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SAS: Harnessing the 'Power to Know' for 20 Years in Asia

In: Asian Channels August 2006

Written by Shanti Anne Morais

2006 holds a special place in Business Intelligence (BI) provider SAS’ heart. Globally, 2006 marks SAS’ 30th anniversary, and closer to home, the company celebrates its 20th anniversary in Malaysia as well.
Starting with just 5 employees selling statistical tools and with a portfolio of only 10 customers, SAS Malaysia today is definitely a far cry from this, employing close to 60 people, having over 100 installations with an average increase of 15 new customers every year, and according to market research firm, IDC, holding the No.1 position in the BI market space in Malaysia with 24%.

Jimmy Cheah, managing director, SAS Malaysia elaborates, “From a 5-person (largely technical) organization, we have progressed to having a full service outfit which includes sales, presales, consulting, project management, education and technical support specialists. Aligning with our customers, we have also hired professionals from the industry to serve as business consultants and extended our servicing capability to include business partners with technical or business specialization.”

He adds, “Our regional vision is to be the No.1 BI software vendor and to return significant value to our customers from their investments in SAS. In Malaysia, we are already here, having been recognized by analysts as being the market leader and growing by 30% over the past two years, In addition, our customer base is also growing at a good momentum, by some 20% over the previous year.”

In 2005, SAS once again saw record sales with global total revenue growing 10 percent, from US$1.53 billion to US$1.68 billion. This marked the company’s 29th consecutive year of revenue growth and profitability. Cheah says that SAS Malaysia contributes some 5% towards Asia Pacific (including Japan) revenues. “However, our contribution is beyond revenue as we have developed partners who extend beyond local shores to value-add to customers in the region. In addition, Malaysia has undertaken some leading BI projects/solutions which contribute towards our overall regional expertise and experience.”

Noting that SAS is in the forefront of information technology especially BI, Cheah says that the Malaysian office’s current focus in on extending wider and deeper into the customer’s organization to provide more specialized products from a functional and technical perspective for Enterprise-wide Intelligence.

“From simple query and reporting tools, we have progressed to providing a full integrated Enterprise Intelligence Platform to include products covering data integration (including data quality, Federation & Synchronization), scalable intelligence storage to advanced analytics.

“This end-to-end offering provides a complete platform for the customer to access data from its sources and deliver quality information in the right format to the right person at the right time. Beyond the platform, we have industry specific frameworks for Banks, Insurance, Government, Communications, Retail, Manufacturing, Communications, Hospitality, Healthcare, Transportation, Logistics, Energy and the Academia.”

With regards to SAS’ channel strategy for the region, Cheah explains that SAS Asia Pacific supports three Channels to Market. “These being our SAS strategic integrators, local partners and our alliance partners. SAS Malaysia’s channel strategy is aligned towards this. We have all these three channels locally,” he says.

Elaborating on this he notes:
SIs - include global and large local SIs who invest in solutions that meet their clients’ needs using SAS technologies and industry solutions.

Local partner community - an invaluable part of the SAS eco-system providing a large range of services to meet customers needs.

Alliance Partners – “Teaming up with hardware and software vendors and technology partners ensure a wide range of compatibility and compliance to industry standards and provide unique value propositions to our customers from ISVs who leverage SAS technologies,” says Cheah.

Describing SAS’ channel engagement with their partners, Cheah says, “With the largest, most comprehensive range of BI solutions in the market, our partners need a close working relationship during the whole value chain of the sales, including marketing, pre-sales, consulting, education, technical support and so on. This is not always easy however, SAS has more resources in the Asia Pacific than any other BI vendor.”

According to him, SAS has 3 different engagement approaches in the region:
The SI or the local partner being the prime for the project liaising with the customer, and SAS being a subcontractor.
SAS priming and the SI/partner being a subcontractor.
SAS and the partners are engaged separately by the customer but ensure that they work as a team.

When is comes to selecting their partners, the key is the economic viability of the partnership. “Most partners are “would be if they could be” however, successful partners have a long term commitment towards building a Go-to-Market strategy and capability to meet customers’ needs and goals. For local partners, we develop them towards an industry or solution expertise to extend the value to the customers,” remarks Cheah.

Commenting on which areas of SAS’ channel strategy he feels the company needs to focus on, Cheah says, “Many partners find it difficult to get repeatability for their solutions. SAS aims to make these assets with partners more visible so our customers can leverage the benefits. Another area we are focusing on is ‘partner readiness’. We are working hard with four new SAS Partner Readiness Managers in the Asia Pacific to improve the responsiveness and capabilities of SAS Strategic Integrators to better meet our customers’ needs.”
He adds, “The order of constraints for market adoption of BI technologies means that partners need to evolve with customer/market demands, but more importantly, help drive demand. Economic viability of the channel is difficult on an ad-hoc basis, therefore investment by SAS and its partners in methodologies to assess and move customers along a path that improves their “Time to Intelligence” ensures a steady, more predictable level of engagement. With this critical mass, the SAS channels become mutually supportive and our customers reap the benefits.”

Cheah also notes the importance of alliances and says that the company is working with most major global technology vendors. However, he also stresses that SAS believes that the area of greatest potential is with regional ISVs. Elaborating, he says, “SAS has many technologies, tools and solutions that can be leveraged by ISVs and improve their solution offerings. We look to support ISVs or other technology vendors who wish to leverage SAS in their markets.”

With regards to the BI market in the region, Cheah says the company expects continued strong growth as more organizations take on fact-based decision-making. From a technology perspective, the latest BI trends include:

Predictive analytics being embedded in many BI applications, creating clearer views of opportunities and trends.
Dashboards and scorecards are proliferating through the enterprise, offering interactive drill-down capabilities.
New integration technology is feeding real-time into BI applications, enabling real-time decision-making.
An end-to-end BI platform (from Data Integration to Analytics) is key to an enterprise’s BI strategy, as performance is key beyond presentation.

“SAS’ technology includes all the above, and for the end-to-end platform, this is the differentiator that SAS pioneered whilst others were still singing their “best-of-breed” approach,” Cheah says.

Looking forward, he adds that the company is aiming to continue their double-digit growth and maintain their position as the No. 1 BI software vendor in Malaysia. “For our channels, we aim to double their SAS revenue as well as their SAS resources. We will be looking to extend the development of our channels into new SAS solutions as well as new markets.”

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