The company has entered into a strategic partnership -- collaborative business intelligence -- with Intraspect Software of US to bring in the latter's knowledge management solutions to India.

Knowledge management solutions play a significant part in converting raw data into intelligent and usefull information to decision makers in a company. Usually, a company generates lot of raw data in its day-to-day functioning, which if collected and analysed would result in intelligent information usefull for business purposes.

But today, a lot of raw data, including the exchanges through mails are not analysed. In this context, the new initiative, CBI seeks to plug the loopholes. As per the new iniative, explains SAS country manager, Gourish Hosangady, even the unstructured datagenerated from e-mails, text documents, web pages and spreadsheets will be combined to provide the total analysis of data.

The group memory in the SAS software covers all functions inclluding online analytical processing to ERP and enables users to fire off search requests and receive links to documents that others have filed to the system. Each document will have a thread history that provides the context and can be further analysed.

"A company's staff will have access to all correlated data for expediting decision making process," Hosangady said.

But, datawarehousing also serves similar purposes. "No, its all about making a strategic sense out of the information available. Data and intelligent information are different. Your success depends on the management of knowledge you have," he said.

SAS is planning to enter consultancy in a major way. It has been providing consultancy to its domestic clients and has put in place a new team to elaborate the operations.

In India, the company will now focuson companies in the vertical segment, fast moving consumer goods (FMCG), pharmaceuticals, retail and banking for providing industry-specific solutions, according Hosangady. Another major target will be the government agencies.

He said the intelligent solutions are key to improving bottomlines of the corporates. Another key area of focus will be education. SAS seeks to provide a range of tools and develop a community well-versed with the SAS solutions to carry on further.

SAS is expecting a 50-60 per cent growth in business in India. It has clients like Reserve Bank of India, Citibank and Hutchinson Max in the country.