CLOUD

CARY, NC -- SAS, the leader in business intelligence, has signed a global licensing agreement with pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN) for software to help AstraZeneca meet its strategic goals. The agreement is worth $9 million over three years. "We will use SAS enterprise intelligence in business projects that contribute toward two of our key shareholder value goals," says Johnson Idesoh, head of development information systems at AstraZeneca. "Adding SAS will help us become a faster and more efficient organization. Additionally, SAS allows us to grow through new product development. We see this agreement as a first step in building a strategic relationship between our two companies." AstraZeneca currently uses SAS(R) software in 24 countries, primarily for clinical research and development. The new license will allow AstraZeneca to use the software for drug portfolio management, or the identification of compounds that are most likely to become marketable drugs. AstraZeneca also plans to use SAS for strategic performance management as well as sales and marketing. "SAS has both the completeness of solution-set and the coherence of vision to help us meet our need for generating and sharing intelligence across the entire organization, bridging the divides between different sources of data, different departments and different geographies," says Idesoh. "The use of SAS gives us the ability to access data from a variety of sources, analyze it and draw conclusions within one environment. This power is critical in improving our efficiency. On a number of drug projects we rapidly consolidate information from as many as 24 different countries within a few hours using SAS. "We also see opportunities to use technologies like data mining in the identification of promising new medicines," he added. "SAS' ability to meet a diverse range of intelligence needs, ranging from our core business of drug discovery and development, to more generalized business applications, was a definitive criterion in our decision to build a strategic relationship between our two companies." "AstraZeneca is one of a number of forward-looking corporations that recognize that an integrated approach to generating and sharing intelligence throughout the organization can have a direct and positive impact on that organization's ability to meet its promises to shareholders," said Art Cooke, president of SAS International.