Financial Watch:

SAS for CRM Increases Travelocity.com Booking Results

Travelocity.com, most popular travel site on the Web, realized a 200 percent increase in its response rate to a preferred membership campaign after implementing SAS Solutions for Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

SAS is a leader in business intelligence and the only vendor to provide a complete solution for analytical CRM.

"We used SAS to segment and target the customers to receive Travelocity Preferred invitations, offering members a bundled suite of benefits," said Chris Warwick, director of Travelocity.com relationship marketing. "We experienced twice our normal lift rate in response to that e-mail campaign and, to date, have enrolled over 50,000 members in the club."

Travelocity.com uses SAS to better understand and communicate with its online customers. SAS' analytical software aggregates and analyzes customer data from multiple sources to give marketers a 360-degree view of customers. Using SAS for segmentation and predictive analysis of their customer database, Travelocity.com decision makers fine-tune marketing campaigns and target offers in ways that improve booking response rates and, thus, increase sales revenue.

"Business leaders such as Travelocity.com use SAS to quickly transform customer data into knowledge that they can act on to create a truly sustainable competitive advantage," said Jim Davis, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at SAS. "Analytical CRM from SAS omits the need for guesswork, drives strategic decision making, and supports company growth."

Economic forces have threatened the travel industry during the past six months. But Travelocity.com fought back using analytics to focus marketing investments where it could optimize payback. Results were almost immediate -- the company experienced unprecedented ROI shortly after implementing SAS in September 2001.

"SAS analytics are sophisticated and flexible," Warwick said. "SAS turns transactional data into intelligence that helps us to match offers to our customers' distinct seasonal and regional travel preferences. We're counting on SAS analytics to also power our customer reactivation efforts. Customer intelligence is the key to our company's success, so everyone -- from our customer service professionals to our senior executives -- backs this CRM initiative 100 percent."

The announcement of Travelocity achieving a 200 percent increase in its response rate to a preferred membership campaign came at the SAS Users Group International (SUGI) 27 conference in Orlando, Fla., attended by more than 3,500 SAS customers from around the world.

About Travelocity

Travelocity.com, a database-driven travel marketing and transaction company, provides Internet and wireless reservations information for more than 700 airlines, 55,000 hotels and 50 car rental companies. In addition, Travelocity.com offers more than 6,500 vacation packages, tour and cruise departures and a vast database of destination and interest information. Travelocity.com employs more than 1,000 customer service professionals, has sold more than 20 million airline tickets and has registered more than 33 million members.

Travelocity.com is wholly owned by Sabre Holdings Corporation, a leading provider of technology and marketing services for the travel industry. Additional information about Travelocity.com can be found on the Web at www.travelocity.com.

About SAS

SAS is a market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 38,000 sites -- including 99 of the top 100 businesses on the Fortune 500 -- to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organizations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For 25 years, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know. Visit us at www.sas.com.

Contact SAS Institute Inc, Cary, N.C. Kris Balic, 919-531-0624, krisbalic@sas.com.

State of Tennessee Employs MicroStrategy BI

MicroStrategy Incorporated, a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence software, announced that the State of Tennessee is using the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform to anchor its financial data access data warehouse. With MicroStrategy, decision-makers in more than 60 statewide agencies, including the Departments of Human Services, Mental Health and Education, are able to more effectively track revenues and expenditures, and make more informed decisions that can reduce costs and increase revenues.

"With the MicroStrategy platform, end users are able to access financial data via the Web, which is proving to be the most valuable service the State of Tennessee has provided to its statewide agencies in the last decade," said Sherrie Benn, data warehouse consultant at the State of Tennessee. "More than just a report writer, the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform offers analytical capabilities far beyond what has been available."

"It is anticipated that the use of MicroStrategy software will help the State of Tennessee better manage financial information, leading to efficiencies that will save both time and money," added Jan Sylvis, chief of accounts at the State of Tennessee. "Ultimately, we expect to see improved strategic planning, activity-based costing and activity-based management in support of State programs."

MicroStrategy is providing the State of Tennessee's end users with comparative and exception reporting, more efficient and timely data analysis, enhanced financial data analysis, summary level reporting for management, and consistent interpretation of financial data definitions and business rules. In the future, the State of Tennessee will expand the reach of its business intelligence initiatives to support 800 end users and develop additional BI applications to include budgetary, grants, projects, contract and vendor financials, as well as payroll analyses.

About MicroStrategy Incorporated

Leadership in a Critical Market: Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a worldwide leader in the increasingly critical business intelligence software market. Large and small companies alike are harnessing MicroStrategy's business intelligence software to gain vital insights from their data to help them proactively enhance cost-efficiency, productivity and customer relations and optimize revenue-generating strategies. MicroStrategy's business intelligence platform offers exceptional capabilities that provide organizations -- in virtually all facets of their operations -- with user- friendly solutions to their data query, reporting, and advanced analytical needs, and distributes valuable insight on this data to users via Web, wireless, and voice.

Enterprise-Class Business Intelligence: MicroStrategy 7i is a truly integrated, enterprise-class, Web-based business intelligence platform. With MicroStrategy 7i, enterprises can now standardize on one business intelligence platform and deploy high-value business intelligence enterprise-wide. MicroStrategy 7i's configurable query, reporting, and OLAP Web interface is designed to support all users, from casual report viewers to power analysts.

Diverse Customer Base: MicroStrategy's customer base cuts across industry and sector lines, with over 1,500 enterprise-class customers, including Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse, AT&T Wireless Group, Wachovia and GlaxoSmithKline. MicroStrategy also has relationships with over 400 systems integrators and application development and platform partners, including IBM, PeopleSoft, Compaq, and JD Edwards.

For more information on the company, or to purchase or demo MicroStrategy's software, please visit MicroStrategy's Web site at www.microstrategy.com.

Contact MicroStrategy Incorporated, Alka Nayyar, 703-847-4897, anayyar@microstrategy.com.