Microsoft Corp. and SAS Tuesday announced an extensive technology and go-to-market strategic partnership. The two companies will enable customers to easily run their SAS workloads in the cloud, expanding their business solutions and unlocking critical value from their digital transformation initiatives. As part of the partnership, the companies will migrate SAS' analytical products and industry solutions onto Microsoft Azure as the preferred cloud provider for the SAS Cloud. SAS' industry solutions and expertise will also bring added value to Microsoft's customers across health care, financial services and many other industries. This partnership builds on SAS integrations across Microsoft cloud solutions for Azure, Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365 and Power Platform and supports the companies' shared vision to further democratize AI and analytics. "Through this partnership, Microsoft and SAS will help our customers accelerate growth and find new ways to drive innovation with a broad set of SAS Analytics offerings on Microsoft Azure," said Scott Guthrie, Microsoft executive vice president of cloud and AI. "SAS, with its recognized expertise in analytics, data science and machine learning, is a strategic partner for Microsoft, and together we will help customers across dozens of industries and horizontals address their most critical and complex analytical challenges." Organizations around the world are moving to the cloud to innovate and move faster toward their business goals. As part of this transition, many customers, like St. Louis-based health system Mercy, are migrating their SAS analytic workloads to Azure to improve performance and cost-efficiency. "At Mercy, we're focused on how to continuously improve patient care and outcomes and realize the role of data analytics, machine learning in bringing that focus to light. Working with SAS and Microsoft, we can capitalize on analytics software and the Azure cloud platform to strengthen our ability to harness Real World Evidence for improved outcomes and more informed care," said Curtis Dudley, Mercy vice president of data analytics. "We're excited about the potential for increased speed, scalability and an expanded catalog of analytics solutions the SAS and Microsoft partnership brings in helping us deliver a new care model." To provide a seamless experience and help organizations accelerate their cloud transformation initiatives, SAS and Microsoft are working together to ensure that SAS products and solutions can be successfully deployed and run effectively on Azure. "SAS and Microsoft have a shared vision of helping customers accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. We both understand that it is about enrichment of data and improving lives through better decisions," said Oliver Schabenberger, SAS chief technology officer and chief operating officer. "Partnering with Microsoft gives customers a more seamless path to the cloud that provides faster, more powerful and easier access to SAS solutions and enables trusted decisions with analytics that everyone — regardless of skill level — can understand." This will include optimizing SAS Viya, the latest release of the company's cloud-native offering, for Azure as well as integrating SAS' deep portfolio of industry solutions, from fraud to risk to retail, into the Azure Marketplace to provide improved productivity and enhanced business outcomes for customers. "The partnership between SAS as a leader in the analytics space, and Microsoft as a leader in cloud makes for an interesting strategic alliance. With SAS planning to build integrations across Microsoft's entire cloud portfolio (Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 & Power BI) it opens up a lot of joint solution potential," said Steve White, program vice president, channels and alliances at IDC. Additionally, through the partnership, Microsoft and SAS will explore opportunities to integrate SAS analytics capabilities, including industry-specific models, within Azure and Dynamics 365 and build new market-ready joint solutions for customers that are natively integrated with SAS services across multiple vertical industries. This further integration will enable SAS customers to capitalize on the scalability and flexibility of the cloud for their analytics and AI workloads. For example, Microsoft and SAS are already empowering customers with solutions that help them capitalize at scale on the vast amount of data being generated by the Internet of Things by combining Microsoft's Azure IoT platform with SAS' edge-to-cloud IoT analytics and AI capabilities. Currently, the Town of Cary, NC, is using a joint IoT offering from Microsoft and SAS to power a critical flood prediction solution. "Localized flooding is something all communities experience, and ours is no exception," said Nicole Raimundo, Cary's chief information officer. "Using sensors, weather data, SAS IoT analytics and the Azure IoT platform, we expect to increase situational awareness of rising stream levels, predict where flooding might occur, and improve our emergency response through automation. Cary is also proud to be able to share this data with our neighboring communities to help them better serve their citizens." Supported with joint co-selling and go-to-market activities, additional SAS products and solutions will begin rolling out later this year. This will enable SAS and Microsoft customers to address some of their most critical and complex analytical challenges while fostering continuous innovation. SAS is also committed to using Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 to power its internal operations. — SG
