Many of us in the SAS world are responsible for the data that feeds the various business intelligence, analytics and business solutions provided by SAS. We’ve been involved in data integration, data migration, data quality, ETL / ELT, data access projects that support SAS solutions or are used for other analytical or operational systems. We have long since recognized the critical role that well managed, trusted data can play when it comes to driving the business. And on the flipside, we’ve seen the damage that can be done or the cost involved if an organization struggles with data problems.

We thought it would be a good idea to start several community based mechanisms to facilitate communication and interaction among those of us that use SAS to perform data management related activities. We recently launched the SAS Enterprise Data Management and Integration Community and Discussion Forum, which contains threads about product usage, troubleshooting, product announcements, product enhancement requests, etc.

It’s basically an open forum that can be used to discuss all things related to SAS data management topics, products, etc. This forum is a great way to interact with SAS product experts, both product management and developers, as well as other SAS users. We just started the forum but we are seeing a good amount of traffic and the value of the forum will grow over time as more people participate. In addition, we are going to start a Data Management blog – initially the data management topics can be found in this sascom voices blog but we’ll be moving to a Data Management branded blog in the next several months. If you have topic suggestions or topics that you’d like us to cover, please let us know.

We’re excited about the momentum and interest that we are seeing in our data management capabilities and we hope that you can actively participate in the forum and the blog. From a product perspective, SAS has moved to provide a complete data management solution that provides a unified set of tools to support data integration, data quality, and master data management initiatives. This data management capability includes the ability to connect to virtually any data source including relational databases, packaged applications, message queues, web services, etc.

We’ll be blogging more about this approach and what we see in the overall market and SAS customers, but for now, you can check out our Data Evolution Whitepaper on the importance of using a unified data management platform and - of course, visit the data management discussion forum mentioned above.

Stay tuned for more!!