CARY, NC (July 18, 2006) – SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today announced that the SAS® Enterprise Intelligence Platform has been optimized to support the new Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® 2 processors (formerly codenamed Montecito). This optimization will significantly improve the performance of SAS’ leading business intelligence software running on Intel Itanium 2-based systems.

The new Dual-core Intel Itanium-2 processors were designed to handle the compute-intensiveness of business analytics, making it an ideal platform for SAS Enterprise Business Intelligence. “SAS®9 leverages the breakthrough capabilities of the new dual-core Intel Itanium 2 processor to deliver the performance and reliability needed to serve our business intelligence customers,” said Keith Collins, Chief Technology Officer at SAS. “A solution based on SAS®9 and the dual-core Intel Itanium 2-based servers brings a comprehensive BI platform to the enterprise, maximizing resources for greater flexibility and lowering operational costs to help drive better decisions faster throughout an organization.”

SAS customers using Intel Itanium 2 processors can take full advantage of 64-bit business analytic applications, such as data mining. Leading analyst firm IDC has stated “Increasingly, organizations are relying on Itanium to address some of the most critical needs of their business.”* The collaboration between SAS and Intel gives businesses a competitive edge by providing solutions that help them make quick and accurate decisions based on efficiently analyzing the vast amounts of data available.

“Intel and SAS continue to work closely together to deliver scalable business intelligence solutions on Intel-based platforms to advance the way people use information. We do this by helping customers realize increased performance and reliability in SAS applications running on the new dual-core Intel Itanium® 2 series 9000 processor,” said Kirk Skaugen, Vice President Digital Enterprise Group, Intel Corporation. “We will also continue joint optimization efforts on the latest Intel platforms, which include innovative features like dual-core, multi-core, and virtualization designed specifically to address enterprise-scale IT requirements.”

* Source: IDC white paper sponsored by HP, “End-Users Feedback: Transform IT and Increase Business Performance Through Itanium-based Standardization,” August 2005 (Nathaniel Martinez and Thomas Meyer)