San Francisco, 28 Marzo 2006 – At the 31st annual SAS® Users Group International (SUGI) conference in San Francisco, SAS honored five of its partners at an awards ceremony and reception held last night at the San Francisco Marriott. The awards recognize companies that go above and beyond in providing business intelligence sales, service and support for SAS customers.

“The SAS Alliance program – including hardware and software providers, systems integrators, consultants, and resellers – continues to offer a strong network of partnerships that give organizations access to unparalleled domain, industry and technology expertise,” said Don McDougall, vice president of the SAS Customer Solutions & Alliance Division. “Working closely with our partners combines their knowledge of industry and solution domain expertise with the breadth and depth of SAS technology and solutions, providing our joint customers with the most comprehensive and successful business intelligence solutions available.”

Inaugural Partner of the Year Awards

For the first time, SAS Americas presented two partners with its highest awards: Consulting Partner of the Year and Technology Partner of the Year. Accenture received the Consulting Partner of the Year Award for generating the most overall revenues for SAS within this category due to its extensive industry and domain knowledge, thereby raising SAS’ visibility as a BI market leader. HP earned the Technology Partner of the Year Award for providing dedicated sales, marketing and engineering teams that support of SAS’ continued growth within life sciences, financial services and other industries. “HP and Accenture made many significant contributions in 2005 to ensure the success of SAS and our mutual clients, and we are pleased to have the opportunity to recognize them with this award,” said McDougall.

Innovator Award

Also for the first time this year, SAS presented its Innovator Award to Gold Alliance partner, Zencos Consulting LLC, for helping advance the SAS partner ecosystem and for its involvement in SAS product planning. Zencos worked closely with SAS to foster innovation throughout SAS software and played a key role in supporting SAS’ BI initiatives.

Field Choice and Services Excellence Awards

For the third year in a row, Qualex Consulting Services received the SAS Field Choice Award for its outstanding support on sales engagements. Integral in the Pearl River Resort account, Qualex’s long history and close involvement with SAS enabled Qualex to identify other opportunities within the resort that would benefit from SAS software, specifically SAS Financial Management. The Services Excellence Award went to ThotWave Technologies for its active support of numerous health and life sciences sales engagements, providing high quality services when installing and configuring SAS business intelligence software.

Candidates for these awards are nominated by members of the SAS sales staff to recognize outstanding partner sales activities over the past year. “Close collaboration with our partners enables us to go beyond customers’ expectations to help them solve business issues,” said Kelly Ross, vice president of U.S. Commercial Sales at SAS. “You can’t put a price on the value of the relationships between the SAS sales force and our partners as far as market knowledge, vision, integrity and the resulting customer satisfaction. SUGI is a great opportunity to highlight those partners that have made a difference with our end users. We are thankful for all their hard work and support.”