Sydney & Auckland , Australia (October 10, 2007) – SAS, the leader in business intelligence and analytical software and services, and Teradata Corporation (NYSE: TDC), the global leader in enterprise data warehousing, have announced a strategic partnership that will enable customers to exploit the best of both companies’ core strengths. This will be accomplished through deeper technical integration of their respective products, as well as through coordinated marketing, sales and services activities.

Gordon Clubb – Managing Director of SAS Australia and New Zealand – and Noel Pettitt – General Manager of Teradata Australia and New Zealand – have simultaneously announced that the new strategic partnership fully applies to this region and that the two local companies have already been working together to exploit their new joint strength. Gordon Clubb said, “Both organisations have appointed dedicated sales and support people for this exciting new opportunity. There are a number of significant customers who already have both SAS and Teradata solutions installed and the new alliance gives us a strong competitive advantage in being able to service them ever more effectively.”
 
“The opportunity for our joint customers to fully leverage the value of their Enterprise Date Warehouse investment by running SAS solutions in the warehouse is an exciting development. It will simplify the process, increase efficiencies and reduce the overall cost of extracting value from the data when running SAS solutions,” Pettitt said. “We’re looking forward to working closely with SAS with our existing and prospective customers”.

“This partnership of two former competitors brings together the respective strengths of both companies in business analytics and enterprise data warehousing,” said Dan Vesset, vice president, Business Analytics, IDC. “In-Database analytics is a key development that promises to improve efficiency and effectiveness of business analytic solutions. It will decrease data movement and increase performance thus enabling IT to better respond to the decision support needs of business decision makers.”

In keeping with a wide ranging SAS® In-Database initiative, the foundation of the partnership is to enable businesses to run and optimise key aspects of SAS solutions and analytic processes within the Teradata database engine. Customers will be able to leverage SAS capabilities and analytical functions to utilise the core parallel processing inherent in Teradata’s architecture. Additionally, the joint roadmap also calls for selected SAS solutions, targeting Financial Services, and Customer Intelligence to be optimised with Teradata.

“As data volumes continue to grow exponentially, leading companies are making major investments in analytic solutions across the enterprise – from customer information, marketing, supply chain and risk to finance, information technology (IT) and operations – to gain competitive advantages,” said Jim Goodnight, chief executive officer (CEO) of SAS. “This announcement with Teradata marks our first RDBMS partnership – one that will open up new opportunities for existing and future customers interested in utilising the power of SAS’ award-winning solutions and analytics within industry-leading database engines such as Teradata’s.”

Teradata’s unique and unlimited ability to aggregate, parse and sort data, as well as handle large data sets, provides an excellent environment for SAS’ data integration, business intelligence and analytics capabilities. These technologies are the underpinnings for analytic solutions focused on specific business issues. For example, financial services organisations will be better equipped to analyse credit card fraud; retail companies will be able to improve their merchandise replenishment systems and better manage their inventory in near real-time; and manufacturers will be able to more quickly pinpoint manufacturing problems to prevent costly product recalls.

“Winning companies treat their data as a strategic corporate asset, one of the things no competitor can duplicate,” said Mike Koehler, president and chief executive officer of Teradata. “One of the key economic benefits that will be delivered via the new SAS and Teradata partnership is the ability to more effectively leverage this unique asset for better, faster decision making throughout the enterprise.”

Customers are already communicating the value they see in the partnership and how the integration will help them achieve competitive advantages. For example:

• “As a result of integrating SAS and Teradata technologies, we have reduced overall processing time to run our forecasting model from 36 hours to 1 hour and 15 minutes,” said Thomas Tileston, vice president of business decision support for Warner Home Video.
   

• "We are always seeking ways to increase our ‘Clinical Analytics Capabilities’, which improve the delivery of healthcare for our clients and their membership," said Mark Halloran, chief information officer, Medco Health Solutions, Inc. “The ability to achieve a higher level of integration with both SAS and our Teradata platforms will provide both increased operational efficiencies and enhanced information analytics, which position Medco to better serve the needs of our clients.”

In addition, SAS and Teradata have created a Centre of Excellence (COE). This dedicated joint team of solution architects and technical consultants will help customers achieve increased performance and capabilities from their current and future SAS and Teradata information technology (IT) infrastructure. The two companies will also establish a joint executive-level customer advisory group for product feedback, future direction and determination of subsequent integration priorities.