SAS Supports Itanium Based Servers and Workstations for 64-Bit Computing.

Business Editors/High Tech Writers

FLORENCE, Italy--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 29, 2001

Data warehousing and BI solution bolsters decision-making

and customer relationships

SAS Institute, the market leader in integrated data warehousing and e-intelligence, today demonstrated a data visualization component of its e-Intelligence solutions running on 64-bit workstation and server platforms.

At its SEUGI Users Conference here, SAS ran its software on multiple operating systems using the Intel(R) Itanium(TM) processor, which will include IBM's AIX 5L, HP-UX from Hewlett Packard and Microsoft's Windows XP workstation and Whistler Server Limited Edition platforms. The SAS(R) system provides end-to-end data warehousing and business intelligence solutions including real-time multi-dimensional analysis and gives knowledge workers the ability to graphically explore and evaluate Web-based and traditional data sources. This capability is key to helping companies identify patterns and trends that affect their business.

"SAS is working closely with Intel to tune and optimize SAS(R) software for the Intel Itanium processor and Itanium-based solutions environments that provide our customers both the performance and scalability they need for mission critical business intelligence solutions," said Jim Davis, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of SAS. "Our customers expect and depend on SAS to turn massive amounts of e-commerce and e-business data into usable information - to optimize their business performance and manage customer relationships. SAS on Itanium-based computing delivers compelling performance at PC price points, giving customers room to grow with their data and needs and helping them perform jobs on a variety of operating systems."

Intel Corp. also announced the availability of the Intel-based Itanium processor and Itanium solutions. "SAS and Intel have been working to provide the next level of computing for the data warehousing and data mining markets," said Will Swope, vice president at Intel Architecture Group. "Today's efforts are part of our combined, ongoing commitment to deliver the full computing power of SAS on Itanium-based systems to meet the demanding needs of the Internet and e-business."

Wells Fargo Bank is currently pilot-testing SAS on Itanium. "Today, Wells Fargo faces a daily deluge of information from a variety of sources that it must process in real time. The Itanium processor offers a powerful and flexible choice between operating systems. Itanium's advanced capabilities are a perfect match for SAS' decision support applications," said Francois Christen, Wells Fargo's vice president and group marketing manager for market area analysis and CRM. "By running SAS on the Itanium platforms, we will be able to scale, store, process and access larger amounts of data - and we will do it faster to form profitable relationships with our customers."

SAS has publicly announced support for the three operating systems -- AIX 5L, HP-UX and Windows. A Beta version of SAS software for these operating systems will be available in the fourth quarter of this year, and general availability of SAS Version 9 software is planned in the first half of 2002.

Intel Itanium Processor

The Intel(R) Itanium(TM) processor is the first in a family of processors from Intel and will complement today's Intel(R) Pentium(R) III processor and Intel(R) Pentium(R) III Xeon(TM) 32-bit processor families with features for high-end scalability, reliability and availability. It also offers large memory addressability and high performance I/O. More information on the Intel Itanium processor is available at http://developer.intel.com/design/ia-64/.

About SAS

SAS is the world leader in e-intelligence software and services, enabling its customers to turn raw data - including the vast quantity generated by e-business - into usable knowledge. Software from SAS, the world's largest privately held software company, is used at more than 35,000 business, government and university sites in 110 countries.

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. Copyright(c)2001 SAS Institute Inc. Cary, NC, USA. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.