The applications suite tightly integrates financial consolidation, reporting, planning and analysis and strategy formulation tools by pulling together several SAS financial products – Financial Management, Strategic Performance Management, Activity-Based Management, Risk Management and Corporate Compliance.

All the applications run on SAS’ new SAS 9 BI (business intelligence) platform.

[Financial Intelligence] is a marketing message that integrates our broad financial and compliance offerings at SAS, Phil Strand, Global Strategist for Corporate Governance and Financial Intelligence at Cary, North Carolina-based SAS, told ComputerWire.

It helps differentiate us from our two main competitors in the enterprise space, namely Hyperion [Solutions] and Cognos who are both strong in financial analytics but offer separate products, Strand said.

Hyperion offers Financial Management and Planning while Cognos offers Finance (formerly Lex 2000) and an application built on budgeting and planning software acquired from Adaytum.

With SAS the ROI for the CFO is attractive because they only have to buy one product from us that’s fully integrated on top of the SAS 9 BI platform, Strand added.

We also include Sarbanes-Oxley and risk management software components that further differentiate our solution.

SAS says that Financial Intelligence is its biggest SAS 9 solution to date, citing increased pressures on CFOs being brought on by government regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II and international financial reporting standards.

Lots of business decisions today are made by the CFO. This product helps CFOs make those decisions, Strand said.

According to Strand, most of SAS’ analytic applications suite has now been re-architected for the SAS 9 platform with the exception of a couple of components on the human capital and IT side.

This near-architectural parity means that users can purchase SAS’ financial solutions in a piecemeal manner and still build outwards.

You’re not buying SAS 9 every time. You buy it once and add on from there.

Strand pointed out that Finance Intelligence is itself part of SAS’ broader performance management message.

Unlike many of our competitors we don’t just have a financial focus. We also cover customer, supplier and IT intelligence as well.

Strand expects SAS to grow its double its performance management business next year by focusing on vertical industry specific solutions in North America and Canada and more generic financial solutions in the EMEA region.

Pricing for Financial Intelligence package starts at $250,000 up to $400,000 depending on the number and types of users supported.