Image Change Has Substance

SAS stresses usability and openness

SAS has announced SAS 9.1 as the most usable, open version to date of its analytic software suite. This version adds new "fit to task" business intelligence (BI) and programmatic interfaces, enhanced metadata management, and centralized application and user management to round out SAS's Intelligence Architecture. According to SAS, with 9.1, "SAS executives expect SAS usage within customer sites to grow to 80 percent of employees."

Slated for August release and early 2004 general availability, the new version builds on scalability features such as multithreading and stored procedures incorporated in the restricted-availability 9.0 release and on the version 8 Integrated Object Model and integration interfaces. Version 9.1 marks a significant step in the reworking of the SAS analytic platform that, in later releases, will feature revamped vertical and domain-specific applications and enhanced workflow management.

SAS BI strategists Eleanor Taylor and Rob Stephens state that in delivering the new BI interfaces — SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office, Report Studio, and Web Report Studio — SAS has recognized the BI market's strength and importance and is seeking to bring usable analytic content to the spectrum of knowledge workers.

Taylor and Stephens say the SAS suite's analytic depth differentiates the new SAS components from similar interfaces offered by competing BI vendors: "We view the delivery of our new and enhanced BI tool suite as putting the icing on our already rich data management, analysis, and reporting capabilities."

Wizards help end users create reports from within the BI studio products that use shared stored processes. These stored processes may encapsulate sophisticated statistical models — for instance, for seasonally adjusted sales data — that are unavailable in most competing online analytic process-based BI tools. Taylor and Stephens say that SAS's statistical-processing and data-integration background shows in the dozens of task guides available in the Enterprise Guide interface, which can draw from disparate data sources to create models, reports, and wizards for access via the new BI interfaces.

Two additional SAS 9.1 facilities extend the interoperability strategy launched in earlier versions. New Java modules and components and the Open Metadata Architecture leverage application-server-centric computing architectures and investments in metadata management that are compliant with the Object Management Group's Common Warehouse Metamodel standard and in XML-based information interchange.

SAS 9.1's new user and programmatic interfaces are similar to those offered by competitors, although they're broader in scope than most. Together with new scalability and integration features, the enhanced ease-of-use and openness will solidify the company's analytic platform and its position at existing customer sites. SAS 9.1 metadata-management facilities and the suite's unmatched analytic capabilities differentiate SAS's products from the competition and position SAS to advance in vertical applications and emerging market spaces including business performance management.

— Seth Grimes

Seth Grimes [grimes@altaplana.com] is a principal of Alta Plana Corp., a Washington, D.C.-based consultancy specializing in large-scale analytic computing systems.

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