Welcome Steve White with this guest post. Steve is Program Director for IDC’s Software Solutions Alliances Leadership Council in my Software Business Solutions Group.
I had the opportunity to attend the SAS Institute’s analyst conference last week in Steamboat Springs, CO which was entitled ‘Inside Intelligence 2009’, a nice play on words representing their business analytics offerings. SAS is the largest privately owned software company in the world, with 2008 revenues at $2.26B and it was interesting to hear from their Execs as to their outlook in these challenging economic times.
Being in an analyst role, one tends to look for patterns and indicators, and I found it interesting to piece together the SAS picture into what seems to me could be a ‘perfect storm’ in terms of strategic partnering potential. There were four key areas that struck me as being positive signs of this opportunity
- SAS’s concerted move towards a more partner inclusive model
- SAS’s impressive heritage of vertically aligned product development
- Their customers’ keen advocacy of their solutions
- The underlying economy requiring greater customer ROI
The event started with a view from the top, from Dr. Jim Goodnight SAS’s CEO and founder. Jim used some of the SAS business analytics tools to share their business outlook. Using what one of the other analysts called a ‘flashboard’ rather than just a dashboard to present the figures, this showcased how SAS are looking at their business from all facets, and was a great insight into how their tools can really help bring critical information to business executives in a usable format. Rather being a tedious deep dive into the numbers, it felt like a brief and graphic summary of the key performance indicators of what is a very substantial business, wholly improved by the use of the technology.
Back to the partnering potential that I was working out with regards to SAS, their heritage has been as a direct to customer operation. However in the past 18 months to 2 years they have made a substantial investment in building out their strategic alliances. In that time their partner impacted revenue has grown 60%. They also shared the fact that, of their top 50 deals in the past year, 20 were partner impacted. A decisive indicator of their willingness to partner.
Another key indicator for me at the event, was the way SAS develop and manage their products. When you see their roadmap, you don’t just see version of each of the core products, you see vertically defined solutions, that are created from the ground up. Their DNA as a business is derived from deep understanding of their customers’ industries, so they develop their products on the SAS platform aligned to the industries of their customers. I’ll not delve into this in too much detail, as it’s not my core area, but you only have to look at their product & solutions offerings to see how they start with the industry first.
Day 1 of the event was rounded off with a customer panel. One great attribute of this particular customer panel was that it was not ‘over managed’ and even though there were some initial prepared questions for introductions, the panel was opened up to the analysts which is often a scary scenario. What I took from this panel were two key points:
- Firstly, the clients' love of the SAS technology and what it can do for their business. In talking to these clients during the breaks, they are extremely vested in the analytics capability that SAS brings to them, and SAS’s deep knowledge of their industries is a key driver of this.
- The second point was the fact that the Business/IT divide is still out there in the market. All 4 of the customers represented areas of their businesses that were outside of IT, in effect ‘power users’ of technology. In all instances they were working hard to align with their own corporate IT goals, but equally they were almost religiously bought into using the SAS tools that had got them to where they are today in terms of their business insights and were in some cases fighting IT to look at other vendors.
I found these conversations very powerful, in that the consumers of this technology value it so much, they would be willing to work outside of corporate guidelines.
These indicators drive me to believe that SAS really is in the perfect storm for building lasting alliances. The current economic environment actually magnifies this opportunity, as customers want to have better business information, and drive to faster ROI based on these analytics. I am interested to see how SAS’s strategic partnering progresses in the coming months and years. After all, what major SI or ISV would not want to partner with such a technology specialist who has such a deep understanding, and engagement with their customers? We shall see.
