The information itself - even though still being the base for every organization - isn't as meaningful as earlier. Much more important it is to ensure it's provided on time, to the right user, and in the best form. That's what SAS Business Intelligence is the best at.

Today's organizations - depending on data - depend on time, in fact. The biggest challenge of these days is not allowing an access to data. It's rather to allow an access to timely data, originating from different sources, in the best possible quality, in the form that is required. Quickly and accurately. Without a need for countless IT interventions. No one doubts in the functionality of Business Intelligence solutions, but their functionality no longer is the main subject of competition. Nowadays, it's flexibility, scalability, and - in the broad sense of term - the time to value.

Such solutions as SAS Business Intelligence have therefore to provide the highest quality connection between data sources and end users. In a very few words, SAS Business Intelligence suite's role is to integrate data spread all over the organization to allow business users to perform self-service reporting and analysis. It influences on the company performance directly - business users focus on what's most important to them (and - therefore - accelerate the time to decision), while IT departments reduce the time wasted on diverse collateral things which don't actually add any value to the company IT systems.

What it means in practice are multiple capabilities, including:

• statistics,
• predictive analytics,
• data mining,
• text mining,
• and forecasting.

SAS Business Intelligence components

SAS Business Intelligence as a whole consists of the two separate elements - Enterprise Business Intelligence and Business Visualization. The first of them is responsible for ensuring that all the capabilities are enabled and easy to use. The second, though, may be considered an addition as it provides a powerful business visualization studio, allowing users to explore the ideas and information in a dynamic and interactive way.

SAS Enterprise Business Intelligence

By combining the strengths of SAS Analytics and SAS Data Management, SAS Enterprise Business Intelligence Server provides business users with a powerful tool for making better decisions. It also boosts the data consistency and - at the same time - streamlines the administration. Its features include:

• easy to customize dashboards and portals
• advanced business visualizations
• reporting based on Web and "based on desktops"
• analytics from outside the office (multiple mobile operating capabilities)
• integration to Microsoft Office suite as well as to MS SharePoint
• powerful query and analysis capabilities
• an intuitive interface for OLAP data storage and exploration
• advanced metadata management options
• well flexible deployment capabilities
• model development and analysis supported with guides and wizards
• and applications development.

SAS Business Visualization

Quite a significant share of today's solutions base on MS Office Excel and its spreadsheets as the only method for data presentation. SAS Business Visualization proves it's not the necessity, expanding thereby the widely known capabilities with advanced data exploration options. Thereupon, SAS Business Visualization allows to:

• query data visually
• forget about any type of data limitations
• efficient data interaction, resulting in enabling the insights into illusorily hidden relationships, patterns, and dependencies which may happen to be crucial for the decision making process
• prefer long term trends viewing instead of year to date pictures
• share the report findings among users across the organization faster and more efficiently.

Why SAS?

Unlike many other solutions, SAS Business Intelligence pays a lot of attention not only to analyzing and reporting based on the past. It allows also to trace the current situation and - what's even more important - predict the future basing on the historical data. By giving end users a full control on the reporting and analytics, SAS solution influences on time wastes reductions. Its business analytics framework, on the other hand, ensures that the organization's solution is well prepared for changing business conditions. All for information assets optimization and control.

SAS Business Intelligence resources:

https://www.sas.com/en_us/solutions/business-intelligence.html - even though most of BI solution vendors don't actually like to share details about their products, SAS provides relatively a lot of useful information about their Business Intelligence suite. The section behind the link is devoted to the Business Intelligence from the SAS point of view and supplied with a quick introduction to the idea of the product. Additionally, there are features and benefits listed as well as separate sections devoted to each of SAP Business Intelligence components included.

www.lexjansen.com/mwsug/2005/Tutorials/TS600.pdf - here is a data source for those more advanced users. The introduction to SAS Business Intelligence is preceded with a short introduction(sic!), and followed with almost thirteen pages of technical information, supplied with illustration from time to time. It definitively is a comprehensive source of knowledge, nonetheless the very beginning users could quickly feel disoriented and - therefore - resign from reading the remaining twelve and a half of the page.

sas_tutorial - here is the source of knowledge for the ones who trace the novelties introduced to the newest releases of SAS Business Intelligence, mainly focused on ETL processing.

Introduction_to_the_SAS_9_Business_Intelligence_Platform:_A_Tutorial - the sascommunity.org portal looks a little bit like Wikipedia and provides all the useful information for SAP solutions users, including the ones who have chosen SAS Business Intelligence. Here is the very introduction to the product, nonetheless it's just a matter of one mouse click to dive deeper into more detailed content.