SAS and SAP partner on big data analytics

According to SAS Institute founder and CEO, Jim Goodnight, this is only in place for 90 to 120 days as a co-marketing pilot programme. But the fact that the news is not just out but formally announced at a major industry conference, the chances are high that it will stick. And if it sticks this could make real waves in the big data analytics arena.

The `it’ in question is a partnership between SAS Institute, the doyen and seriously big cheese amongst complex analytics vendors around the world, and SAP. It was announced at SAP’s TechEd conference in the USA this week.

The two companies have had a love:hate relationship for years, with SAS often seeing a potential relationship in the fact that SAP generated the numbers, often in huge quantities, and it had the skills and software tools to make analytical sense of it all.  Now it seems that a love match may at last be on the cards.

If that is so, then the prospects for business users could be significant. Any benefits will take time to appear. There are certainly no joint venture products or services being waved around at present, and it has been described as `a toe in the water with customers’ for the time being.

That does mean some customers are obvious involved in some form of beta program, however. And given the technical depth of both vendors, most obvious integration problems will certainly have been fixed by now. According to Diginomica analyst, Dennis Howlett, both companies have already been figuring out how their technologies fit together.

The initial market sectors to be addressed will be financial services, telecommunications, retail, consumer products, and manufacturing.

Both companies have experience of high performance, in-memory processing environments, and Howlett suggests that SAP’s HANA system will provide the in-memory database services, while SAS will provide the high powered maths required for large analytics operations.

Perhaps the most tempting prospect for the long term is the fact that HANA-based services are now starting to appear as SaaS. It is highly unlikely that HANA-based SAS analytics services will appear as SaaS in the near future. But by the same token, it is an opportunity neither company is likely to walk away from in the long term.

What is more, SAS is reckoned to have more data scientists on the staff than any other IT vendor – and most other businesses. Using cloud services to help deliver their capabilities to an ever-wider range of customers is bound to look tempting, even now.