On Monday, SAS announced the beginning of a new era with its Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions OEM partnership. This is the first time SAS has provided its technology for an equipment manufacturer to wrap into its solution  to help retail customers gain the benefits of advanced analytics.

We always ask the question, “Is this good for our SAS customers and prospects?” It has been and always will be important that retailers also focus on the needs of their consumers in whatever they do, so it’s only appropriate that we challenge ourselves with the same question.

The SAS-Toshiba partnership, which provides built-in analytics at the point of sale, is good news for retailers and their customers in a few ways:

• Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions is the leader in Point-of-Sale (POS) solutions. The partnership will bring advanced analytics capabilities to more than 5,000 customers worldwide who are not already using SAS. And for those customers that already have SAS somewhere in their enterprise, chances are high that they don’t overlap with the Toshiba TCxVector promotions execution engine, which is central to the SAS-Toshiba partnership
• The initial offerings in the partnership, including the TCxVector promotions execution engine integration with SAS^® Visual Analytics and Visual Statistics, provide a platform which allows business users to immediately see the insights with no extra coding. This will help bring insights to business users who previously didn’t have access to analytics.
• The TCxVector solution with SAS inside will help retailers bring a better shopping experience and loyalty system payoff to consumers by ensuring they receive appropriate, timely, targeted offers.

Exposing more retailers to the benefits of advanced analytics will help foster an analytics culture that will help them connect to fast-moving consumers and stay ahead of competitors.

To learn more about the SAS and Toshiba partnership and checkout analytics, visit our alliance portal.