SAS

Historically, DataFlux has had a broad focus across industry sectors and across organisation sizes. SAS, on the other hand, is well-known for focusing on the top end of the market. It is common when companies are absorbed like this that the parent company will continue to claim that the relevant products will be marketed independently but in practice that never happens: salespeople prefer low hanging fruit and that is the existing client base. For all intents and purposes therefore we expect DataFlux sales to be concentrated on the SAS user base. This is also likely to mean that companies that are otherwise non-SAS users may move to other platforms in the fullness of time.

SAS has a rich partner program but it is difficult to isolate partners that are specific to Dataflux data profiling/discovery.

Customer numbers are measured in terms of thousands though how many of these are using profiling/discovery as opposed to other elements of the Data Management Platform is not clear. In any case it will be a significant number and many of these are household names.

Data profiling and discovery is a part of the DataFlux Data Management Platform, which is an integrated (truly integrated) platform with common metadata across the entire suite. It runs under Windows, Linux and AIX. JDBC and ODBC are supported and there are native drivers for Greenplum, DB2, Informix, MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, SQL Server and SAP Sybase. However, there are no facilities for supporting non-normalised data such as Oracle nested tables. On the other hand, COBOL copybooks are supported; along with text files; XML; and spreadsheets; as well as Hadoop and Hive.

SAS is a major worldwide organisation with offices all around the globe. DataFlux thus enjoys the consulting, support and training capabilities that one would expect from a company of the size of SAS.

SAS in general has a wide customer base across all industry sectors but, of course, we are here concerned with the insurance sector. Here, as well as in other markets, the company tends to focus on the largest companies.

Overall, SAS has thousands of customers. Relatively few Solvency II case studies are listed on the SAS web site but we suspect (actually we know) that this as much to do with organisations not wanting their names to be known as anything else. It is also a result of these case studies being specifically linked to the company's risk management solution and not also to its data governance.

To support Solvency II regulations you need both risk management and data governance to ensure that the data is timely, accurate and as complete as possible. You also need data governance because you need to be able to prove that you are actually using the relevant models to support your business, so you need some sort of monitoring capability.

The headline SAS product supporting Solvency II is SAS Risk Management for Insurance which includes features to support firm-wide risk (calculation of Pillar I requirements), market risk management, P&C underwriting risk, life underwriting risk, risk data management and risk reporting (Pillar 2 and 3 requirements). Relevant data models are included in the product along with relevant ETL (extract, transform and load) capabilities to support the creation of relevant data marts for analytic purposes.

The data governance aspect of Solvency II compliance is provided by the SAS DataFlux Data Management Platform. This is a an integrated suite of products, built on top of a single infrastructure (so this is truly integrated and not a bunch of acquisitions that have been bolted together) that provides data profiling, data cleansing, data enrichment, ETL and other data integration options, and, for those that require it, master data management. The platform also provides specific facilities to support data stewards and data governance processes.

SAS, as one might expect, provides all the services one could wish for and it also has a number of systems integrators as partners, such as Accenture, Capgemini and Deloitte Consulting, who can also provide relevant services.