Forrester Research reports that enterprise marketing platform solutions will grow “in excess of 20 percent over the next five years”. 1
This comes as no surprise to SAS, the leader in business intelligence: SAS Customer Intelligence solutions sales grew fifty percent in 2007.
“Awareness has mushroomed that an integrated suite of marketing solutions is pivotal to an effective marketing organization,” said Jeff Levitan, General Manager, SAS Customer Intelligence.
Forrester reports that 83 percent of marketers “increasingly believe that a comprehensive marketing suite that supports the entire marketing organization can make the difference.”
In its Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Marketing Platforms, Q1 2008 (January 2008) report, Forrester found that SAS “offers a strong, analytically driven solution for relationship marketing.” In the analytics and reporting sub-category, SAS received a perfect 5 – the only vendor to score do so in any category.
Per Forrester, “SAS’ platform offers best-in-class data mining and customer analytics capabilities. They also have significantly improved the performance and usability of its campaign management application. Customer references we spoke with were complimentary about the performance of the current version of Marketing Automation and Optimization. Recent improvements in workflow, configuration, and analytics were designed to make the application more usable and support the casual marketer.”
Additionally, Forrester reported that “direct marketers tell us that contact optimization is near the top of their wish list of technologies,” but that the market is currently underserved. The report identified SAS as one of the very few vendors that can provide the comprehensive contact optimization that marketers desire.
Since Forrester completed its vendor evaluation, SAS has released a new version of its Customer Intelligence suite (December 2007) featuring SAS Real-Time Decision Manager, which helps marketers coordinate interactive marketing across multiple channels. This new solution uses analytically driven decision logic to increase the effectiveness of every customer interaction.
Forrester writes that interactive marketing technologies, not yet part of today’s Enterprise Marketing Platform, are “mostly delivered by smaller, niche vendors,” and “that interactive marketers struggle to coordinate internal and external activities, centralize measurement, and optimize spend.”
While SAS Real-Time Decision Manager was not evaluated due to release timing, its capabilities directly serve the reported needs of the market.
SAS’ goals – to help marketers deepen customer insights, choreograph customer interactions and continuously improve marketing performance – are what marketers need today. SAS Customer Intelligence solutions uniquely support marketers through a complete range of solutions – including campaign management, optimization, Web analytics, customer profitability, digital marketing and real-time decision management – not currently available from other vendors.
About SAS
SAS is the leader in business intelligence and analytical software and services. Customers at 43,000 sites use SAS software to improve performance through insight from data, resulting in faster, more accurate business decisions; more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; compliance with governmental regulations; research breakthroughs; and better products and processes. Only SAS offers leading data integration, storage, analytics and business intelligence applications within a comprehensive enterprise intelligence platform.