SAS, the leader in business intelligence, recently unveiled a new solution based on VMware virtualisation to monitor, manage and optimise IT operations across all physical and virtual environments.

SAS IT Intelligence for VMware Infrastructure will enable customers to better align IT resources with strategic business goals.

"SAS IT Intelligence for VMware Infrastructure will help us better manage IT costs by more efficiently tracking and optimising physical and virtual resource utilisation," says Kevin McDearis, Senior Vice-President of Engineering for CheckFree, now part of Fiserv.

"We can also measure usage, availability and performance of IT virtual infrastructure more quickly across our electronic payment applications. This virtual overview of resource availability enhances our capacity planning and performance management, so we can process payments quickly and securely."

Integrating the best technologies from SAS and VMware streamlines and simplifies physical and virtual resource utilisation, providing a universal view for IT resource forecasting and foresight into planning scenarios.

"This partnership with VMware extends SAS' expertise in managing open systems and mainframes to virtual environments," explains Keith Collins, Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer for SAS.

"With a more comprehensive view of their IT resources, businesses can more accurately forecast resource requirements; improve the delivery of IT services; account for IT resources down to the minute; and feed results to internal or external billing or revenue systems based on planned business needs. The result is increased ROI driven by better decisions."

With VMware Virtual Centre, SAS IT Intelligence now enables a data centre to automatically run, manage, account for and predict IT needs. VMware Virtual Centre is the management component of VMware Infrastructure, a market-leading data centre virtualisation and management platform.

"Combining SAS business intelligence and analytics software with VMware virtualisation gives customers greater transparency into the utilisation and performance of their IT resources across both physical and virtual environments," says Parag Patel, Vice-President of Alliances at VMware. "This combined solution offers new functionality that customers are increasingly demanding. Especially during the current economic conditions, they need to better understand who is using certain resources and charging back accordingly."

The benefits of VMware virtualisation reach far beyond server consolidation. Customers can benefit from reduced capital and operating expenses, assured business continuity, strengthened security and lower carbon emissions. In addition, there can be significant energy savings and lower capital expenses due to more efficient use of hardware resources - a benefit that can also affect a company's long-term environmental impact.

VMware is a SAS Platinum partner and SAS is a member of the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) Programme.