SAS Forum 2007 - Growing Together

SAS held a Forum on 5th September 2007 at Shangri-la Hotel, Kuala Lumpur. It is called the "Customer Partnership Growing Together".



Company Strategy:

Managing Director Mr. Jimmy Cheah opened the forum by declaring the numbers of new customers obtained within the last 12 months. The non-exhaustive list includes Affin Bank, Kuwait finance house (banking sector), PIDM & MIROS (Public sector) and University Malaysia (Academia sector).

SAS has always been practicing a direct approach and now they are looking to bring in partners to be categorized as either:

• System Integrators
• Resellers & OEM

Jimmy Cheah highlighted the latest market trend which would generate more business intelligence projects, which includes:

• Industries are facing more competitive market
• Thinning profit margin
• More innovation required
• The need for more data for decision making

Also, he gave us a sneak preview on the growth of Business Intelligence market provided by IDC.

Global growth for 2008 = 12.5%
Malaysia growth for 2008 = 12.6%

Thus, clearly it shows that Malaysia has higher growth rate compared to global wise.

Mr. Jimmy Cheah concluded his opening speech by reaffirming the corporate mission, that is "SAS wants to be the first company that customers would call to solve business problems".

Business Insights:

Mr. Steven Ing (Professional Services Director for SAS APAC) then came on stage with a keynote stressing the importance of recognizing and adapting to market agility. Change is getting quicker and quicker. Thus, in order to stay ahead of the curve to avoid collision, people need to have intelligence.

Information is doubling at a faster rate.

As a result of this, he cited a good business to embark on would be the one dealing with the following three activities:

• Storage of data
• Interpretation of data
• Data cleaning

And the latest trend about information is "overloaded".

If we search Google Trends for keyword "business intelligence", we can to see which people in which country actually queried Google most frequently for it. And Malaysia is amongst the top 10. This is pretty amazing and it agrees with figures provided by IDC stated above.

Mr. Steven Ing stressed that Business Intelligence is not just about reporting and queries. He summarized them into key categories:

• Business Intelligence
• Dashboard & scorecards (KPI)
• Analytics infrastructures
• Planning, budgeting and forecasting
• Analytics applications

Business Intelligence must be viewed as enterprise platform (total integrated platform) and SAS can do that for you, because it is not easy. The boundary is quite huge. One needs to ask what are the decisions chief executives are looking for into their business systems. The four critical dimensions for the integrated platform consist of:

• Human Capital
• Knowledge Process
• Culture
• Infrastructures

Mr. Steven Ing concluded by mentioning that there are two differentiators for making businesses successful.

• Quality of the information that can be surfaced out of the infrastructures that one has
• Quality of people to drive actions as a result of intelligence

That was pretty cool overview of business insights for the business intelligence business.

Human Continuity:

Then, strategist and corporate motivator Mr. Roger Konopasek came on stage to bring the crowd back from information overloaded into living-the-very-moment. Of course, he started it with a joke and the crowd ate it up. Roger was to deliver the message about "Attracting and retaining a team of the best & brightest".

According to Roger, nobody wants to hire polite and nice young people anymore. The biggest asset for now (according to trend) is to have a brain which is well connected to the mouth so that you can express your idea clearly. The salary culture as we know it, may be a thing in the past.

Go and do what you have a passion for and he asked you to check out the concept of Wikinomics.

He also highlighted that the world needs to shift from a culture of monetory-focus to more advance thinking focus by human advancement and human continuity in a holistic approach discounting communism. He gave a few examples:

1. South West Airline organizational culture focuses on taking care of employees' heart and doesn't offer the best of salary.
2. Global warming and energy efficiency.


The Future of Business Intelligence - Now!

Then came on stage Mr. Steve Illingworth(Senior Manager of Business Information Optimization for HP Asia Pacific to talk about the future of Business Intelligence.

Mainly he talked about HP Neoview System; a data warehousing system that has the following features:

• Very powerful (you will find out why later)
  
• Comes in a box - Check out why is system-in-a-box good for sales
• A system that doesn't shut down (24 x 7 self maintaining and automatic upgrades)
  
• Pre-configured scenarios for finance, telco and retail industry
• Using Neoview system, we don't need 2 or 3 full time DBAs

The fuss about HP Neoview system is that it comes with a good story and from a good background, as much as the background does for Mr. Steve Illingworth, who has more than 20 years experience from Oracle.

HP Neoview is created when HP current CEO Mr. Mark Hurd took over the office from Carly Fiorina. He had a problem to have a single view of the organization and he didn't have business intelligence. So, Mr. Mark Hurd hired the CIO from Walmart which was using Teradata System for their BI/DW system.

So, HP then assembled a team to work out not only the solution for HP's business intelligence requirements and eventually the solution was promoted to become Neoview System. This is good to hear, it proves a precedence where products are developed based on real scenarios and not based on some ingenious thinking. It is happening in HP. This is important because it takes away all the concerns of original concept and ethics of copying.

It is able to satisfy HP and Walmart requirements. This makes it so powerful!

SAS is completely certified with HP Neoview system.

In fact, the key to it is that HP Neoview system is the most advanced Data warehousing system available to the market NOW!.

But we forgot to ask Steve about the projected life cycle of the product.

BIDW Best Practices:

Then, Mr. Yap Chee Wai (Business Development Manager of Sun Microsystems Malaysia) gave a talk about "Making Business Intelligence Data Warehouse (BIDW) Infrastructure Easy.

SUN Microsystem is an infrastructure company. Mr. Yap gave overviews about best practices in terms of SAS infrastructure and the technologies available such as Solaris 10 (which includes zfs; next generation file system).

Conquering Yourself!

Morning session was concluded by Datin Paduka Sharifah Mazlina Syed Abdul Kadir, the first asian woman who conquered the north and south poles. She shared her experience from both conquering the north and south poles and reminded the crowd about global warming effects and self conquering.

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