SAS Hosts First Gathering of DW Industry Experts

SAS Institute, a market leader in integrated data warehousing, decision support and e-Intelligence solutions, announced the success of the first SAS Data Warehousing Industry Expert symposium.

The attendees, all well-known data warehousing industry authors, instructors, speakers and thought leaders, included Dr. Claudia Imhoff and Joyce Norris-Montanari of Braun Consulting, Herb Edelstein of Two Crows Corporation, John Ladley of Knowledge InterSpace and Jill Dyche of Baseline Consulting.

"Data warehousing experts agree that data access, data management and data exploitation are essential steps to all e-business, CRM, data mining and decision support activities," said Bill Prentice, SAS North America data warehousing program manager. "Experts also often differ in their approach to constructing this environment. The purpose of this symposium was to develop a two-way communication path with industry thought leaders regarding SAS' complete information delivery architecture and wide range of metadatasupported business solutions. This meeting was the first of what we hope to be many meetings where we welcome data warehousing experts interacting with our people and software on a one-to-one basis."

What the Experts Are Saying

"The choice of a data architecture is key," said Herb Edelstein, president of Two Crows Corporation. "SAS has shown us a solid information delivery architecture and metadata-supported industry solutions. I have a greater understanding of the breadth and depth of SAS' product line."

According to John Ladley, president of Knowledge InterSpace, "SAS is a leader in data warehousing architecture and metadata-supported business intelligence through its broad spectrum of business intelligence solutions."

"The SAS product set will definitely create a stir in the industry," said Joyce Norris-Montanari, vice president Braun Consulting Inc.

"I knew about SAS' traditional strengths in statistical analysis and data mining," said Jill Dyche, Partner of Baseline Consulting Group and author of the book e-Data. "But I was glad to get up to speed on SAS' new customer relationship management capabilities. They have clearly evolved into a business solutions company."

"Our proven data warehousing tools and methodologies not only enable our customers to build custom information delivery and data warehousing solutions, but have also allowed us to build intelligent solutions that solve real business problems for our customers," said Prentice. "Our customer relationship management and supplier relationship management solutions, and our e-Warehousing environments demonstrate how SAS solutions adds business value for our customers. Building the data warehouse is only the beginning of the process. Delivering useful business information to your decision makers requires a robust information delivery architecture and tools that work together, day in and day out - ones that integrate and are easily maintained. Success in solving customers' business problems has made SAS a billion dollar company today."

About SAS

SAS Institute, one of the world's largest privately held software companies, is a leader in decision support and data warehousing, providing integrated enterprise information-delivery and e-business solutions. Founded in 1976, SAS markets packaged business solutions for vertical industry and departmental applications, as well as an integrated suite of software tools and consulting services. These allow companies to transform the wide variety of data within their organizations into information that business users and researchers need to make better decisions. SAS software and services are used at more than 33,000 business, government, and university sites in over 110 countries. SAS' 1999 revenues totaled $1.02 billion. Please visit SAS' Web site: www.sas.com.

Contact SAS Institute, Wally Maczka or Pamela Meek, 919-677-8000 x5350, Wally.Maczka@sas.com.