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SAS Delivers Near Real-Time ETL Functionality

SAS, a leader in business intelligence, has announced that adapters to market-leading message-queuing platforms have delivered SAS data collection, transformation and storage functionality in near-real time within existing IT environments.

"IT shops, faced with declining budgets and staff, and tremendous increases in data volumes and compute power, demand that new software quickly integrate into their existing operational infrastructure," said Keith Collins, senior vice president and Chief Technology Officer, SAS. "In response, SAS is providing near real-time data warehousing and significant new integration capability through adapters to IBM Websphere MQ, Microsoft MQ and TIBCO TIB/Rendezvous message queuing products."

Support for message queuing platforms enables SAS software's information delivery capabilities to be leveraged within various enterprise scenarios, including:

• Near real-time operational data collection, transformation and storage
• Application integration
• Asynchronous/mobile synchronization
• Event notification

Application messaging architectures provide two key benefits: 1) They allow interoperability among loosely coupled, asynchronous and disconnected applications so applications are guaranteed fulfillment of requests for service or event delivery. 2) Message queuing platforms also greatly benefit environments that are heterogeneous in nature, as are most IT shops, hence the popularity. Access to these message queues is provided through the Common Messaging Interface in SAS Integration Technologies. The Common Messaging Interfaces include messaging functions that are common to IBM Websphere MQ, Microsoft MQ and TIBCO TIB/Rendezvous.

SAS integrates with these market-leading message queuing products through adapters provided in its SAS Integration Technologies product. IT managers face the challenge of creating an IT platform that provides support for a wide breadth of software products and solutions to facilitate getting the right information to the right people, at the right time so they can make informed decisions. At the same time IT managers live in a world of distributed systems and resources where they are often frustrated by the need to deliver information in a timely manner throughout the enterprise using computers and software systems that do not, or cannot, easily communicate with each other. This incompatibility often causes new systems to be put in place and IT departments have to spend a great amount of time on workforce retraining to use the new software. SAS Integration Technologies provide an IT platform, based on industry standards, that lays the foundation for standardized communications and effective information distribution to more efficiently address these issues.

As a current customer example, a large banking and finance company is optimizing SAS' near real-time ETL offering. This company targets high-risk customers who are profitable and have high lifetime value through cross- and up-selling potential. To identify optimal sales opportunities and maximize customer profitability, the organization implemented an innovative CRM solution that combines interactive voice response, message queuing and SAS near real-time ETL technology. The solution triggers the delivery of customer-specific and relevant marketing intelligence to front line agents in less than a second, consequently reducing the workload for the agents and enhancing customer relationships and brand loyalty.

SAS is the only vendor of business intelligence software able to provide technology and solutions that deliver proven value across the whole process of generating intelligence -- which SAS calls the Intelligence Value Chain. From data to strategic intelligence, SAS delivers benefits throughout the entire intelligence creation process, which includes planning, ETL, storage, analytics, and BI query and reporting.

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 98 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 more than 25 years, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know.

Contact: Karen Whichard, Media Relations, 919-531-0284, e-mail Karen.Whichard@sas.com.