The IT industry is littered with examples of short-lived corporate partnerships and alliances that often appear impressive but regularly end or are withdrawn after the initial enthusiasm wanes. The old adage that “actions speaker louder than words” is especially pertinent and I regularly encourage clients to look for tangible examples of co-operation beyond the text of a press release.

I wanted to use this blog post to highlight the existence of a relationship that began in late 2007 and bucks the industry trend. Cast your mind back to 2007: Can you remember when Vista was the predominant PC operating system, the Apple iPhone had just been launched, Android had yet to be announced and Uber didn’t even exist ?

This lengthy preamble is simply a way to introduce the SAS partnership with Teradata, a relationship which is now nine years old and has been responsible for some significant achievements:

• Together the partnership has secured more than 250 joint customers and 450 implementations. Notable joint customers include Unicredit, Meijer, Roche and Sogei.
• Teradata offers a purpose-built appliance for SAS Analytics supporting in-memory capabilities including SAS High-Performance Analytics Products, SAS Visual Analytics, SAS Visual Statistics and SAS IMSTAT. To the best of my knowledge it’s the only hardware that sports a SAS logo .
• SAS sits in the centre of Teradata’s Unified Data Architecture (UDA). This reflects its support for Teradata’s three platforms: Data Warehouse, Discovery and Hadoop but more importantly the ability to promote SAS analytics into these platforms so processing can occur in-situ, leveraging the platform performance and minimizing data movement. This means that decisions can be made more quickly and effectively by making use of complete data sets.
• Teradata also offers a SAS Managed Server which can reside in any of the Teradata Workload-Specific Platform Family to run SAS analytics  and is supported by the Teradata monitoring ecosystem. Typically you could install SAS foundation products on such a server.

As with any long-term relationship, strains do exist. Until recently both companies had competing solutions for Marketing Automation and Teradata efforts to become an analytics vendor increases the overlap with SAS. However, many of Teradata's 2500 customers primarily use its RDBMS platform technology, making SAS an obvious and complementary candidate for analytics.

Hadoop is a potential arena where both organizations can benefit: Teradata providing the platform & integration with existing data warehouse investments, while SAS delivers technologies & solutions leveraging Hadoop as both a data store and powerful analytics processing platform.

Just this month, Teradata has become a global authorized reseller of SAS advanced analytics software. I mention this because it’s further evidence that the evolving partnership is clearly alive and delivering for our joint customers.

If you’re using Teradata technologies (Data Warehouse, Aster Discovery or Hadoop Appliance), it’s a good time to explore how SAS fits and here’s a useful starting point. In September we’ll have a SAS booth at Teradata Partners event in Atlanta while Teradata will be exhibiting at the SAS Analytics Experience conference in Las Vegas.