SAS Institute Expands Distribution Channels 11.11.97 ACTION ITEMS D S *
SAS Institute Inc. has announced details of a focused alliance strategy in data warehousing, data mining and decision support, that continues the expansion from its traditional direct sales model to embrace alternative distribution channels. SAS Institute is developing strategic reseller and referral-based partnerships with select vendors whose specialized competencies complement SAS data warehousing, data mining and decision support solutions.
Barrett Joyner, SAS Institute Vice President of North American Sales and Marketing, said, "For more than 20 years, SAS Institute has distinguished itself by providing world class technology and the technical know-how to apply it in solving our customer's business problems. Traditionally, we've partnered directly with our customers, but today we need to move further in the direction of providing complete solutions to customers. In partnering selectively, we're increasing the value of our customer solution while expanding our channels of distribution."
Recent alliances include Price Waterhouse, KPMG, Deloitte & Touche, IBM, Avnet Computer, and Hewlett-Packard. In the most extensive agreement to date, NCR will become the Institute's first significant reseller, bundling SAS. software in its Scalable Data Warehouse solutions. At META Group's recent Application Delivery Strategies conference, John Ladley and Wolfgang Martin, both analysts at META Group, identified SAS Institute as "one of the few vendors that could provide a truly integrated solution including extraction, transformation, data cleansing, and warehouse administration. NCR's large-scale data warehouse integration with SAS software is a positive for customers." SAS Institute and NCR both acknowledge that a mix-and-match "best-of-breed" partnering approach is simply not successful.
"By making it easy for a select group of alliance partners to use our software when they deliver solutions," said Wink Swain, SAS Institute general manager of market development, "we are effectively opening up further opportunities that we may have otherwise missed. SAS Institute is the leader in providing both the IT tools and architecture for data warehousing, and the business user exploitation tools." Swain added, "Joining forces selectively will help to fill a widely recognized shortage in skills in the market relating to delivery of warehouse solutions."
The addition of NCR's Teradata storage devices to SAS Institute's already extensive heterogeneous storage architecture for warehousing will extend organizations' ability to store data in the most suitable form for their warehousing applications.
"A wider group of our customers will benefit by being able to build data warehouses much faster, involving less risk, and achieving a faster return on investment," noted Joyner. "And, customer benefit is why SAS Institute is adding this important distribution channel."
Sentry Market Research also calls SAS Institute "the top Analytics vendor by at least a 3:1 margin, with a highly integrated offer - from data transformation to exploitation." The combination of SAS software and NCR's data warehousing platforms and Teradata database offers customers an extension to SAS Institute's successful open data warehousing solution, ranging from NT data marts to very-large-scalable enterprise data warehouses. NCR and SAS Institute have complementary product offerings and a commitment to data warehousing, analysis, and professional services.
SAS software includes OLAP, query and reporting, EIS, data mining, analysis, data visualization, and application-development interfaces. SAS software is client/server and Web enabled. SAS Institute also delivers business solutions that are complete packages for financial consolidation and reporting, clinical trials analysis, oil and gas analysis and IT service management.
For more information, see http://www.sas.com