SAS acquires SaaS firm IDeaS

BI and analytics software provider SAS has acquired IDeaS, a company that develops revenue management software for the travel and hospitality industry.

The acquisition will have a 'significant local impact' for SAS in the Australian market, according to Camille Coles, Regional Marketing Manager for SAS Asia Pacific.

“We’re already embedded in the hospitality and travel sector locally, and have some customers we have worked on [with IDeaS],” said Coles.

“We’re very excited to add revenue management capabilities to the SAS offering. This is an opportunity for both SAS and IDeaS to grow and further embed ourselves into this industry.”

IDeaS is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of SAS but will continue operating under its current management, according to Grahame Tate, Managing Director for Asia Pacific at IDeaS.

“Our operations in Australia remain the same,” Tate confirmed to iTnews this morning.

“We’ve been looking to grow our business within hospitality and also outside of that into other vertical markets, and the acquisition by SAS enables us to do that.”

IDeaS currently has six sales and support staff based at Lindfield, near Sydney.

In a statement, SAS said that “IDeaS will continue to prioritise the hospitality industry. Its solutions, combined with leading-edge SAS capabilities like forecasting, optimisation and statistics, will also extend to other industries outside of travel, hospitality and retail.”

Price- and revenue-optimisation solution providers such as IDeaS are said to have grown from airline industry deregulation, when carriers sought to maximise profitability in a newly competitive industry.

The revenue management discipline (also called yield management) now permeates hospitality and travel sectors, taking limited, perishable resources, predicting consumer behaviour and adjusting pricing to maximise profit.