SAS Upgrade Offers New Tools for IT

Computerworld - CARY, N.C. -- IT managers and SAS users don't always see eye to eye. But SAS Institute Inc. last week released an upgrade of its data analysis software that includes new features designed to make it easier for IT departments to set up and centrally manage data marts for users of the tools.
The SAS 9 software became available almost exactly a year to the day from when the company detailed its plans for the upgrade, saying then that the new version would be ready by the end of 2003 . SAS 9 also adds other enhancements, such as multithreading support to boost performance and less-complex user interfaces aimed at making the software more accessible to users who aren't statisticians or data mining experts.
Catalina Marketing Corp., a marketing services company in St. Petersburg, Fla., has had small groups of SAS users for 10 years or so. But Catalina increased its commitment to SAS about 15 months ago and hopes to use the software to consolidate a large portion of the business intelligence point products that are now used within the company, said Kelly Carrigan, its senior director of database architecture.
"SAS lets you consolidate, but it requires that IT folks and the advanced users work together," he said. "There has to be mutual respect for each other's contributions."
To foster cooperation and coordination between IT and the data analysts and data mining specialists who currently use the SAS tools, Catalina set up an internal SAS user group that meets biweekly. The company also created an intranet site with a set of FAQs about the SAS applications and ran a "SAS education boot camp" for a group of about 20 IT staffers and end users, Carrigan said. The boot camp involved 10 days of training classes over a three-month period, with help from a SAS instructor, he added.
For IT managers, the upgrade provides improved data cleansing tools and a common metadata repository for ensuring that information is consistent across different systems. The new Web-based user interfaces also let IT departments support the software in thin-client mode, SAS said.
In the past, SAS was often adopted by power users "who wanted access to data and often circumvented IT" to get at the information they needed, said Wayne Eckerson, an analyst at The Data Warehousing Institute in Seattle. But SAS 9 looks to be a more IT-friendly offering, Eckerson said.
Michael DeMatteo, manager of market intelligence and planning at KeySpan Corp. in Brooklyn, N.Y., said his group of SAS users is