Strategic Partners and Alliances

IBM

"IBM is very proud of our relationship with SAS as we work together to deliver the promise of e-business to our customers. We're particularly proud that by combining our strengths through such leadership initiatives as business intelligence and decision support, we deliver higher levels of value to our customers as their business processes continue to transform."
– Nicholas M. Donofrio, senior vice president, Technology and Manufacturing, IBM Corp.

Partner Overview
Today's government requires complex systems that can grow and change with an organization. And while no single provider can do it all, building an infrastructure with a collection of independent tools isn't the answer either. The answer lies in cooperative alliances between industry leaders like IBM, the world's largest information technology and IT services company, and SAS, the recognized leader in business intelligence and data warehousing.

Intelligence solutions from SAS and IBM encompass software, hardware, middleware and services, enabling you to serve citizens better by:

• Understanding and anticipating citizens' needs and behaviors.
• Creating intelligence from information.
• Improving operational efficiency.
• Reducing financial and operational costs and risks.
• Supporting strategic decisions and processes with intelligence.

And since relationships with citizens, suppliers and partners - including relationships between departments and agencies - all contribute to the success of your organization, intelligence solutions from SAS and IBM include:

• Customer relationship management (CRM) - This solution lets organizations analyze data from all customer contact points, including e-commerce systems, and turn that data into knowledge in order to understand and predict customer behavior, meet customer needs, and build more profitable one-to-one relationships with customers. New intelligence capabilities deliver content customization and personalization across all electronic channels.
• ERP exploitation - Intelligent warehousing solutions leverage enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications from SAP, Baan and others. These solutions uncover and exploit critical business information housed in ERP and other operational systems as part of an open, intelligent process for decision making.
• Supplier relationship management (SRM) - This solution helps organizations reduce procurement costs and leverage relationships with key suppliers, maximizing every dollar spent. The solution includes data rationalization and a procurement information warehouse, as well as enhanced analytics and Web-enabled reporting. By consolidating and classifying purchasing data, SRM allows organizations to get a clearer picture of their supplier relationships and understand what, and from whom, they buy.

Fully integrated intelligence solutions
True solutions are not found in software alone. It takes an end-to-end and fully integrated combination of software, hardware, middleware technology and expert services to deploy a lasting solution that will grow with and adapt to your changing needs.

• IBM Global Services – IBM has created a unique practice within IBM Global Services that specializes in SAS solutions. These consultants provide analytical services, systems integration and government-specific consulting expertise. Combining these services with SAS solutions for CRM, SRM and ERP exploitation, SAS and IBM customers integrate the decision-support capabilities of SAS solutions with existing transaction systems and other IBM e-business applications.
• Software and middleware technology – Together, IBM technology and SAS software extend the power of intelligence throughout the enterprise. IBM DB2 Universal Database is powering the world's e-business solutions by offering open, industrial-strength database management for business intelligence, transaction processing and a broad range of applications. More than 2,700 sites and 1,900 companies and organizations are running SAS software and DB2 Universal Database today. Coupled with IBM MQSeries, eNetwork Communications Server and DB2, Web-enabled SAS software applications deliver organizations real-time access to data warehouses and sophisticated analysis applications for large and geographically dispersed user bases.
• Servers – While SAS software is highly customized for every organization, the company's alliances with IBM's scalable, award-winning servers results in a truly unique, fully integrated solution. SAS has had formal relationships with IBM server divisions (S/390, AS/400, RS/6000, NUMA-Q and Netfinity) for many years. And as a Premier Member of IBM PartnerWorld for Developers, SAS gains early access to new IBM servers and other technologies so joint customers leverage hardware and software innovations as soon as they become available.
• International Competency Center – As an ongoing commitment to provide joint solutions, SAS and IBM created the International Competency Center (ICC), located at SAS' world headquarters in Cary, N.C. A team of e-business experts at the ICC provides customers and sales teams worldwide with assistance and resources for sizing, designing and configuring, benchmark testing and implementing a host of SAS capabilities. Solutions offering data mining, data warehousing and other business intelligence functions run on leading IBM server platforms.