SAS targets digital marketing with Customer Intelligence 360, updates architecture and IoT tools

Analytics giant SAS announced a new digital marketing product called Customer Intelligence 360, as well as updating its analytics architecture and providing more support for IoT data.

Image: Conner Forrest/CBS Interactive

On Tuesday, at the 2016 SAS Global Forum, SAS announced Customer Intelligence 360, a product that it said will "fill the void" for analytics in digital marketing.

Customer Intelligence 360 acts as a hub that combines data from disparate channels so that marketers can more effectively use it to power their campaigns. The goal is to break down data silos and eliminate the fragmentation that can happen across large organizations.

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By combining these data sources, SAS said that it can give marketers a more complete view of the customers that they are targeting. An example given in the press release announcing the product is that marketers using SAS Customer Intelligence 360 could know when a customer is passing a retail store and immediately send that person a personalized offer.

The new product offers guided analytics, which provides automatic segmentation and algorithms that add context to the data for a marketing campaign. Being that all the data is aggregated into a central hub, marketers will be able to use it more readily wherever they are.

The single view of the data is combined with a single pane view of the customer. Customer Intelligence 360 shows marketers how customers are behaving on digital properties, as well as what they are doing in a brick and mortar store, for example. Marketers can then measure how their content is performing on which demographic.

Customer Intelligence 360 is a multi-tenant solution that will be delivered as a SaaS product. It will start with two core modules:

  1. SAS 360 Discover - Data discovery that offers reporting and intelligence on customer behavioral data captured through mobile or the web.
  2. SAS 360 Engage - This lets users create what SAS called "digital customer journeys," so marketers can optimize how they are reaching them.

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According to the press release, SAS will be releasing more modules and additional tools for Customer Intelligence throughout 2016.

At the SAS Global Forum, the company also made two other major announcements. For starters, the company announced Viya, a new analytics and visualization architecture that is focused on cloud-native apps, analytics investigation and machine learning.

Additionally, SAS announced its new Analytics for IoT, which aims to make it easier for SAS users to integrate and utilize data from their connected devices and sensors. For a more in-depth look at SAS Viya and SAS Analytics for IoT, check out this article on our sister site TechRepublic for more information.

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