ACADEMIA

SAS, the leader in business intelligence, in collaboration with Intel Corporation, will bring SAS 9 on the Intel Itanium 2 processor. The collaboration will allow Hong Kong enterprises to benefit from the ease of use of SAS 9 and the Intel Itanium 2 processor powerful memory and data capabilities. Customers will be able to enjoy the enhanced computational power, massive data processing ability and scalability to compute more data in less time. Intel's joint effort with SAS expands on years of collaboration between the two companies and will help users expand business intelligence throughout the enterprise as SAS 9 runs on Intel Itanium 2 processor-based servers. "SAS 9 delivers unprecedented performance and simplicity that gives more people access to the power of SAS advanced predictive analytics. With more users comes the need for more power, and there's where Intel's Itanium 2 processor comes in," said Dawn Kung, Regional Director -- Greater China, SAS Institute Ltd, "Together, Intel and SAS enable businesses to run scalable applications that extract business information and apply it intelligently to improve operations, increase profitability and keep costs down." "Intel and SAS are delivering innovative business intelligence solutions that are easy to deploy and provide a high return on investment," said Mark Pallone, Global Software Strategy Manager, Intel Corporation. "SAS software running on Itanium 2-based systems turns massive amounts of data into business intelligence more rapidly and effectively, giving customers a solution they can depend on." The SAS system running on Itanium 2 processors brings together the world's leading business intelligence solution with the most affordable and fastest growing 64-bit environment, allowing greater scaling of threaded and multi- user applications. The collaboration is an ideal solution for both new SAS 9 users as well as those who are migrating from the old version. Itanium 2 microarchitecture is designed to integrate easily into existing environments. Basic design strategies are virtually identical to those used to deploy 32-bit solutions on Intel architecture, so development teams can take advantage of their existing resources, tools and skill sets.