The SAS executive noted that while banks are still the biggest users of Business Intelligence, new customers are mostly coming from the non-financial sector, such as manufacturing, retail, and utilities. Some Philippine companies that signed up with SAS last year were Shopwise Supercenter, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Philippines Corp., TDK Fujitsu Philippines Corp., Maynilad Water Services Inc., Toyota Financials Services Corp., and Marketing Convergence Inc.
According to Halili, the companies are now relying on SAS BI to improve the quality of their products and services, as well as help them in performance forecasting and credit risk management. On the other hand, he admitted that some local users do have concerns regarding the availability and quality of data, and the BI supplier's understanding of the business, global practices, and overall experience.
To address the concerns about supplier experience and global practices, SAS established it's Center of Excellence two years ago. Today, the centre has over 100 SAS consultants who serve clients in the Philippines as well as across the Asia Pacific region. These certified consultants are deployed to Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Pakistan, and Iceland, and such is the level of demand, the company is now looking to hire 50 more consultants.
The centre in the Philippines was chosen because of the Filipino's reputation for being hardworking and passionate, plus the ability to communicate fluently in English. The center of excellence is actually part of SAS's employee retention strategy, as since it gives SAS's employees the chance to travel and work on projects abroad they are less likely to leave.
With headquarters in North Carolina, SAS made its first foray into the enterprise BI market in March 2004 when it began shipping SAS 9. Since then, it has been ratcheting up efforts to overcome its reputation as "simply being a vendor of complex analytic forecasting and modeling tools for statisticians and other power users."
These efforts seem to be paying off as sales of BI applications accounted for 29% of the company's 2007 worldwide revenues which totaled US$2.15 billion, up 15% over 2006 results. The Americas accounted for 44% of the total revenue while Europe/Middle East/Africa and Asia Pacific accounted for 45% and 11%, respectively.
