SAS Touts Its Integration, Storage Tools for BI Projects

Computerworld - SAN FRANCISCO -- SAS Institute Inc. last week unveiled a strategy aimed at persuading companies to use its storage and data-integration tools rather than transactional databases to build business intelligence systems.

Executives at the Cary, N.C.-based company touted its new Enterprise Intelligence Platform - which bundles SAS's multidimensional database and data-integration products with its BI and analytics tools into a package for enterprise users - as the centerpiece of the new strategy.

The goal, officials said during the annual SAS user conference here last week, is to convince customers that the SAS products can replace relational database management systems, which have traditionally been used to store BI data for analysis.

IMS Health Inc., a Fairfield, Conn.-based provider of market intelligence data to pharmaceutical and health care companies, has started a proof-of-concept project to migrate its 66TB data warehouse to the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform, said Christopher Nickum, global practice leader for sales and account management. He declined to identify the company's current warehouse technology.

Nickum hopes that the SAS tools will let external users from pharmaceutical companies perform faster queries using more-recent data than the current system allows. The migration project will take several years, he said.

Christopher McCann, president of 1-800-Flowers.com Inc. in Carle Place, N.Y., said his company needs an enterprise BI platform in its effort to build a system that can use data from transactional systems in real time to support operational decisions like cross-selling. The company is two years into the three-to-five-year project using SAS tools to build an information-delivery framework that will give users departmental views of data, he said.

"We would need this enterprise platform to understand customer behavior across these different brands," McCann said. "I need an analytic capability outside the transactional systems." The retailer currently uses SAS's enterprise BI tools and data mining product.

John Enriquez, vice president of IT at Pearl River Resort in Choctaw, Miss., said he will rely on SAS integration tools in a new project. Pearl River's project will involve pushing real-time data about customer behavior obtained though player-tracking systems to floor supervisors for upselling while a player is in a casino.

The casino operator used SAS integration tools to quickly adjust its marketing plan after Hurricane Katrina to account for a large influx of customers who previously had gone to casinos in hard-hit areas such as Biloxi and Gulfport, Miss., and New Orleans, according to Enriquez.

However, not all SAS users will need the data storage or integration tools. Grant Felsing, decision support manager at lawn mower engine manufacturer Briggs & Stratton Corp., said he doesn't need all of the bundled offerings to produce management reports detailing inventory and sales figures. For example, by analyzing two-thirds of warranty data, he can identify overarching trends, Felsing said.

Keith Gile, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said companies might initially resist a new storage system from SAS for BI, but as IT is tasked by the business with delivering more detailed data for decision support, the response will likely change as they seek systems that can quickly deliver the most data.

The integration offerings in the SAS bundle include a Customer Data Integration Server and an updated Enterprise Data Integration Server that adds data quality tools. SAS officials pledged at the conference that they plan to boost research and development spending on integration technology by 15% in each of the next two years.