Data warehousing vendor SAS Institute Inc. has released a data access product for customers of PeopleSoft Inc.'s suite of ERP (enterprise resource management) software.
With the addition of SAS/Access to PeopleSoft, the U.S. ERP vendor becomes the third after SAP AG and Baan Co. NV, to be supported by SAS Institute's access software, said Frank Nauta, worldwide product manager for SAS Institute's data warehousing and data quality products. The PeopleSoft product is used to manage human resource data, CRM (customer resource management) data, as well as financial and supply chain data.
The SAS software adds speed and efficiency to the interaction between users and databases, particularly the extraction of data, Nauta said Wednesday at a data warehousing conference in Washington, D.C. It lets PeopleSoft customers navigate the structure of the PeopleSoft system and identify and organize the data they need without being experts in the PeopleSoft software, Nauta said.
The product improves upon existing access software because it mines metadata tags and rules placed on the information by PeopleSoft and presents the information back to the user graphically in a form that's more meaningful, Nauta said.
PeopleSoft's public sector customers will be SAS Institute's initial focus for the new access product. Those customers, which include many U.S. federal and state agencies, have been complaining about the lack of an effective access product, some of them saying they had better access to their data before their ERP implementations, Nauta said.
SAS Institute announced the immediate availability of SAS/Access to PeopleSoft at the data warehousing conference on Tuesday. Pricing is based on the number of PCs a server serves, Nauta said.
The next access product SAS Institute plans to add will improve user interaction with Oracle Corp.'s financial database, said Wally Maczka, a spokesman for SAS Institute. The company also plans to formally announce that SAP has certified its access software for the company's R/3 software, Maczka said.