Huizen, November 27 - 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 whilst 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, e.g. 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 share-of-wallet by providing their customers with relevant services and product offerings. They can only to 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 software 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 recognize 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:
· Creation of consulting practices in IBM Global Services units throughout EMEA supporting SAS solutions
· Consultants that are trained in integrating SAS business intelligence solutions with existing transactional systems and other IBM e-business applications
· 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 United States in early 2000 and in Canada early 2001. SAS is also an IBM Strategic Alliance Partner.
About SAS
SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 39,000 sites - including 99 of Fortune 100 businesses - to develop more profitable relationships with their customers and suppliers, to make better, more accurate and informed decisions, and to drive their organizations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics, and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For more than 25 years, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know(tm). For more information, visit www.sas.com.
Contacts:
Hussein Ibrahim, Communicatie Manager SAS Nederland
Tel: 035-699 69 47
Fax: 035-694 19 52
Mob: 06 22 99 7273
E-mail: hussein.ibrahim@snl.sas.com
Anton-Jan Thijssen, Hill and Knowlton
Mob: 06-218 737 07
Fax: 020-644 9736
E-mail: ajthijssen@hillandknowlton.com