Joining SAS in North Carolina as a marketer from New York City has been a real eye opener. Language like OLAP, DI, ERM, DPPM and various other business intelligence buzzwords have been thrown my way in a vernacular I am not completely used to. The cuisine and culture are a little different here too.

I am a former blogger (or once you start, are you forever just a blogger?) for the Association of National Advertiser’s Marketing Maestros blog. During my tenure there, I learned a wealth of knowledge from several chief marketing officers I worked with (one of my last projects at the ANA was a recently released book titled CMO Thought Leaders: The Rise of the Strategic Marketer). One of the key learnings: As a marketer in a new role, go out and spend some time with your consumers. Ask them questions. See how they interact with you.

So that’s what I did and here is what some of our customers had to say about us:

• Can handle large volumes of data quickly
• Can perform tasks unavailable by any other software the corporation licenses
• Good for large datasets
• Increased analytical capabilities
• Rapid exploration and prototyping
• Ability to improve product offerings
• Puts data processing in the hands of the business so that IT does not freeze all progress on business rule development
• I use SAS primarily to generate reports on large amounts of data quickly. It saves me time and effort as well as eliminating manual errors. It saves an awful lot of time and effort.

You learn more about the business from a customer than from any internal collateral or stories. One of the key insights I have also seen is that business intelligence is set for a boom across all industries as data is multiplying at unheard of rates. I look forward to talking more about this on sascom voices as I learn myself.