Milano, 7 settembre 2006 – SAS today announced that it will expand its relationship with HP to further develop, market and sell the SAS® Enterprise Intelligence Platform on HP Integrity servers. The agreement includes pre-sales support, project sizings, architecture assessments and additional resources dedicated to co-marketing and sales engagement activities. SAS has provided ongoing support for HP Integrity servers for more than two years.

Building on a 25-year relationship, the agreement provides a deeper integration between SAS’ business intelligence software and HP Integrity servers running HP-UX 11i. The two companies will develop and market new vertical offerings to help customers integrate business processes across the enterprise and gain greater insight into business performance.

“With this announcement, we are demonstrating SAS’ increasing commitment to the HP Integrity family of servers as an optimal platform for an enterprise’s most demanding workload,” said Miles Mahoney, Vice President of SAS Strategic Alliances and Channels. “Customers can feel confident in the technology decisions they are making, knowing the SAS and HP combination delivers an efficient buying and implementation experience, as well as the support needed to ensure their mission-critical business applications perform at the high levels necessary to achieve corporate strategic goals.”

Customers in a variety of industries, including financial services, pharmaceutical/life sciences and the public sector, have benefited from the companies’ relationship because SAS’ software has been optimized for greater performance on HP Integrity servers. This optimization is expected to continue for new releases and future updates to ensure a smoother implementation process and enable users to leverage their existing hardware and software investments more effectively.

“For more than 25 years, HP and SAS have worked together to provide server and application tuning and optimization for customers’ most demanding business intelligence workloads,” said Don Jenkins, vice president of marketing, Business Critical Servers, HP. “Today’s announcement will help meet the increasing demand for our combined solutions and services, which offer customers a better return on their IT investment and a clear path to enterprise business intelligence success.”