CARY, NC (Feb. 4, 2008) – SAS, the leader in business intelligence, has been placed in the Leaders Quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 2008[1] by Gartner, Inc.

“SAS customers clearly embrace our vision,” said Jim Davis, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at SAS. “We not only offer a robust platform, but also business-specific applications, such as financial services fraud detection and retail merchandise replenishment, that fully exploit SAS’ power.”

According to Gartner, “Leaders are vendors that are reasonably strong in the breadth and depth of their BI platform capabilities, and can deliver on enterprisewide implementations that support a broad BI strategy. Leaders articulate a business proposition that resonates with buyers, supported by the viability and operational capability to deliver on a global basis."

With award-winning analytics and data integration, SAS® Business Intelligence helps organizations, including 96 of the Fortune 100, understand the past, monitor the present and quickly predict outcomes to meet any performance objective, such as maximizing shareholder value, predicting inventory levels or monitoring defects.

“SAS offers an unmatched breadth of capabilities now deployed at over 43,000 customer sites worldwide,” said Davis. “SAS innovation continues with new, powerful visualization capabilities. Now, customers can view information in highly intuitive, visual formats. Our visualization takes analytics to the next level,” said Davis.

SAS also speeds delivery of business intelligence throughout all levels of organizations. The SAS In-Database initiative, announced with Teradata Corp., will enable businesses to run and optimize key aspects of SAS business intelligence solutions and analytic processes within leading relational database systems. The result? Decision makers will have faster access to results, and better insights.

“SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform is a powerful resource for our teachers,” said Jim Hirsch, Associate Superintendent, Academic and Technology Services, Plano (Texas) Independent School District. “Because SAS is powerful, yet simple to use, teachers don’t guess how to maximize student success; they now analyze individual student strengths and know what curricula will produce results. This greatly increases our effectiveness.”

About the Magic Quadrant
The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2008 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

SAS
SAS è leader nel settore del software e dei servizi di business intelligence. Con oltre 44.000 installazioni in tutto il mondo, aiuta le aziende a migliorare le proprie prestazioni di business e/o incrementare la produttività analizzando enormi quantità di dati. L’utilizzo di SAS, da parte di aziende private e pubbliche, porta a un miglioramento del processo decisionale; relazioni più vantaggiose con clienti e fornitori; aderenza alle normative nazionali e internazionali, progressi nell’ambito del lancio di nuovi prodotti e campagne di marketing. SAS offre tecnologie di data integration, intelligence storage, advanced analytics e business intelligence, il tutto all’interno di una piattaforma completa di enterprise intelligence. Dal 1976, SAS è al servizio dei clienti di tutto il mondo fornendo THE POWER TO KNOW®. SAS è presente in Italia dal 1987 con direzione generale a Milano e uffici a Roma, Torino e Venezia-Mestre e conta 347 dipendenti.

[1] Gartner, Inc. Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 2008, James Richardson, Kurt Schlegel, Bill Hostmann and Neil McMurchy, February 1, 2008