As promised last June (CI No 1,934), SAS Institute Inc has begun shipping version 6.08 of its cross-system application development system: the SAS System for Information Delivery. The new release sees the System climb off the mainframe for the first time and there are the expected implementations for OS/2, Microsoft Corp Windows and Digital Equipment Corp’s OpenVMS. The other change is support for object-orientated technology within the application development environment. At the same time the Executive Information System has been bumped up from its ‘experimental’ status to a full product. The Executive Information System is just one of several new products being bundled with the new version; the others include a gateway with IBM Corp’s CICS, which, the Cary, North Carolina company claims, enables mainframe-based CICS users to tap into all of the SAS features and SAS/LAB, previously an experimental release, which provides data analysis tools, designed to aid users without vast experience in the area.
