SAS, the leader in business intelligence and analytics, and Aprimo, the leader in enterprise marketing management (EMM), have announced that the Marketing Resource Management (MRM) products within the Aprimo Marketing suite will be incorporated into SAS Marketing Automation.

The integrated solutions will be immediately available as a SAS offering through its global sales channels.

"The deeper integration resulting from the relationship between SAS and Aprimo makes a lot of sense for clients from both a functional and administrative perspective," said Robert Blumstein, research director for CRM analytics and marketing applications at IDC.

"Tightly linking the ability to execute and analyse with the ability to plan and manage accelerates the marketing optimisation cycle and decreases the disruptive time spent moving between environments."

"Based on demand from our mutual customers last year, SAS and Aprimo announced a partnership to integrate our capabilities," said Paul Bierbusse, senior director of customer intelligence solutions at SAS.

"We are now taking our relationship to the next level by providing a seamless integration of the broadest and deepest set of MRM and marketing automation capabilities available. SAS and Aprimo customers will experience exponential benefits from this integration, which creates the best end-to-end solution for marketers currently available."

Charles Guise-Brown, head of enterprise data warehousing and business intelligence services at Nedbank, says: "As a customer of both SAS and Aprimo, we are delighted to see that these companies plan to further integrate their solutions.

"We have been encouraging this with both organisations. Being able to use Aprimo capabilities through SAS Marketing Automation will significantly increase our efficiency and capability and it shows the commitment by both companies to provide great, integrated marketing solutions."

"Aprimo is pleased to be working even more closely with the industry leader in customer intelligence and predictive analytics," said Haresh Gangwani, vice-president of business development at Aprimo.

"Our relationship with SAS will help drive and reinforce our MRM vision, and our software integration will be the most scalable and usable solution in the industry. Our customers will benefit from a tighter integration with SAS's customer intelligence solutions and achieve world-class results, by establishing repeatable best-practices, increasing speed to market, and tracking the performance and results of all their marketing programmes."

Aprimo
Aprimo Incorporated develops and markets software and consulting services, which help marketers manage the business processes of marketing. Aprimo Marketing is a suite of Web-based software products designed to enhance and work seamlessly with existing ERP and CRM systems. Aprimo's products enable marketing teams to achieve excellence in execution, gain managerial visibility across the global marketing organisation and create more demand for products and services. Aprimo is delivering value to many industry-leading companies, including Bank of America, Alticor, Delta Faucet, Ernst & Young, Merrill Lynch and Pfizer. Aprimo is headquartered in Indianapolis and has offices throughout North America and in London. Visit www.aprimo.com.