SAP and SAS in a strategic partnership

SAP and SAS have unveiled a strategic partnership that is expected to advance in-memory data analysis capabilities for businesses across industries. SAP and SAS will partner closely to create a joint technology and product roadmap designed to leverage the SAP HANA platform and SAS analytics capabilities. By incorporating the in-memory SAP HANA platform into SAS applications and enabling SAS' industry-proven advanced analytics algorithms to run on SAP HANA, decision makers will have the opportunity to leverage the value of real-time data analysis within their existing SAS and SAP HANA environments. The announcement was made at SAP TechEd, being held on October 21-25 in Las Vegas.

SAP and SAS are leaders for in-memory platform technology, advanced analytics and business applications. The collaboration between SAS and SAP is expected to harness the power of combined platforms while helping to eliminate data movement, duplication and reconciliation. It will also enable massive parallelization of computationally intense workloads, all in-memory, enabling new Big Data solutions that could not previously be delivered.

The in-memory functionality is designed to improve data scientists' productivity by accelerating model development, iteration and deployment. The single environment for business applications and advanced analytics is expected to also vastly simplify IT landscape, help reduce costs and deliver real-time performance.

"The partnership of SAS, the market-leading advanced analytics provider, with SAP will simplify Big Data and analytics efforts by reducing data movement and allowing for faster decision-making," said Henry Morris, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Software and Services, Research, IDC. "It can be more efficient to move the model to the data than the data to the model. This relationship will significantly drive value to joint customers."

SAS and SAP plan to execute a co-sell pilot program to engage select joint customers to validate SAS applications running on SAP HANA. The goal of this program is to build and prioritize the two firms' joint technology throughout 2014, in particular for industries such as financial services, telecommunications, retail, consumer products and manufacturing. The applications are expected to target business areas that require a combination of advanced analytics running on an in-memory platform that will be designed to yield high value results. Such opportunities exist in customer intelligence, risk management, asset management and anti-money laundering, among others.