October 16, 2000

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Amazon.com Taps SAS For Business-Intelligence Tools

E-retailer plans to simplify internal processes and boost customer-service efforts

By Rick Whiting

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mazon.com Inc. is implementing business-intelligence tools and analytic applications from SAS Institute Inc. as part of its efforts to become as profitable as it is big. The companies last week disclosed an extensive five-year deal under which Amazon .com will use SAS's technology to improve relationships with customers and suppliers and for financial and business-strategy analysis.

Amazon.com plans to leverage the SAS products to simplify internal processes and predict customer demand, Jim Miller, the company's supply-chain operations VP, said in a statement. The SAS software is also expected to boost customer-service efforts, says John Overdeck, Amazon .com's customer-relationship management VP. A spokeswoman for Amazon.com wouldn't comment further, and the deal's value was undisclosed.

The contract gives Amazon.com access to the SAS Intelligent Warehouse, a data warehouse administration system; SAS Enterprise Miner, a data-mining tool; and SAS Solution for Balanced Scorecard, business-performance-management software. Analysts speculate that SAS tools for gathering and analyzing Web-site clickstream data, as well as CRM and supplier-relationship management analytical applications, also are part of the deal.

Amazon.com will use the SAS products to capture data from its Oracle operational systems for CRM and supply-chain analysis, financial reporting, and business-performance measurement, says Theresa Tesh, SAS's senior director of contracts. The software will run on HP-UX and Sun Solaris platforms--the core of Amazon.com's IT system--as well as Linux systems in the future, she says.

Oracle disclosed last year that Amazon.com was building a multiterabyte customer-data warehouse using Oracle software. It was no surprise that Amazon.com turned to SAS for expanded business-intelligence capabilities. Says Mike Schiff, data warehousing strategies director at Current Analysis, "SAS is clearly a specialist in this field."

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