SAS and Singapore university set up training lab

SINGAPORE--Business intelligence (BI) vendor, SAS, has together with the Singapore Management University (SMU) established a laboratory on the local university's campus.

Called the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Laboratory, the facility is equipped with some S$660,000 (US$485,944) worth of BI software and backend hardware. SAS has also contributed S$180,000 (US$132,536) toward bond-free scholarships for undergraduate and postgraduates in Information Systems (IS) Management, with emphasis on BI.

SMU's School of IS will incorporate the SAS BI software into its course content. According to an SAS statement, the school plans to offer a series of professional training and outreach forums for industry members.

Professor Steven Miller, dean of the School of IS at SMU said: "It is essential in today’s economy for our Business-IT students to have a strong grasp of the concepts, technologies and applications that are employed to gather and analyse large amounts of data and information for enterprise operations."

Bill Lee, SAS managing director, Singapore and emerging markets said: "There needs to be greater [industry] involvement with the tertiary sector to plug IT industry's talent gap."

Lee added that "platform-specific courses" integrated with the curriculum create "work-ready" graduates.

A recent report by analyst firm, Gartner, showed the Asian BI software market is still growing "healthily" amid a global slowdown. According to Gartner, the market in the region is primed to hit US$577.6 million in 2011, fueled by the region's "greenfield opportunities" and economic and structural developments.