SAS storms Irish market with new release

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Business intelligence software firm SAS will continue to maintain a strong direct presence in Ireland as it prepares to launch its latest product SAS9, which the company  is touting as its most significant product suite release in its 28 years of existence.The US multinational opened up its 15-strong direct sales office on the Northumberland Road in Dublin in 1999, some 15 years after securing its first Irish customer. It focuses on enterprise level customers including banks and financial services, life sciences, the public sector and manufacturing.  Its client list comprises nearly 60 companies including
IIB Bank, The Revenue Commissioners and Eclipse Clinical Technologies. 
‘The traditional perception of what business intelligence is about is very narrow,’ said SAS Ireland manager Patrick Durkin. ‘Customers are still struggling to get useful, actionable information from their BI systems.’

Durkin said that R&D spend on business intelligence as a percentage of total revenues stands at over 25 per cent, a figure higher than SAS’s competitors.  The development of SAS9 incorporated market research on SAS’s customers that revealed a diverse group of users, including those categorised as decision makers, power users and business analysts.
The new product comes with interface ‘role-based’ settings designed to adapt to the needs of these individual groups of users.

The new software, which is fully backwards compatible with all other SAS applications as well as other data sources and programmes, enables data integration, user friendly business reporting and analysis.
Durkin said that its manufacturing customer base, particular multinational firms, was increasingly looking to business intelligence software as a way of differentiating its operations from those located overseas.  As simple assembly becomes something that is increasingly a side issue, applying business intelligence to the shop floor enables a new way of working whereby problems are no longer resolved by post mortems but identified
and fixed there and then.

SAS worldwide generated $1.3bn in revenues last year but is unusual among large software companies in persisting with its privately owned status. Durkin said that the company flirted with the possibility of an IPO at one stage due to the difficulties experiencing in retaining employees during the boom, but once that was over, things returned to normal.SAS Ireland reported revenue growth of 22 per cent in 2003 on the previous year. ‘Regulatory requirements such as Basel II in financial services, FDA regulations in Life Sciences and a need for more transparent performance management in the public sector are all driving the need for our business intelligence solutions,’ said Durkin.  He said SAS was a stable vendor with a direct presence in Ireland, unlike its direct competitors here, which include Cognos, Business Objects and Informatica.Durkin said there was still a perception of SAS as a proprietary software vendor, but pointed out that SAS supports a wide variety of industry standards.

14/06/04

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