Intel IA-64 Architecture Promises Improved Performance for SAS Data Warehousing, Data Mining Solutions

Business Wire, August 31, 1999

INTEL DEVELOPER FORUM, PALM SPRINGS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 31, 1999--SAS Institute Inc., the market leader in integrated data warehousing and decision support, today reaffirmed its support for Intel Corporation's forthcoming IA-64 architecture, beginning with the Merced processor.

Merced is expected to start shipping in mid-2000, and the first Merced servers shortly thereafter. SAS Institute provides enterprise decision-support solutions that currently run on Intel's 32-bit architecture and will take advantage of the improved performance, scalability, and multiple operating-system choice of IA-64.

"With SAS Institute's powerful decision-support software solutions optimized to take advantage of the enhanced performance and scalability of IA-64, companies in all industries will benefit," said Mike Pope, director of the enterprise software program at Intel. "These companies will be able to size business-intelligence solutions more easily, access and analyze their data more effectively, and reach critical business decisions more rapidly, achieving competitive advantage as a result."

"Effective decision-making is timely and requires ever more data on which to base those decisions" said Robert Cross, director of advanced technology at SAS Institute. "Because the dynamics that affect a business are constantly changing, decisions must be made more quickly than ever. Based on our early work with the new architecture, we anticipate SAS (R) solutions that will enable customers to apply the significant speed increases and scalability of IA-64 in their decision-making process."

IA-64 and decision support

Many SAS Institute customers have deployed enterprise data warehouses, e-business applications, and customer-relationship management (CRM) solutions that pull data out of transactional processing systems (such as ERP systems). For these and other high-end computing applications, the speed and scalability of the processor is critical for business decision-making. IA-64-based servers with 64-bit addressability should translate into better performance for data warehousing, data mining, and transactional applications that involve database access.

SAS Institute has worked closely with Intel in anticipation of Merced's production availability. "Learning the new assembly language for this important new architecture was a critical first step in porting our existing 32-bit applications to IA-64," said Gary Mehler, SAS Institute's manager of PC research and development. "With Intel's continued training and support, we were able to demonstrate SAS software running on a simulated IA-64 server more than a year ago. Our efforts since then have been to continue development of our application code as well as to assist Intel in improving the simulator environment for other software vendors."

Added Patricia Miron, Intel's IA-64 server software program manager, "Since mutual customers will benefit greatly from the vastly improved scalability, performance and operating-system choice of the IA-64 platform, it has been SAS Institute and Intel's commitment to ensure that SAS software solutions would support Merced as soon as it became available. Through our early efforts, we are working together to ensure a complete solution offering for enterprise customers - interoperability with other software solutions, databases, and operating systems key to data warehousing and decision support on this new architecture."

SAS Institute & Intel: A commitment to excellence

Intel and SAS Institute have a long history of working together - including a formal business relationship since 1991 - in order to optimize and exploit each other's new technologies as they develop. This relationship ensures that when new technology from Intel becomes available, SAS software solutions will be ready to support it. Ultimately, the goal of this commitment is to maximize customers' return on investment in server hardware and SAS software solutions.

SAS Institute was an early tester of a number of Intel's 32-bit processors (Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III Xeon) and continues to evaluate Intel's future processors, including processors based on the IA-64 architecture. The Institute also has profiled succeeding versions of SAS software in Intel's benchmarking labs, with the goal of optimizing performance on Intel architecture.

"We will continue to work closely with our technology partners, ensuring that our customers experience a smooth transition to and reap the benefits of new technologies," said Dennis Massengill, manager of SAS Institute's enterprise technology partner program. "Our support for IA-64, as with our exploitation of IA-32 and our continued strong working relationship with the Intel development team, demonstrates that ongoing commitment."

About SAS Institute

SAS Institute, the world's largest privately held software company, is the leader in decision support and data warehousing, providing integrated enterprise information-delivery solutions. Founded in 1976, the Institute markets packaged business solutions for vertical industry and departmental applications, as well as an integrated suite of software tools and consulting services. These allow companies to transform the wide variety of data within their organizations into information that business users and researchers need to make better decisions. SAS software and services are used at more than 33,000 business, government, and university sites in 115 countries. SAS Institute achieved 1998 revenue of $871 million.