SAS and AEM - Creating winning solutions

Effective partnerships play a key role in the delivery of today's complex technology solutions.

To be successful in fast moving markets,organisations need integrated and tailored technologies, backed by experience. SAS has a history of working together with Partners who can bring complimentary skills and additional value in the form of domain knowledge, integration and project management expertise.

The SAS alliance with implementation partner, AeM, illustrates the benefit of these partnerships.

Our relationship with AeM has achieved consistently excellent results for our clients, most recently with the delivery in Q3, 2003 of a Risk Management Solution for BankWest and the ongoing collaborative work at HBF Health Funds.

AeM Managing Director Ian McFarlane says, "The sound relationship we have with SAS, combined with our executive level contacts at BankWest and SAS' robust solutions, placed us head and shoulders above the competition."

"BankWest was a large project, the first of its type in Australia. It was a very significant execution for the Bank as it involved critical compliance requirements, and it had to be completed in a tight timeframe." AeM, together with SAS, implemented the SAS Risk Management Solution to enable BankWest to be compliant with the Basel II Capital Accord. Basel II mandates capital requirements for financial institutions under the Internal Ratings-Based (IRB) approach.

With the contribution of AeM's project management skills, it was a very successful implementation and completed on time, on budget. This solution enabled BankWest to move quickly and achieve Basel II compliance shortly after the implementation.

"We were able to carry through our existing BankWest and SAS relationships," added Mr McFarlane. "With projects of a large scale such as these, retaining a high level of trust, openness and honesty is imperative. Having worked with SAS for several years, SAS were very responsive which kept the project to schedule. It was clearly a win, win, win solution all round."

Shared Values
SAS Partners need to meet the same high standards of market knowledge, vision, integrity and customer satisfaction to which SAS aspires in the delivery of its own independent solutions and services.

SAS has seen its Partner AeM grow rapidly over its seven year life. Today AeM provides management and technology consulting to leading government sector and private organisations and employs more than 150 professional consultants, with offices around Australia and in Asia. AeM's people embody the company's core values of customer focus, teamwork, delivery and commitment.

• SAS benefits from working with other experienced business and technology organisations
• The Partner aligns themselves with the market leader in business intelligence, and
• Our joint customers get the most complete set of intelligent and analytical solutions and expertise available on the market.

"We retain very few selected partners," says Mr McFarlane. "The SAS partnership has flourished over a number of years and we will continue to work with them, and look for other opportunities to collaborate".

Supporting the alliance is a joint marketing operation. For example, e, AeM keeps SAS informed of their marketing strategy so SAS can prepare for the technical solutions.

"The partnership is seamless but at the same time from the customers' point of view, in terms of ongoing servicing, they know exactly where AeM and SAS fit," added Mr McFarlane.

"One of the key reasons for our partnering success is that our companies retain respect for each other's individual capabilities."

Partnering spectrum
The SAS Alliance Program comprises partners in a number of categories:

• Business consultants and strategists
• Systems integrators
• Implementation partners
• Hardware and platform partners
• Software partners
• Outsourcing and hosting partners