SAS Institute eyes Australian channel

SAS Institute is pushing to be “channel-ready” ahead of its planned IPO, its ANZ director of alliances and channels Dermot McCutcheon told CRN. 

SAS, which is one of the world’s largest privately-held software providers, does not have an ANZ distributor, but McCutcheon said “we are going to assess that option in detail over the coming months.”

The company has previously expanded deployment in ANZ through partnerships with US data warehousing provider Snowflake. The vendors combined their platforms when they took part in delivering a $1.5 billion business transformation programme for New Zealand’s Inland Revenue Department.

SAS announced in July last year that it is preparing to go public by 2024. The announcement came weeks after it rejected global chipmaking giant Broadcom's offer to acquire it for between USD$15 billion and USD$20 billion.

“I think the big target is to get to 2024 and be channel ready and have a significant proportion of revenue through indirect channels,” McCutcheon said.

McCutcheon said getting the company’s analytics platform SAS Viya onto Azure Marketplace last month would accelerate SAS’s channel growth and that offering it through a pay-as-you-go model would make it more accessible to more partners. 

“It helps our channel partners enormously because what they want to do is deliver outcomes to their customers using their own unique IP or industry expertise. 

“And so the ability to make the software available to deploy it, provision it, give it to the customer with no friction: that's significant.

“It's quicker time to value. It means the channel partners can better engage the customer to deliver the business outcomes the customer wants to achieve.”

McCutcheon said that the “technology-agnostic” platform was compatible with AWS and Google Cloud and plans were underway to release it on their marketplaces

“The market is all about hybrid cloud. So we can run equally well on GCP and AWS, but we've released on Azure first because of our strategic partnership with Microsoft.”

McCutcheon said that white labelling was another important part of growing indirect revenue.

“They take our product, add their IP to it and it creates a service that they sell to the customer.”

“A really good example is Zencos who does that with anti-money laundering. We have a number of customers now but they don’t go to us they go to Zencos who get their anti-money laundering solution delivered as a service with a monthly bill.” 

“Another one is KPMG. They’re doing the same thing. They run a risk capability for treasury management. 

“Fairly substantial, comprehensive solutions but if you’re dealing with a tier three mutual bank they don’t have the personnel or expertise or IT skills to build their own platform. So we go to KPMG and say you deliver it to them,” McCutcheon said.