SAS and Sun Microsystems have announced a new initiative to help organisations establish an enterprise-wide analytic architecture built on a scalable and secure platform. The SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform Powered by Sun's Datacentre of the Future (DcoF) claims to help organisations better manage, optimise and enhance current and future SAS and Sun IT infrastructures throughout the enterprise.

To help organisations increase business performance while reducing the cost and complexity of business intelligence solutions in the datacentre, SAS will leverage Sun's IT infrastructure, including hardware, software and services, as part of the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform running on the open source Solaris operating system (OS).

As part of the initiative, Sun and SAS also unveiled a customer-accessible online Knowledge Centre to house reference architectures, white papers and best practices. The reference architectures help customers accelerate deployment of the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform on Sun systems by ensuring interoperability and scalability with existing and future strategic business environments. Additionally, Sun and SAS will collaborate on joint engineering, marketing efforts and global sales efforts.

"The SAS and Sun Datacentre of the Future initiative provides IT and executive managers the continuity, security, data privacy, compliance and performance so critical to enterprise customers," said Keith Collins, chief technology officer at SAS. "Our goal is to ensure businesses have optimal configurations of the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform on Sun systems that are eco-friendly. This will accelerate the successful deployment of business intelligence throughout organisations more quickly and efficiently."