Anyone that has followed the product offerings from SAS in recent years knows that they have a comprehensive, end-to-end Business Intelligence package known as the EBI Suite or it's little brother the BI Suite. These products offer a great business intelligence platform with all of the OLAP, Web Reporting, Analytic and Portal tools that any fortune 500 company could ever need.
But what about smaller businesses? Those that love SAS but have a limited budget. Those that just need a way to automate and web-enable some existing base SAS or Enterprise Guide reports but don't have a need for the heft of the BI suite (or its price tag). Well, the answer may have been sitting right under your nose.
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A common set of non-BI products that SAS offers includes a product called "Integration Technologies". This product flies so far under the radar and is so frequently misunderstood that you may have it licensed and don't even know it. Furthermore, even if you know that you have it licensed you may not be leveraging it at all. In almost all default version 9 installation configurations of non-BI offerings, many components of Integration Technologies are not even installed! Yes, a nice chunk of your licensing dollars may be sitting on a CD in a big ugly binder collecting dust.
OK, what are the components of Integration Technologies and how can they help me? Well there are many pieces to this product ranging from IOM servers to APIs that allow interfacing SAS with Java and dot net applications. All of that stuff is cool in itself but the real hidden gem is something called the Web Infrastructure Kit (WIK). Buried inside the WIK is something called the Stored Process Web Application. It runs inside a SAS-flavored Tomcat Apache server (also provided as part of Integration Technologies). Once these pieces are installed one can easily take an existing Enterprise Guide project, convert it to a Stored Process and expose it to the masses through a web-based interface. Security concerns? Don't sweat it. All of these stored processes can be fully secured via the SAS management console, a standard feature of version 9.
Want to maintain a few base reports but allow lots of flavors? You can create run-time parameters for the stored process and the parameters automatically show up as drop-down boxes, date-selection dialogs or pick lists automatically. Let me repeat - there is absolutely no html or Java to code. All you have to do is convert an Enterprise Guide report to a stored process through an easy-to-use wizard and you're just about done.
The possibilities for this technology are only limited by your imagination. You can allow users to summarize, slice and dice, create web-based pivot tables all within a browser. Users can create interactive graphs, charts and geographic maps that are truly interactive - with no software required on the desktop. Allow executives to summarize sales and profits by region, quarter, product or state. Allow tables to be chosen, filtered and automatically exported to Excel. Let your data breathe!
What's the catch? There is absolutely no catch from a SAS licensing perspective. You may be paying for powerful software that has never seen the light of day. The main obstacle to leveraging this technology is a somewhat tricky installation procedure. If installation and configuration are your concern then contact me through my web-site listed below and I will help get you on your way. Free your data!
SAS BI Lite - For a Fraction of the Cost
http://www.bluechipsolutions.com
Blue Chip Solutions has been helping customers make fact-based decisions for over 12 years. Use the link above to contact us today and let us help you leverage your business data for competetive advantage.
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