Company: SAS Institute
Industry: Data Quality and Maintenance, Business Intelligence
Location: Cary, NC, United States of America

"According to most practitioners, ETL design and development work consumes 60 to 80 percent of an entire BI project," The Data Warehousing Institute reported ("Evaluating ETL and Data Integration Platforms" by Wayne Eckerson and Colin White, 2003; www.tdwi.org/research/reportseries)."With such an inordinate amount of resources tied up in ETL work, it behooves BI teams to optimize this layer of their BI environment."

"This TDWI research validates how essential ETL is to a company's overall BI success," said Rob Stephens, technology director at SAS."Using SAS Enterprise ETL Server, businesses can quickly and efficiently take a strategic step toward creating a cohesive enterprise intelligence platform."

SAS Enterprise ETL Server improves productivity in the following ways:

-- Reduces the time and effort typically involved in the ETL development cycle and improves future maintenance by making it easier for developers to access a wide variety of external data files, including legacy formats, without the need to write custom code - something that is typically required by other vendors.

-- Gives developers wizard-driven user interfaces, simplifying how metadata is captured at the transformation level.This capability makes it easier to track and maintain data in the warehouse, regardless of the source.It also greatly improves overall consistency and authenticity of information in the data warehouse at the ETL level.

-- Enables critical ETL routines in the development cycle to be performed in real-time through messaging queuing products (i.e., IBM WebSphere(R) MQ, Microsoft MQ and TIBCO TIB/Rendezvous), as well as through Web services - resulting in a more efficient ETL process.

-- Provides data lineage and impact analysis capabilities that go beyond what other ETL tools can deliver, making the ETL process more transparent to both IT staff and decision makers within the company while reducing ETL development costs.SAS Enterprise ETL Server maintains a full history of changes made during a project's life cycle, allowing for instant reconciliation against other sources of information and ensuring knowledge continuity in the event of personnel changes.This history also ensures that information derived from the ETL process is correct and trustworthy.

"As a recognized ETL leader, SAS continues to find innovative ways to deliver value at the initial phase of a company's business intelligence process," continued Stephens."SAS' ETL offering allows organizations to integrate information in ways that make enterprise intelligence immediately accessible any time, any place and in the most appropriate form - regardless of the source."

"SAS ETL Server spares our company time and resources with regards to development, maintenance and execution of different tasks," said Tim Thranegaard, senior vice president at BRFKredit - a Danish mortgage credit institute."We are able to deliver high quality information to the business quickly, which allows us to make more efficient and confident decisions."

"SAS' ETL software speeds up the execution and brings our data to life much faster, with improved stability and manageability of better-quality data, reducing our development time and maintenance," said J0rgen Falkesgaard, project manager for the IT Competence Department at Codan, one of Scandinavia's most successful insurance companies."SAS ETL Server enables us to handle the kinds of complex data transformations required by our business - fast, in an easy-to-use, wizard-driven environment."

SAS Enterprise ETL Server www.sas.com/technologies/dw/entetlserver/index.html is an integral part of the SAS(R)9 Intelligence Platform, which is the foundation of the SAS(R)9 family of technologies and solutions.From data management tools to business reporting interfaces to unparalleled analytic capabilities, SAS delivers reliable and easy-to-use technologies that leverage historical investments to drive immediate results.

About SAS

SAS is the 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 40,000 sites - including 96 of the top 100 companies on the FORTUNE Global 500(R) - 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 nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know(R).Visit us at www.sas.com.

SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc.product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc.in the USA and other countries.(R) indicates USA registration.Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

Copyright (C) 2005 SAS Institute Inc.Cary, NC, USA.All rights reserved.

Desiree Adkins (desiree.adkins@sas.com)
Phone: 919-531-0736