SAS, a business intelligence and analytical software and services provider and Teradata Corporation, a supplier of enterprise data warehousing solutions, recently announced a strategic partnership that will enable customers to exploit the best of both companies' core strengths.

This partnership of two former competitors brings together the respective strengths of both companies in business analytics and enterprise data warehousing. "'In-database' analytics is a key development that promises to improve efficiency and effectiveness of business analytic solutions," said Dan Vesset, vice president, Business Analytics, IDC.

The foundation of this partnership is to enable businesses to run and optimise key aspects of SAS solutions and analytic processes within the Teradata database engine. Customers will be able to leverage SAS capabilities and analytical functions to utilise the core parallel processing inherent in Teradata's architecture.

"As data volumes continue to grow exponentially, leading companies are making major investments in analytic solutions across the enterprises for customer information, marketing, supply chain, risk, finance, IT and operations in order to gain competitive advantages," said Jim Goodnight, CEO, SAS.

Teradata's ability to aggregate, parse and sort data, as well as handle large data sets, provides an excellent environment for the data integration, business intelligence and analytics capabilities of SAS. These technologies are the underpinnings for analytic solutions focused on specific business issues.

Mike Koehler, president and CEO of Teradata said, "Together, SAS and Teradata offer companies the ability to more effectively leverage their data as a strategic corporate asset for better, faster decision making throughout the enterprise. We clearly see the customer demand to optimise the processing and use of data throughout the enterprise."

In addition, SAS and Teradata have also created a Center of Excellence (COE). This dedicated joint team of solution architects and technical consultants will help customers achieve increased performance and capabilities from their current and future SAS and Teradata IT infrastructure.