SAS expands business intelligence

SAS9

SAS Institute Inc. officials recently released a new application platform and analytic software that is designed to help officials in federal agencies and enterprises solve business problems faster.

SAS9 connects all of the company's applications, allowing them to work together and communicate with other data sources and applications, according to Jeff Babcock, vice president of the company's public sector.

With SAS9, the Cary, N.C.-based company is moving beyond traditional business intelligence software, which focuses on querying and reporting, SAS officials said. Instead, the new SAS Intelligence Platform, a set of integrated software for data integration, business reporting and analytics, has a higher level of predictive capabilities embedded in the software, said Jennifer Hill, the company's director of public-sector market strategy.

New Java interfaces in the company's SAS Enterprise Miner and SAS Text Miner enable business users to analyze structured and unstructured information more easily.

Using Enterprise Miner, business and information technology analysts can extract knowledge from vast data stores and then create results that can be integrated with operational systems. The software can be used for myriad tasks, from supporting financial decisions to detecting fraud and money laundering, SAS officials said.

Text Miner extracts data from documents and can be used for tasks ranging from analyzing information from call centers or employee surveys to analyzing competitors.

Linda Atkinson, a statistician in the Agriculture Department's Economic Research Service, said SAS9 would boost the performance of the company's data-mining tools that service officials already use.

The analytic software will "run faster with large datasets," and help statisticians generate better statistical graphs, she said.

Other essential components of the Intelligence Platform include the SAS Enterprise ETL Server, which integrates data into a common repository; SAS Enterprise Business Intelligence Server, for querying and reporting; and intelligence storage and Web portal capabilities.