SAS Institute Inc. unveiled several new products at its SAS European Users Group International conference in Vienna, Austria, Wednesday, most geared to business and IT users rather than statisticians as the Cary, N.C.-based developer of business intelligence and analytics software continues its push to widen its enterprise reach.
As part of its SAS 9.1 platform release, the company announced plans for a new application called Intelligence Storage, an open platform that comprises SAS OLAP Server, SAS Scalable Performance Data Server, Base SAS Data Storage Engine and SAS Scalable Performance Data Engine.
Intelligence Storage provides relational, OLAP and parallel storage options within an integrated, interoperable metadata framework achieved through the use of the Common Warehouse Model (CWM) standard and is designed to support faster query and load times than traditional relational database management systems, SAS officials said. It will ship to customers in a phased release beginning Oct. 30.
For data integration and management, SAS announced SAS Enterprise ETL Server, part of the 9.1 platform. It contains three products: ETL Studio, for mergingdata from disparate sources; Metadata Server, for managing business, technical and process metadata, including data from outside SAS systems; and SAS Data Quality Solution, for eliminating or reducing inconsistencies in data.
SAS is extending its Marketing Automation application to business users with the 3.1 release announced at the show. The release is targeted to marketing managers and business analysts who don't have a statistical background.
A wizard-driven environment allows users to define customer segments and target audience definitions using the combination of analytic techniques, business rules and visualization, SAS officials said. The application presents descriptive and predictive techniques in a business setting, they said.
It includes a segmentation management application that allows marketers to visually track segments over time to show how certain factors, such as changes in market conditions, life events, or marketing campaigns, affect customer migration through segments.
SAS also announced a new Marketing Optimization to improve the targeting of marketing campaigns. It evaluates multiple direct marketing campaigns simultaneously to show which products or services should be marketed to which customers. It combines mathematical optimization and user-defined constraint modeling to take into account all potential offers across resource constraints, such as budget and call center capacity, to select the best combination of offers for individual customers, increasing marketers' control over campaigns, SAS officials said.
Along the same lines, as previously reported by eWEEK, SAS announced Interaction Management 1.1, for tracking customer behavior and delivering appropriate marketing messages and offers to customers based on that behavior.
In addition, SAS announced Activity-Based Management 6.0, based on the Oros technology it acquired from ABC Technologies Inc. last year. This software provides cost and profitability analysis of customers, products, services or business processes. This version includes advanced business modeling capabilities, a Web-enabled analysis and reporting interface, and data integration tools to retrieve and transform data from any system.
Finally, SAS detailed plans to deliver more solutions to help financial services companies comply with government regulations, following up on its SAS Anti Money Laundering release of last September, which helped companies comply with the USA Patriot Act. The new solutions will focus on fraud, broker surveillance and lending regulations.
Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in eWEEK.
