Marlow, Buckinghamshire-based SAS Software Ltd held its SASVille show recently at the Royal Garden Hotel, Kensington. The show was based around a fictitious company called IDS Holdings, a holding company for subsidiaries operating in various market areas: retail, finance, pharmaceutical, healthcare and power all integrated at the data processing division thanks to SAS. And if the company is considering an acquisition or merger invol ving the integration of two companies with different computer systems then SAS can deal with the problem as, thanks to its MultiVendor Architecture, it is relatively hardware-independent. Each market area at the show had its own stand and the idea was to show the versatility of the SAS system. All stands demon strate how apparently easy it is for the end user to build applications in the various market areas using SAS/Assist and the company had one or two new tools on show. At the pharmaceutical stand Ph-Clinical was being demonstrated, which is currently in beta test but is expected to be released soon. This tool is for use by lab technicians in pharmaceutical companies through to employees of the Federal Drugs Administration in the US. Available only with version 6.07 products, the menu-driven tool enables users to build a selection query using dynamic links to the clinical trial data entered at an earlier phase in the drug’s development. It was designed as an exploratory tool for criteria selection necessary in clinical trials and was developed with the close co-operation of 25 pharmaceutical companies. One market area where the SAS System has been very successful over the past few years is healthcare as this is an area where users are having to modernise their computing power and have data at their fin gertips in a way they never used to. Indeed, the team on the healthcare stand was glowing with the news that the UK Family Health Care Service Computer Unit has selected the SAS System to link up data from various personal computer packages. The Unit was looking for a software system that could access and integrate data from both MUMPS and several proprietary languages and be used as a management information system. SAS was chosen as the toolset that could see the Unit through as it changes from MUMPS on PDP-11 to a Unix system. SAS says that its information delivery system enables software developed on personal computers to be lifted onto Unix boxes with a simple recompile. Largely because of these data integration capabilities, the show was crawling with consultants which would seem to be a good thing for SAS.
