If you’re a fan of Charles Dickens like me, you may remember the opening line to the Tale of Two Cities. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. Digital transformation is impacting every industry, opening the door to “born in the cloud” startups while challenging even the best of the incumbents. So is it creating the best of times or worst of times for your business? It depends on how you react to this rapidly changing environment.
IDC talks about Digital Transformation and the 3rd platform of Cloud, Social, Mobile, and Analytics. It’s what’s driving the Internet of Things, Robotics, and Machine Learning. It’s impacting every industry as companies are becoming data-driven and creating an incredible amount of data that they want to monetize through analytics. Digital transformation is driving strategy at SAS, as you can see with our development of Viya, an entirely new open, cloud, platform. It will have a huge impact on your company as well.
Digital transformation is causing a massive shift in customers’ consumption model. Gone are the days of $20M ERP investments, only to be scrapped after years trying to get it implemented. Managed services are disrupting the market. Gartner estimates that by next year buyers will have shifted as much as 50% of their sourcing to managed services. What started with Salesforce and Office365 is now moving into analytics. This is the future of analytics. This the future of SAS.
So what is SAS’ Channel Strategy in this age of digital transformation? We’re responding by creating two types of channel partners. One is the traditional reseller, and that’s an area we’re continuing to grow. The other is the Managed Analytics Service Provider or MASP, an area where we expect exponential growth.
We’re making great headway in our traditional channel program. I joined SAS 6 months ago to run Global Channels. My entire focus has been on finding out what holds SAS and our partners back from being successful, and implementing improvements to help us do better.
We created the MASP to expand our reach into customers who not only want to buy from their local provider, but they also want to buy a service, not a product. The MASP program allows partners to create a bundled solution focused on solving specific business problems by combining their IP with any SAS software. The options and combinations are almost endless.
So is this the Best of times or worst of times? I believe this is the best of times for SAS and for our channel partners. It’s an opportunity for you to get in on the ground floor with managed analytic services. It’s also chance to become one of SAS’ select resellers as we transform into a channel-driven company. Which road will you take? Here’s the best news, you can take both.
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