SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform

The SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform is a multiple component platform that serves as the basis for the vendor's targeted business and turnkey vertical market offerings. The platform provides the enterprise with information aggregation and analysis capabilities in a variety of manners; focused within the key areas of data integration and ETL, storage, business intelligence, and analytics.

The foundation of the platform's data integration and ETL capabilities are provided by the SAS Enterprise ETL Server, which features an interactive ETL environment with drag and drop transformation wizards. Features include a library of prepackaged data and analytical transformations, integrated remote connectivity processing to "any platform and/or against any database natively," parallel processing for sorting and aggregations, integrated change management, tracking, and auditing, integrated and customizable data cleansing routines, workflow scheduling, and load balancing.

Via the vendor's "Intelligence Storage" platform, data collected via the ETL process can be centrally stored for further analysis and reporting capabilities. Intelligence Storage is a relational storage option; a client-server DB management system featuring multi-threading and multi-I/O support. The vendor notes their storage platform is especially designed "...to support OLAP processing where the application profile requires fast access to summarized information." A technology suite facilitates interoperability between SAS and third party systems.

Business Intelligence features of the platform are supplied primarily via the SAS Enterprise BI Server. Featuring Web and desktop-based reporting interfaces, the BI Server features multiple, self-service query interfaces; OLAP data storage and a Web-based data exploration interface for the examination of data summaries; multiple graphical data presentation options; integration with MS Office; open access to integrated metadata; and a centralized management framework.

Finally, the Analytics Suite encompasses multiple software components targeted to specific data analysis tasks. Among the current analytics component offerings:

- SAS/STAT software, with ready-to-use procedures for statistical analysis including analysis of variance, regression, categorical data analysis, multivariate analysis, survival analysis, psychometric analysis, cluster analysis, and nonparametric analysis.

- SAS/INSIGHT, a visual analysis tool featuring interactive graphs

- SAS/IML, a matrix programming language for programmers, statisticians, and researchers; facilitating specialized analyses and exploration

- SAS/IML Workshop is a graphical user interface and extension of SAS/IML

- SAS/LAB software offers guided (prompt-driven) data analysis for engineering and research applications

- Enterprise Guide, a project-oriented Windows application

- SAS/QC software provides tools for statistical quality improvement, including tools for statistical quality control and an interface for the design of experiments

- SAS/ETS software includes tools for econometrics and time series analysis

- SAS/OR software provides a range of optimization methods

The SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform is available now. Contact the SAS Institute for further information.