Ageas Deploys Offerings from SAS

CARY, N.C., Sept. 3 — Ageas, one of the UK’s leading insurance providers, has modernized its business intelligence infrastructure to exploit big data and better understand its customers thanks to technology provided by business analytics leader SAS.

The insurer, which employs over 6,000 people at offices across the UK and has approximately 9 million policyholders, has upgraded its IT systems with a new SAS Grid Manager environment. This will deliver new analytics capability and provide the executives and management teams with a full picture of the insurer’s business performance data assets on a regular basis.

“We’re particularly pleased about the new technology as it offers a quick and easy way to analyze key information from across the business,” said Angela Hails, Head of Business Intelligence at Ageas. “It also offers a stable platform to answer business challenges, as well as the capacity to scale up with growing data requirements. Ultimately it gives us the ability to better understand our customers.”

“We’re delighted Ageas has decided to use SAS to help develop a deeper understanding of its data,” said Mike Pell, Executive Director for SAS UK and Ireland. “In the information economy, it’s crucial that businesses like Ageas are able to properly collect and analyze that data to give them the power to know all they need to about their customers.”

SAS solutions deployed by Ageas are:

• SAS Office Analytics, which enables users to easily access and analyze large amounts of data. Guided analysis via built-in tasks and visual process flows means SAS novices can quickly perform sophisticated analyses, schedule projects, share results and embed outputs for others to use. IT is free to focus on strategic initiatives while dynamic, interactive content can be published to Microsoft Office and web users.

• SAS Grid Manager, which reliably and cost-effectively meets peak computing demands by creating a shared, managed environment with workload balancing, high availability and parallel processing. Low-cost commodity hardware resources can be added incrementally, so there’s no need to size today’s environment for what you anticipate your needs will be a few years from now.

• SAS Visual Analytics, which is part of SAS’ suite of high-performance analytics solutions, and enables organizations to easily map out and understand analytic insights and share those with employees and customers across an organization. It delivers rapid, in-memory analysis and interactive dashboards for reporting in-depth data visualization.