SAS Institute Inc. is set to unveil a new Windows client application next week with an interface designed to allow companies to rapidly deploy analytics across the enterprise using existing platforms and data sources.
Enterprise Guide 2.0 will provide a single point of access to SAS capabilities, freeing business analysts from the need to do programming. Instead, programmers, statisticians, and business analysts can use the interface to tap SAS analytics while reducing the time spent previously coding or programming, according to company officials in Cary, N.C.
“You don’t have to be a statistician to be able to understand some of these results,” said Eleanor Taylor, SAS manager of business intelligence strategy for SAS. “Those results can be shared throughout the enterprise to enrich decision making. In the past [BI] has been based on historical information flowing one way. Some of the analytics…can help empower you to drive forward instead of always look at historical performance.”
New features in Enterprise Guide include additional guided tasks to lead users quickly and easily through analyses and reporting and role-based task display to decrease the complexity of the user interface. In addition, integrated scheduling is designed to allow users to refresh and disseminate reports automatically at regular intervals to reduce the load on IT departments. Finally, the guide supports custom tasks and makes common requests repeatable using SAS or other development environment such as Microsoft Visual Basic or .Net.
Version 2.0 of Enterprise Guide will allow Banca del Gottardo, one of Switzerland’s largest banks, to make business intelligence available to an even broader audience within the bank without increasing IT resources to do so, said Claudio Campana, information manager at the bank. In particular, the new scheduling functionality considerably reduces the time it takes to deliver information to multiple channels, Campana added.
Enterprise Guide 2.0 is available now.