NCR, SAS Create Global Strategic Alliance 10.21.97 ACTION ITEMS D S *
Combining their data warehousing and data mining/analytics expertise, NCR and SAS Institute, Inc. announced that they are creating a global strategic alliance to provide complete, fully integrated solutions for companies of all sizes, across all industries. In addition, NCR will become the first reseller of SAS products and services.
"The fact that NCR will resell our products reflects the level of commitment that we are making to them," said Barrett Joyner, vice president, North American Sales and Marketing for SAS Institute. "As strategic partners, our customers will benefit by being able to build and exploit data warehouses much faster, involving less risk, and achieving a faster return on investment than ever before. And, customer benefit is what this alliance is all about."
NCR and SAS Institute will integrate SAS data management software and data mining, data extraction and transformation tools into NCR's data warehouse solutions, to enhance the value of customer data warehouses and extend the reach of the NCR Teradata RDBMS data warehouse engine.
By significantly cutting systems integration and implementation time, customers will be able to get answers from their data quicker; the right answers at the right time to critical business questions, such as "Who are my best customers?" and "What product mix is most profitable?"
At NCR's annual global customer conference in San Diego, the companies outlined the scope of the new alliance:
Although worldwide in nature, the alliance will first be introduced in North America, and then in Europe and the Asia Pacific area. NCR, which has a long- standing relationship with SAS Institute, will begin reselling SAS products in January 1998.
"The benefits of this alliance to end users are numerous, including the extensive experience offered by both firms, along with an architecture that is built for growth," said John Ladley, program director for META Group's Application Delivery Strategies Service. "The NCR/SAS collaboration provides customers with one-stop shopping for a range of data warehouse and data mining products, services and support all of which are being provided by companies with proven track records."
Customers already benefiting from the NCR/SAS approach to data warehousing and data mining include Bank of America, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, JC Penney and J.D. Williams.
"The NCR/SAS alliance will demonstrate that our integrated solutions will be more valuable than the sum of their parts," said Mark Hurd, vice president Marketing for NCR's Computer Systems Group. "The combination of both companies' strengths represents the strongest data warehousing solutions available for customers who increasingly want integrated systems designed and tested to work together, rather than a collection of products needing to be integrated. Customers want to be able to implement their data warehouses quickly and seamlessly, so that they can get the right answer to any question at any time, anywhere in the organization."
NCR/SAS Offerings:
The combination of SAS software and NCR's data warehousing platform the NCR Teradata database and NCR WorldMark servers will offer customers complete and open data warehousing solutions, ranging from Windows NT data marts to verylarge -scale enterprise data warehouses.
Data management and analysis tools such as SAS/Warehouse Administrator, SAS/Enterprise Miner, SAS/Enterprise Reporter and the full range of SAS statistical analysis products are included in the new partnership. NCR intends to bundle these products as part of NCR's Scalable Data Warehouse solutions, such as RightSTART entry-level data warehouses, data mining, and dependent data mart offers.
A combined force of more than 600 NCR and SAS data warehousing/mining service professionals will support these programs by providing services that include Data Warehousing/Data Mart consulting, Business/Information Discovery, Logical and Physical Database design, Transformation, System Integration, Knowledge Discovery and Model Development, Data Mining and Analytical Application, and Project Management.
More information about NCR can be found at: http://www.ncr.com