Last week Forrester Research picked on Business Intelligence (BI) as an area that wasn't ripe for SaaS as yet; this week SAS has set out to prove the analyst firm wrong with plans to spend $70 million on a Cloud Computing fdata centre to expand its on-demand applications.
The 38,000-square-foot Cloud Computing facility will be based at its Cary, North Carolina headquarters. The centre will have two 10,000-square-foot server farms, with the first one to be completed in 2010 and a second to be built when the first reaches 80% capacity.
The first should be up and running by mid-2010. The second will be built as a shell and then added to as needed once server one nears capacity. The facility will be built to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards for water and energy conservation.
“There's a significant shift going on in customers' perspectives on where they want to invest and how to invest in business analytics solutions,” explained Keith Collins, SVP and CTO, SAS. “Part of that is reducing the costs of managing a solution.
“If you look at all the hype around Cloud Computing and SaaS you do see the reality of what customers are looking for, so we believe the time is right to make the investment and expand our capabilities and offer SAS on-demand and SaaS business analytics solutions.”
SAS plans to launch two SaaS offerings in the second quarter of this year. The firm has had an on demand offering for several years.
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