SAS Integrates with Platform JobScheduler - Alliance Delivers Value to Customers; Spectra Marketing Increases ROI With Automated Data Warehousing Job Scheduling

Business Wire, Oct 28, 2002

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

CARY, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 28, 2002

SAS, the leader in business intelligence, announced that its integration of Platform JobScheduler with SAS/Warehouse Administrator(R) software has generated significant return on investment (ROI) at Spectra, Inc., a division of VNU, the largest marketing information services company in the world.

Spectra's premiere suite of consumer targeting solutions enables clients within the fast moving consumer goods industry to develop complete profiles of their most-valued consumer. In turn, clients can assess how their target consumer's lifestyle, lifestage, and attitude impact consumer buying decisions, and properly define their marketing strategies.

The integration of Platform JobScheduler into the warehousing process decreases the time and resources required to manage data warehouses. With SAS, Spectra analyzes and monitors distributed application workloads across the enterprise for production operations from a single point of control, thus reducing the costs of developing, deploying and maintaining enterprise production operations. In addition to cutting operational costs, Spectra reduced the time required for data conversion when they implemented a new collection system; a process that once took weeks now only takes days.

"Data warehousing is critical to us. Spectra serves the fast-moving consumer goods industry with consumer-centric marketing solutions, creating marketing ROI by measuring the consumer behavior impact of demand-side spending," said Dennis Klos, vice president of data development and production, Spectra Marketing. "SAS improved reliability of extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) of data - making the information in our warehouse highly consistent and available for use in our information products and in delivery to our customers. As a company that operates 24/7, the integrated job scheduling and ETL functionality allowed us to reduce the time-to-market required for new processes. In turn, this enabled us to significantly speed delivery of critical information to sister companies, ACNielsen, VNU Entertainment and other clients."

SAS/Warehouse Administrator, the flagship product of SAS(R) Data Warehousing, gives information technology (IT) professionals a sophisticated tool to design and manage data warehouses. SAS/Warehouse Administrator takes full advantage of Platform JobScheduler to enable users to achieve quicker time to results by enabling the use of distributed processors to run parallel jobs, controlling access to limited computer resources, and automating the execution of the ETL process. Platform JobScheduler also provides a single user interface to heterogeneous computer systems, centralized resource provisioning using queue priorities and job preemption, and a reliable job scheduling environment enabled by calendar-based and inter-job dependencies.

"The integration of SAS/Warehouse Administrator with Platform JobScheduler demonstrates the willingness of SAS to work with other vendors for the benefit of its clients. It provides further evidence of SAS' commitment to forming integration alliances that address real-world problems," said Mike Schiff, Vice President of E-Business and Business Intelligence at Current Analysis.

SAS/Warehouse Administrator captures and integrates data, and the integration of the Platform JobScheduler automates and distributes job flow automatically over any existing hardware resource to optimize the ETL process. By applying Platform's workload management and distributed management computing technology, IT departments can schedule, analyze and monitor job flow with minimal human interaction to deliver predictable results.

"SAS helps companies generate the high quality information necessary for true business intelligence," said Tho Nguyen, SAS director of data warehousing strategy. "Since May 2001, our alliance with Platform Computing has delivered value to customers by complementing SAS' data management capabilities. Automation of the data integration and management process offered within SAS' warehousing solution makes companies like Spectra more efficient so they achieve greater ROI. Such ETL automation minimizes long-term maintenance. It allows IT staff to derive further value from the SAS Intelligence Architecture so they can maintain and, even extend, levels of service while working within tightened IT budgets."

About Spectra

Spectra Inc., is a division of VNU, which is the largest media and information services company in the world. With headquarters in Chicago, Spectra, is the leading provider of Consumer-Centric Marketing solutions to consumer packaged goods companies, and is leading the development of information tools that establish a brand-specific framework for achieving marketing ROI. The company pioneered the framework for identifying brand opportunity on a combined lifestyle-lifestage basis with the introduction of the 54-cell Spectra Grid, which classifies consumer households according to six demographic and nine lifestyle criteria. Visit us at www.spectramarketing.com.