SAS and Microsoft form strategic partnership

Microsoft and SAS have formed an extensive technology and go-to-market strategic partnership.

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 be available to Microsoft's customers.

This partnership builds on SAS integrations across Microsoft cloud solutions for Azure, Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365 and Power Platform.

"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," says Microsoft cloud and AI executive vice president Scott Guthrie.

"SAS, with its recognised 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.

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," says SAS chief technology officer and chief operating officer Oliver Schabenberger.

"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 optimising 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.

"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," observes IDC channel and alliances programme vice president Steve White.

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 capitalise on the scalability and flexibility of the cloud for their analytics and AI workloads.

For example, Microsoft and SAS are already providing customers with solutions that help them capitalise 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.

Supported with joint co-selling and go-to-market activities, additional SAS products and solutions will begin rolling out later this year.

SAS says it is also committed to using Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 to power its internal operations.