OIL & GAS

The recent spate of corporate consolidations has led many businesses to seek more efficient and effective ways of retrieving data from multiple locations to populate their data warehouses. SAS, a leading business intelligence vendor, has earned a reputation for making it easy for customers to access data from virtually any database or platform, including enterprise applications. From SAP to Siebel to Oracle to PeopleSoft, users can pull the data they need to gain a single version of the truth so decision makers can lead with confidence. No other company offers customers this level of access. In fact, an IDC report published in August 2003 report titled, "Worldwide Data Warehousing Tools Forecast and Analysis, 2003-2007,"(a) noted that SAS continues to lead in the data warehouse access tools market. IDC defines data warehouse access tools as those that enable end users to access and analyze information stored in the data warehouse. "SAS has not only one of the broadest portfolios of business analytics software, but importantly holds market leadership positions in several segments of the market including data warehouse access," said Dan Vesset, research manager for IDC. "The breadth of tools and applications provided by SAS has the potential to enable organizations to decrease the complexity of software integration and ongoing maintenance costs." "We help our customers protect and fully exploit corporate intellectual assets," said Tho Nguyen, manager of data integration strategy at SAS. "SAS technology allows data to be extracted from any location - enterprise applications, relational or legacy systems. Organizations may be concerned about how recent acquisitions will impact their ability to access data from new or unfamiliar platforms, but SAS customers know that their data can be quickly accessed and transformed for decision making when they need it most." Sprint has enjoyed significant benefits from using SAS to better anticipate its customers' needs, allowing the telecommunications carrier to market its solutions more effectively and reduce customer churn. "By allowing us to pull data from more than 20 internal data sources housed in numerous data silos, SAS enables us to gain deeper intelligence about our customers," said Flint Craver, Sprint's marketing information manager. "This has helped our marketing operations team obtain a holistic view of our customer base and prospects - allowing us to find, and act upon, more opportunities for success." SAS' data integration strategy involves making data a generalized and available resource - regardless of the source or platform on which that data resides. SAS ETLQ (Extraction, Transformation, Load integrated with Data Quality) is the integration platform that enables customers to retrieve data from any source - including enterprise applications such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel and SAP, as well a variety of relational, non-relational and other data sources. In addition, SAS' access technology features data surveyors, powerful metadata exploitation tools that allow users to understand complex enterprise application data structures and more easily populate their data warehouses in less time. No matter where the data is kept, SAS delivers the tools to access and analyze it.