The enhanced solutions are the result of SAS' commitment to meeting its customers' changing needs and solving specific business challenges in key vertical industries including banking and financial services, manufacturing, retail, and telecommunications. SAS invests almost a quarter of annual revenues (24 per cent of $1.68 billion in revenue in 2005) in research and development, a scale unmatched among BI vendors.

The new and enhanced SAS industry solutions are:

For financial services

• SAS Anti-Money Laundering - sifts through huge amounts of data to detect subtle patterns that may indicate suspicious behavior; the latest version adds enhanced data integration capabilities through SAS Data Integration Studio and other components
• SAS Credit Risk Management for Banking - for scoring, rating and managing credit and credit risk; the latest version adds improved reporting so information can be shared more easily throughout the bank
• SAS Fair Banking - helps lenders ensure regulatory compliance while improving quality of their lending decisions; new version's enhanced analytics help lenders better track global exposure

For manufacturing

• SAS Warranty Analysis - reduces warranty costs and improves quality by using warranty claims, call center data and other sources to identify fraudulent claims, detect emerging issues and forecast warranty costs; the new version offers enhanced integration with standard desktop tools
• SAS Service Parts Optimization - a new product from SAS, it allows organizations to provide the highest level of after-sale support by better forecasting demand for parts and optimizing inventories, thus increasing customer satisfaction and improving profitability

For retail

• Marketmax Allocation - improves inventory management with allocation and replenishment of basic, fashion and promotional merchandise; the new version offers support for advanced and user-defined allocations, and for industry-standard allocation methods
• SAS Markdown Optimization - boosts profitability by determining which items should be marked down, by how much, when and in which stores; the latest version includes improved scalability for large-volume markdown and clearance events
• SAS Promotion Optimization - helps maximize revenue by accurately predicting which items to promote, in which locations, at what price and via which promotional vehicles; the enhanced version offers more support for complex promotions, as well as improved event and scenario analysis and planning

For telecommunications

• SAS Revenue Assurance for Telecommunications - a new product shipping later this year, it enables communications service providers to manage their revenue streams and minimize revenue leakage
• SAS Price Plan Optimization for Telecommunications - a new product shipping later this year, it helps providers improve operational performance and customer satisfaction by identifying price plans with the highest returns for the operator and the highest preference among customers

"There are lots of software vendors out there claiming to provide analytics and BI offerings that, in reality, are little more than reporting or operational systems," said Jim Davis, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at SAS. "No other vendor can offer the same depth and breadth of BI solutions as SAS. And we will continue to deliver constant, customer-focused innovation, as shown in the 10 products announced today."

Like all SAS solutions, the 10 new and enhanced products are built on top of the industry's foremost platform for business intelligence, the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform.

This platform integrates technology for:

• Data integration - consolidate and manage data from all available and relevant sources
• Predictive analytics - answer key business questions and understand what will happen, as well as what has already occurred and why
• Business intelligence - share intelligence quickly throughout the organization for faster and more accurate decision making
• Storage - create intelligence from massive quantities of data through storage designed and optimized for BI and analytics