Executives at the Cary, N.C.-based company touted its new Enterprise Intelligence Platform -- which bundles SAS's multidimensional database and data-integration products with its BI and analytics tools into a package for enterprise users -- as the centerpiece of the new strategy.

The goal, officials said during the annual SAS user conference here last week, is to convince customers that the SAS products can replace relational database management systems, which have traditionally been used to store BI data for analysis.

IMS Health Inc., a Fairfield, Conn.-based provider of market intelligence data to pharmaceutical and health care companies, has started a proof-of-concept project to migrate its 66TB data warehouse to the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform, said Christopher Nickum, global practice leader for sales and account management. He declined to identify the company's current warehouse technology.

Nickum hopes that the SAS tools will let external users from pharmaceutical companies perform faster queries using more-recent data than the current system allows. The migration project will take several years, he said.

Christopher McCann, president of 1-800-Flowers.com Inc. in Carle Place, N.Y., said his company needs an enterprise BI platform in its effort to build a system that can use data from transactional systems in real time to support operational decisions like cross-selling. The company is two years into the three-to-five-year project using SAS tools to build an information-delivery framework that will give users departmental views of data, he said.