" stated Todd Wermerson, VP of IT, from Northern Tool and Equipment. "Our implementation went very smoothly, and we’re already taking advantage of its features. We expect to see additional improvement in ROI using SAS for our marketing operations."

SAS is recognized by IDC as the largest predictive CRM analytics vendor in the world. Now, enhancements to SAS Marketing Automation provide a number of performance improvements for high volume marketers, and a series of new features to continue to make sophisticated marketing simple, effective, and profitable.

SAS Marketing Optimization enables marketers to mathematically optimize all outbound customer communications to maximize effectiveness while balancing the organization's capacity to deliver, the likelihood that customers will respond and the potential value of each response to the company. The latest version of SAS Marketing Optimization brings improved usability for business users that want the power that SAS provides yet don’t want to get overwhelmed with the process. This release also provides improved reporting, analysis and collaboration to enable better decision making for this extremely important step in the overall marketing process.

SAS® Digital Marketing, available next month, delivers e-mail and text messaging capabilities to help marketers easily leverage their most cost effective 1:1 channels.

SAS Digital Marketing makes it easier for marketers to connect with their target audience.

SAS Customer Intelligence – which includes SAS Marketing Automation, SAS Marketing Optimization, SAS Interaction Management, SAS Web Analytics, SAS Digital Marketing, SAS Veridiem Marketing Resource Management and SAS for Marketing Performance Management -- provides the most complete marketing solution available today. SAS Customer Intelligence, built upon the open-standards-based SAS®9 platform, combines extensive best-in-class technology with deep industry and domain expertise to solve the myriad challenges facing chief marketing officers today. The solution can be integrated readily with an organizations current infrastructure to add maximum value to existing investments. SAS Customer Intelligence also integrates with SAS solutions for compliance, risk management, performance management and other vital corporate functions.

Customers using SAS for customer intelligence around the world include The AA, Absa, BarclaysUK Consumer Finance, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, Northern Tool and Equipment, The Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, Harrah’s Entertainment, MLB Advanced Media, U.S. Bank and the World Wildlife Fund.