Four Reasons Customers Select Enhanced SAS® Analytics

November 16, 2011

Tools

10,000 new ways organizations save time and money, identify issues and opportunities

CARY, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- More than 7,000 customers ordered the new version of SAS since its July release. Health care organizations improving how they diagnose and treat diseases, retailers tailoring and automating campaigns, hoteliers finding ways to boost guest satisfaction, and insurance companies preventing fraud all reacted enthusiastically. Thousands of new features from the leader in business analytics improve how organizations tackle massive volumes of structured and unstructured data, enabling better and faster decisions. As evidence of its popularity, SAS continued to lead the analytics software industry with worldwide analytics revenue growing 13 percent over the same period last year.

“SAS 9.3 represents more than 10,000 individual improvements inspired by customer feedback,” said Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Keith Collins. “Its capabilities, performance and stability honor our customers’ investments in SAS.”

Organizations want answers fast, with automated processes and accuracy. They use SAS to aggregate, analyze and process large volumes of data and analytic models to support critical decisions that must be made in hours, minutes or seconds. The most popular reasons organizations upgrade to SAS 9.3 are:

Scalability: SAS’ new components analyze greater amounts of data, so customers can maximize hardware and database investments.

"With each new release, SAS improves scalability and performance," said Dan Vesset, Program Vice President of Business Analytics Solutions at IDC. "That’s important in and of itself. Eventually, that leads to more accuracy and better assessment of risk."

Performance: Increased scalability enables organizations to analyze more information and answer more complex questions.

“Computational speed is huge,” said Jim Goodnight, SAS CEO. “When code runs in five minutes instead of five days, you use the time to solve business problems. Things are possible now that were out of reach before high-performance computing."

Productivity: SAS’ new capabilities streamline analysis, freeing staff to tackle additional projects. SAS Analytics, recognized by analysts and customers as superior, push the boundaries on problem solving with new algorithms and functionality.

“We’re excited about the new options in SAS^® Enterprise Miner™ and its component SAS Rapid Predictive Modeler,” said Larry Seligman, Director of BI and Analytics, Intercontinental Hotels Group. “SAS helps us optimize marketing spend and improve brand performance.”

Broader enablement: New features incorporate nontraditional data sources and formats into analyses and workflows, allowing users to collaborate to solve bigger, more complex issues.

Customers excel using SAS^® Analytics

SAS 9.3, available at no cost for existing customers, is powering decisions worldwide. US adopters include J.M. Smucker Co., Honda of America Mfg. Inc., Mitsubishi Motors North America, Kimberly-Clark, and Six Continents Hotels. More than 1,000 software users attended the recent Analytics 2011 conference exploring data mining, text analytics, forecasting, optimization, visualization and predictive modeling techniques and advances.

“SAS 9.3 adds algorithms to SAS’ many analytical products that solve a large, diverse set of problems,” said Radhika Kulkarni, Vice President of Advanced Analytics. “The breadth and depth of the analytics in SAS 9.3 enable customers to tackle even the most complex business problems with confidence.”

SAS enhancements are extensive. One new procedure in the SAS Predictive Analytics Suite models the size of losses or insurance claims, such as the magnitude of natural-disaster damage. Another analyzes the risk of large losses for operational risk management processes. A new survival data mining application in SAS Enterprise Miner predicts when – not just if – an event will happen. Enhancements to SAS Text Analytics let organizations better access and understand information buried in large text and document collections. SAS Forecasting increases accuracy of models, offering ensemble models that combine the best of individual models to help managers better predict behavior and improve planning. Always innovating, this year SAS High-Performance Analytics rounds out the SAS High-Performance Computing family of in-database analytics and grid computing offerings to speed decision making.

About SAS

SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions, SAS helps customers at more than 50,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW^®. SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright © 2011 SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.