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derek_klobucher
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Ninety of the top 100 companies on the Fortune Global 500 list use SAS Business Analytics software to seek fresh business opportunities, take action in record time and get results. So it was big news when SAP announced its new partnership with SAS at SAP TechEd last month in Las Vegas.

“This is something the customers have been asking for,” Aiaz Kazi (left) said of the SAP/SAS partnership.

That’s because analytical solutions from the Cary, North Carolina-based software developer will now run on SAP HANA. The partnership will address two big issues for businesses, according to Paul Kent, vice president of big data at SAS.

Solving Problems

“The very first problem that you like to tackle is the scoring,” Kent said, referring to the way organizations develop predictive business models, and then rate -- or “score” -- events, customers, machines and much more. “Put that program into the HANA platform and score it directly in the run time of HANA.”

With the SAS/SAP partnership, organizations won’t have to move their data to separate computers to conduct scoring, Kent stated. They can do so in a single machine.

The second issue is helping data scientists find patterns that can lead to a business advantage, according to Kent. It’s all a matter of “finding this signal in the noise,” he said, recalling statistician Nate Silver’s opening keynote at SAP TechEd.

“You can detect a machine that’s going to fail earlier than it actually keels over,” Kent said.
“So you can send a technician to fix it before it actually dies.”

Making Things Easier

SAP customers have been asking for this type of collaboration, according to aiaz.kazi, who runs platform strategy and adoption SAP. The SAS/SAP partnership simplifies a disparate landscape, allowing data scientists to get data in SAP, as well as flexibly build and trade models.

“SAS data scientists who are used to SAS tools will get to save their models in HANA,” Kazi said.
“And then anybody -- the same data scientists or other people who are using HANA, even from HANA Studio -- can score these models or run these models.”

Kent seemed equally happy with the increased efficiency and usefulness from the partnership over stand-alone and legacy systems.

“That is exciting to put on HANA,” Kent said. “It is actually going to be a huge win for our common customers.”

Follow Derek on Twitter: @DKlobucher. Like this story? Sign up for the SAP Business Trends newsletter here.

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