SAS sets new standards on 64-bit BI support.

SAS Enterprise BI Server, one of the first major enterprise business intelligence solutions released capable of operating on a 64-bit architecture, continues to offer the widest choice of operating systems and hardware by any BI vendor for companies looking for a flexible deployment environment that is able to meet their business needs now and in the future.

With the most recent addition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 on Itanium, SAS Enterprise BI Server is now available on the following 64-bit based hardware and operating system combinations: Solaris (SPARC only), HP-UX on Itanium, AIX, Windows Server 2003 family for Itanium-based systems, and HP-UX on HPPA/ RISC (Alpha). Other platforms supported include Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 families (x86-32 based architectures), and SuSE SLEs 8 (x86-32-based architectures) and IBM z/OS. No other BI vendor comes close to this wide range of choice.

APEX Management Group, a leading healthcare consulting and insurance services organization, relies on SAS Enterprise BI Server to develop a comprehensive understanding of ongoing transformations in the healthcare economy and to predict the potential impact of benefit plan modifications. APEX runs many of its BI applications on 64-bit Intel Itanium architecture. Processing is handled by 64-bit and fed to clients through a mid-tier for web-based services.

"Our success depends on our ability to find the answers to increasingly complex questions," said Dr. Jody Porrazzo, director of econometric risk strategy at APEX. "SAS Enterprise BI Server running at this level empowers us to query, analyze and forecast outcomes on large amounts of data. Itanium was designed to handle large amount of I/O, which means it's great for handling big ETL jobs where data has to be aggregated before we can load it into memory for analytic processing."

A primary reason that APEX selected a server architecture based on Intel's Itanium 2 processor was the need to address large data volumes efficiently. "The 64-bit memory combined with the enhanced architecture allows us to load data efficiently and handle very large computations, allowing us to tackle extremely complex problems that weren't possible a few short years ago," added Porrazzo. "We acquired two Intel Itanium 2 processor-based servers, one for our central database server and the other for our data warehouse."

SAS Enterprise BI Server, the industry's most comprehensive BI solution, helps organizations address many of the most demanding aspects of their business by allowing them to analyze and report on large amounts of critical information that most basic reporting tools cannot handle.

"SAS' 64-bit BI solutions running on Intel processors offer compelling business and IT advantages," said Pat Gellsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group. "Intel has already shipped over 1 million processors for 64-bit servers, and has a proven track record for simplifying migrations and providing powerful, flexible and cost-effective support for enterprise business intelligence on 64-bit server platforms."

SAS and Intel have been working together for more than 10 years to develop and deploy SAS solutions on Intel-based platforms to help solve real business problems in the most cost-effective manner. Most recently, the two companies brought SAS9 to the Linux 64-bit operating system on the Intel Itanium 2 processor. SAS and Intel have optimized the SAS Enterprise BI Server to take full advantage of the power, scalability and reliability of the newest Intel server platforms. This optimization allows businesses of all sizes to quickly and easily extract and analyze massive amounts of critical business information from across the entire enterprise and then apply it intelligently to their decision-making processes.

"The ability to run SAS business intelligence on this architecture represents a significant step for organizations across industries, which need it to meet their scalability requirements," said Dr. Jim Goodnight, SAS' CEO. "Successful BI requires the ability to reach large audiences and deliver results quickly, consistently and accurately. We continue to invest in key 64-bit technologies, which represent the future in terms of speed and capacity, and further enable SAS Enterprise BI Server users at all levels to leverage enterprise data."