Milano, 16 aprile 2007– Mainframes are established critical components in an organization’s technology infrastructure, housing vast amounts of data that decision makers can use to gain historical hindsight and predict future outcomes. This is why SAS has tightly integrated its Enterprise Intelligence Platform – which includes data integration, intelligence storage, business intelligence and analytics software – with the IBM System z mainframe. In addition, the introduction of sub-capacity pricing – a pricing structure that reflects the industry movement towards server consolidation – provides SAS mainframe customers with a cost-effective way of adding new workloads and new applications to the System z platform.

"As the only combined BI and advanced analytics vendor to run on the mainframe, SAS is clearly committed to helping organizations take advantage of IBM's application and data access solutions for System z," said Claudia Imhoff, President of Intelligent Solutions, Inc. "The BI market is growing, mainframes are established elements of a company's technology foundation and leveraging the two together just makes sense for long-term success. Regardless of size, SAS and IBM have declared that they are in it for the long haul – enabling enterprises to perform sophisticated data analysis and other BI functions while protecting and leveraging their mainframe investments."

As partners for many years, SAS and IBM have continuously worked together to help customers gain the most value from their software and hardware offerings. “SAS has been on the mainframe for 30-plus years, so it only makes sense to ensure that the mainframe can support advances in business intelligence,” said Jim Davis, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of SAS. “With the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform running on IBM System z, enterprises can fully leverage their mainframes to be more agile and strategic with management decisions and feel more confident with their overall information management strategy.”

“As business intelligence becomes more mission-critical to System z customers, IBM wants to ensure that they have access to proven, reliable and comprehensive BI platform technology that can meet current and future business needs,” said Florence Hudson, Vice President of Marketing and Strategy for IBM System z. “We are pleased with the progress that BI vendors, such as SAS, have made in offering our customers the analytics and reporting capabilities they need to cost-effectively and efficiently optimize the value of their operational data on the mainframe.”