SAS up on Business Intelligence

IT infrastructures are complex. Integrating data and applications is a constant challenge, and so is providing the accurate intelligence demanded in today's fast-paced competitive environment.

George Varghese

One of the foremost names that strike our minds when it comes to Business Intelligence (BI) is SAS. The presentation was delivered on ‘Enterprise Intelligence for Strategy Execution.’ The economic and enterprise trends today have multiple facets such as value, which includes the operational infrastructure vs the focus on data intelligence. Simplicity can be achieved through IT consolidation and through streamlining the people, processes and practices followed at the enterprise. According to the statistics presented by SAS, the information revolution is driving enterprises today. With the total number of blogs approximately 27,651,401, the Internet traffic comes to 300 to 500 petabytes/month.

CIOs today have to balance themselves on multiple parameters and factors such as performance improvement with stringent control over the cost, increase agility, and minimise risk while maximising the value for the enterprises. The number one technology priority today is considered to be BI. Gartner informs that the top three priorities for CIOs today include strengthening their information on the entire value chain, building ideal IT business skills, and finally getting closer and building a value of trust with their customers.

The SAS intelligence solutions offers metadata which includes IT intelligence, financial intelligence, customer intelligence and intelligence based on risk and supply chain. The SAS enterprise intelligence platform forms layer one, while the upper layers are formed by the earlier-mentioned intelligence solution as a whole. This is followed by the third layer known as SAS industry solution. The industry solutions are vertical and sector specific. The converged three layered solution offered is further tied to the enterprise database and support system.

The competitive differentiator for the SAS-offered platform is the business analytics platform which helps enterprises to look forward and not backward. The solution offers an integrated foundation which in turn offers a platform for value growth, and finally, the grid capabilities of the platform which further leverages the power to perform.

Nine design principles for enterprise class implementations defined by SAS
Principles	Features
Usability	Fit to Task interfaces Full Intelligence Value Chain coverage Wizard and Task driven
Manageability	One shared common infrastructure One shared common metadata layer One interface to manage the whole Intelligence Platform
Inter-operability	Largest-ever list of supported industry standards Closes the Loop
Scalability	Scale upwards and outwards Core procedures and servers multi-threaded Paralleled access engines and native data stores Grid Computing