SAS Supports Consolidated Meta Data Standard

SAS Institute, a market leader in integrated data warehousing, decision support and intelligent solutions for e-business, announced its support for the consolidation of meta data standards for the data warehousing and business intelligence community.

Earlier, the Object Management Group (OMG) and Meta Data Coalition (MDC) announced that they will merge efforts to converge on a single standard, incorporating the best of OMG's Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM) and MDC's Open Information Model (OIM).

"Meta data is a key enabler for the success of e-intelligence and application of data warehousing, OLAP and business intelligence," said Keith Collins, senior vice president of R&D and chief technology officer for SAS.

The OMG's and MDC's respective memberships have invested significant energy and expertise into developing meta data standards that can be applied across all computing environments. The single standard that results from merging efforts will make it easier to manage and process the vast amounts of metadata that are associated with today's business and e-commerce transactions. Meta data is the information that surrounds the data resources in an organization and explains the "where, how and why" about the data. Meta data makes it possible for organizations to manage their data effectively and to analyze it for business intelligence, data mining, e-commerce and other applications. Without a common meta data standard, it is nearly impossible for software vendors to create applications that can read and analyze customer data.

SAS solutions rely on metadata for its core technologies that help companies turn their raw data -- including the huge volumes from e-business and e-commerce applications -- into actionable knowledge for decision making. The SAS Solution for e-Intelligence leverages SAS's core competencies in data warehousing, data mining, OLAP and other areas. The solution helps improve online customer loyalty by building one-to-one relationships with customers. The SAS Solution for e-Intelligence enables companies to understand customer behavior and predict future needs in order to deliver the products and services to meet those needs.

Meta data refers not only to the set of definitions of the data in the warehouse, such as products, parts, prices, but also to its formats, processing, transformations, and routing from origin to warehouse: everything except the data elements themselves in the data warehouse. Meta data management, including reconciliation of inconsistent metadata when data from different sources are merged, is one of the biggest problems facing enterprises working with data warehousing today. The definition and support of a standard for meta data exchange will go a long way towards allowing companies to build business intelligence solutions cost-effectively.

About SAS

SAS is a world leader in e-intelligence software and services, enabling its customers to turn raw data - including the vast quantity generated by e-business - into usable knowledge. Software from SAS, one of the world's largest privately held software companies, is used at more than 33,000 business, government and university sites in 110 countries. SAS' 1999 revenues totaled $1.02 billion. Please visit SAS on the Web at www.sas.com.

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