First in series of SAS®9 Customer Intelligence solutions

10 May 2004 - Following the successful March 30 launch of the SAS®9 Intelligence Platform, SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today announced the general availability of the first customer intelligence software solution based on this platform: SAS® Marketing Automation 4.

"SAS has a history of delivering customer intelligence software that successfully builds off of the considerable strengths of the company's analytic capabilities," said Bob Blumstein, director of research for CRM analytics and marketing applications at IDC Research. "With enhancements that include marketer-friendly campaign development and analytics, SAS Marketing Automation 4 provides organisations with a strong, well-rounded solution that marketing professionals can leverage to maximise value and return from their efforts."

SAS® Customer Intelligence
SAS Marketing Automation is part of the SAS Customer Intelligence suite, a set of integrated solutions that allows companies to easily understand their customers, apply that customer knowledge appropriately and measure the value of sales and marketing activities. Additional solutions that complement marketing automation and extend the marketing process include SAS Interaction Management and SAS Marketing Optimisation, as well as industry-specific marketing applications for banking, insurance, retail and telecommunications. By sharing a common platform for data management and business intelligence, SAS delivers the only comprehensive, end-to-end solution that empowers marketers to better analyse, segment, profile and target customers, resulting in superior marketing campaigns and customer profitability. This allows marketing organisations to optimise their most valuable marketing resource - their skilled professionals - and clearly demonstrate measurable value from their marketing investments.

SAS Marketing Automation 4 - delivering on the promise
On March 5 Forrester Research reviewed the new version of the SAS Marketing Automation solution. The solution was so significant that in their report, "SAS Shakes up Marketing Automation" (see report at: http://www.sas.com/solutions/crm/market.html) Forrester analysts Elana Anderson and Eric Schmitt noted that SAS Marketing Automation 4 and its sister products in the Customer Intelligence family will provide SAS with the potential to disrupt the marketing automation software market and seize a leadership position. ¹

"We promised, and then we delivered. Less than 45 days after releasing the SAS®9 platform, a production solution is available," said Jim Davis, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at SAS. "When developing the SAS®9 platform and the solutions that run on it, we focused on extensibility. With SAS Marketing Automation, for example, our customers do not have to re-engineer their business processes to fit their software. Rather, our solution helps them overcome key business and technical challenges while leveraging existing technology investments. In addition to extensibility, we also designed SAS Marketing Automation to address the key areas of managing marketing processes, empowering marketers and integrating across the enterprise."

Managing the Marketing Process
For years, organisations worldwide have grappled with the challenge of finding a marketing automation solution that offers the appropriate capabilities for different types of users. In response to this need, SAS leveraged its considerable resources to collect thousands of requirements and to document best practices. SAS Marketing Automation 4 reflects SAS' detailed understanding of the campaign management business process. This new version also introduces new user interfaces specific to various marketing roles to better meet the needs of all stakeholders in the organisation from analytic modelers to campaign managers to marketing executives.

"SAS sent both software engineers and psychologists versed in human factors design to visit customer sites, shadow marketers and study the business process of implementing a campaign from start to finish," said Davis. "From these observations, SAS undertook an extensive user interface overhaul. Many different versions of the user interface were tested by marketers at Fortune 1000 companies until SAS was satisfied that all stakeholders in the process, from the IT department to the campaign manager, could accomplish any task intuitively."

In addition, an enterprise-class infrastructure and embedded analytics empower business users to themselves leverage SAS' renowned sophisticated analytics to create targeted customer intelligence, thereby freeing the true analytic specialists to focus their time on unearthing the patterns, trends and predictions that create a sustainable competitive edge.

Empowering marketers
In many companies there is friction between the marketing and information technology (IT) departments. Marketers count on IT to deliver data for creating customer insight and supporting sensible business decisions. If this takes too long or becomes too difficult, both marketing and IT suffer. The architecture of SAS Marketing Automation 4 is designed to reduce the time and resources required for IT to deliver this vital information to marketing.

Another key enhancement of SAS Marketing Automation is that organisations now benefit from SAS' leading database-marketing capabilities, built into the open SAS Intelligence Platform. This provides interoperability with existing infrastructures, other SAS solutions and other operational platforms. Unlike other offerings on the market, SAS' open system lets organisations fine-tune the analytic engine to include their own insights about their customer behaviors, incorporate internal best practices and leverage existing IT investments, such as data warehouses and CRM systems. In addition, the new data management capabilities include easier access to data as well as the ability to define available data in business terms so that marketers can more easily accomplish their tasks without burdening the IT department.

This key differentiator has been acknowledged by the other key industry providers. "Companies in many industries, including financial services, are looking for efficient and effective ways to understand their customers better," said Bryan Foss, customer solutions insight executive at IBM. "SAS is a technology leader in helping financial institutions and other companies to learn more about the needs of their customers. IBM helps clients to benefit from applying that knowledge. The combination of SAS' and IBM's industry technology, industry services and intellectual property accelerates marketing transformation and helps enterprises better manage their customer experiences."

Coordination and compliance
Customer privacy legislation brings with it a whole new set of challenges, including the need to comply with legislative and regulatory requirements. SAS Marketing Automation supports this process by providing central control over metadata, business rules and data management logic. By having a single location to assign roles to employees for access to data, security measures can be implemented more easily. Changes to global contact rules can be administered from a single point of entry and will be available globally to all business users and marketers. This simplified process creates an audit trail across the enterprise.

To further ease legislative adherence, SAS Marketing Automation enables chief privacy officers to create and enforce common compliance rules across campaign processes managed by individual campaign managers. The SAS solution also consolidates an overview of all campaigns to ensure that all campaign activities are done correctly and in the right sequence to comply with corporate marketing processes.

SAS Marketing Automation and SAS Risk Dimensions®, announced on April 27th, are the first of seven software solutions this year that will take advantage of the new SAS®9 Intelligence Platform. They will be followed by offerings for performance management, financial management, activity based management, supplier relationship management and IT management. SAS will deliver all its existing solutions on the SAS®9 platform.

The announcement of SAS Marketing Automation 4 came at the 29th annual SAS User Group International (SUGI) conference. More than 3,000 SAS users from around the world attended this year's SUGI in Montreal.

About SAS
SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 40,000 sites - including 96 of the top 100 of the 2003 Fortune Global 500 - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organisations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know^®.

¹ "Source: Forrester Research, Inc."

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