Unisys and SAS unveil Linux-based business intelligence

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, Oct 25, 2004

Unisys Corporation (NYSE:UIS) and the SAS Institute have announced that they are teaming up to make Linux enterprise-ready for business intelligence. Together, Unisys and SAS have offered high performance, scaleable end-to-end business intelligence and analytic solutions. Now, joint customers are able to take advantage of the flexibility and openness of the Linux operating system.

"We're seeing heightened customer interest in Linux-based business intelligence solutions--particularly in the financial services industry," said Keith Collins, CTO of the SAS Institute. "Working with Unisys--a long-time price/performance leader among high-end Intel based systems--and its ES7000 family of servers, we're well poised to make Linux-based business intelligence a reality for our enterprise customers."

Effective business intelligence requires high levels of performance. Customers increasingly rely on Intel's Itanium 2 architecture as the backbone of their enterprise business intelligence solutions. Sixty-four-bit computing delivers highly scaleable and available servers, and the associated memory caches and buffers ensure critical information is delivered with speed and accuracy. Industry leaders such as Intel, Unisys and SAS are now working together to offer these capabilities to the Linux operating system at a significantly lower-cost than RISC-based alternatives. These factors are contributing to a significant boost in enterprise acceptance and adoption of Linux business intelligence.

"Changing business dynamics are making it more important than ever to extend business intelligence to individuals and groups across the enterprise," said Chander Khanna, vice president, Systems & Technology, Unisys. "Simply put, Unisys ES7000 servers, based on Intel's Itanium 2 technology, are built for enterprise business intelligence. With industry-leading software providers like SAS joining us to bring Linux to the enterprise, we're delivering standardized solutions for business intelligence and data warehousing that are comparable to Unix/RISC-based competitors at a significantly lower cost."