SAS, IBM Global Services team up with joint BI offering for customers in EMEA

SAS, the market leader in business intelligence, today announced it has teamed up with IBM, the world's largest information technology services provider, to jointly offer business intelligence solutions that will help customers throughout Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) increase customer profitability, improve the return of marketing campaigns while lowering the cost of executing them, and gain an enterprise-wide view of their business performance.

SAS Solutions for Customer Relationship Management, Marketing Automation and Strategic Performance Management will be offered as part of IBM Global Services' Enterprise Customer Analytics solution.

"One outcome of the economic downturn has been that organisations are increasingly looking to ensure that new technology investment delivers real business benefits and rapid return on investment. In this environment, using business intelligence solutions, eg to analyse and streamline supplier relationships or identify unprofitable customers, are attractive propositions that can directly impact the bottom line. The alliance between SAS and IBM Global Services comes at a good time in the market and represents the teaming up of one of the most established business intelligence software companies and the largest IT services organisation. IDC believes that this is a strong alliance that can have a real impact on the business intelligence solutions market, especially if the two partners work together to quickly establish a significant number of skilled consultants," says Marianne Kolding, Director of European Services Research, IDC.

Companies in mass-consumer industries such as telecommunications, financial services and retail are under intense pressure to increase customer profitability and lifetime value by providing their customers with relevant services and product offerings. They can only do this with complete and accurate intelligence on their customers. The joint SAS and IBM offering speeds time to implementation, and therefore to return on investment, in business intelligence by combining solutions from SAS and infrastructure and services from IBM in a one-stop-shop package," says Matthew Mikell, Director of Channels and Alliances for SAS International.

"This agreement demonstrates IBM's commitment to offer the best business intelligence offering of software, hardware and services to our customers in EMEA. IBM always looks to partner with leaders in their field and we recognise SAS as a leader in business intelligence solutions," says Mark Ramsey, Global Business Intelligence Community Leader with IBM Global Services.

The agreement and accompanying joint development efforts will result in:

a. Creation of consulting practices in IBM Global Services units throughout EMEA supporting SAS solutions.
b. Consultants that are trained in integrating SAS business intelligence solutions with existing transactional systems and other IBM e-business applications.
c. Integration of SAS business intelligence solutions and DB2 Universal Database to further enhance performance on all IBM server platforms.

The deal follows on from similar agreements signed by SAS and IBM Global Services in the US in early 2000 and in Canada early 2001. SAS is also an IBM Strategic Alliance Partner.