SAS® Business Intelligence Made Easy for Business Professionals

Top Email Client Joins Other SAS Query-and-Reporting Interfaces, Improves Outlook for Better Decisions

CARY, N.C.--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--As business intelligence applications spread throughout enterprises of all sizes, business analytics leader SAS is extending the power of query and reporting within Microsoft Outlook, the world’s most widely used email package.

“This will make it much easier to increase BI adoption.”

SAS offers Microsoft Office integration in SAS BI Server and SAS Enterprise BI Server with new support for access through Outlook, ensuring a familiar, self-service interface to key information for critical decisions. Market watchers estimate that MS Outlook makes up between 37 percent and 43 percent of all e-mail clients.

“Leveraging Outlook is a great way to make BI more pervasive, particularly for casual users, because email is more widely used than even Excel. As I discussed in a Sept. 27 “Ease of Use in BI” report, email is rated significantly easier to use than BI tools, and easier-to-use BI tools boast a 10 percent higher adoption rate than BI usage overall,” said Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard founder and author of Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App.

“The enhancement to SAS Microsoft Office integration takes the integration of BI and e-mail to a new level, with the e-mail client used as a navigation tool to access all reports and dashboards. Folders on the SAS BI Server automatically appear as folders in Outlook. From within Outlook, users can view, refresh or send a report to another person,” said Howson. “This will make it much easier to increase BI adoption.”

SAS Business Intelligence lets less technical users immediately access data, modify data requests and display information visually. Those business professionals may use SAS BI through Sharepoint, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. They can choose from a library of predefined but customizable templates or design their own. Users gain insight, investigate patterns and discover previously hidden facts through visual queries.

“There is no substitute for timely, detailed reports to best manage the business,” said Bobby Hull, Systems Analyst at BGF Industries. “We can’t lock up information in a back office – our high-tech fabrics industry is far too dynamic for that. With SAS BI providing critical information to managers in minutes and not hours, everybody is using the same key data and we can stay a step ahead of the competition.”

Query and reporting are key components of the SAS Business Analytics Framework – solutions, software and services to enable strategic business decisions that optimize performance of an organization.

The SAS Business Analytics Framework includes industry and line-of-business solutions, as well as analytic, data management, query and reporting technologies. Companies can address the most critical business issues immediately and then add new functions over time, enabling continuous performance improvement.

About SAS

SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions delivered within an integrated framework, SAS helps customers at more than 45,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW^®. 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. ® indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright © 2010 SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.