SAS Australia & NZ Launches New Partner Program

SAS AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND LAUNCHES NEW PARTNER PROGRAM

New – Product bundling and pricing; Skills development and accreditation; Dedicated online demonstration centre facilities; Enhanced local support levels backed by corporate – to drive increased revenues through channel sales to small-to-medium size enterprises

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sydney and Auckland, 11 October 2007

The Australia and New Zealand arm of SAS Institute, Inc. – the leader in Business Intelligence – has today announced major new go-to-market initiatives which emphasise the company’s commitment to the small-to-medium enterprise (SME) sector through a new Partner Program.

This new program will greatly enhance SAS support for value-added resellers, systems integrators, implementation partners and independent software vendors; including SAS’s global alliances. The program includes new product bundling designed specifically for the SME market and a new online demonstration centre service which will be readily available to VARs through the entire new sales – and ongoing customer development sales – cycles.

Describing the new program, Gordon Clubb, SAS managing director for Australia and New Zealand, said, “This announcement flows from the initiative launched by SAS headquarters in the United States four months ago and under which the company aims to have signed a significant number of formal new partnerships, worldwide, by the end of this year”.

Dedicated management of the SME Channel for SAS
Earlier, Gordon Clubb named Janice Willemsen as director, Alliances and Channels (see SAS Sydney media release, dated 27 September) to manage the new program locally. In doing so, he stressed that this was a new direct-reporting position created in order to aggressively increase the share of total revenues derived through partner relationships.

Janice Willemsen will be announcing five new local SAS SME channel relationships before end-2007 and aims to drive the value of reseller sales to SMEs to a sizable percentage of overall SAS Australia and New Zealand revenues by end-2009.

She added that SAS was seeking relationships with partners that were well established and demonstrated appropriate skills, saying, “We are not looking for a large number of resellers and will appoint only the best. The strong preference is for quality, not quantity. This is in the long term interests of the users of our solutions and has the added advantage of avoiding resource waste through overlapping.” Willemsen emphasised that, “Resellers will have exclusive coverage of the ‘green fields’ SME space that is not covered by SAS direct sales teams”.

Skills Support
In addition to special product bundling and the new online demo. centre service, the new program will include technical and sales training for each new partner. This will cover SAS Business Intelligence, Data Integration and Analytics solutions, and will endorse partners’ personnel on various levels of skills certification.

SAS support under the program at the local level is backed by the company’s corporate commitment to partnering. At the time of the global announcement made earlier this year (referred to above) the SAS vice president for Global Alliances Group committed, “We are ensuring that each country has the necessary internal resources and support to help its resellers be successful”.

Specially priced product bundles for SMEs
The program includes the availability of customised product bundles based on the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform and is available exclusively for SAS VARs under the SAS Partner Program. These bundles embrace SAS Data Integration, Business Intelligence and Analytics software, and are priced to offer SAS capabilities to a wider market than was previously possible.

SAS Partner Demo. Centre
Use of the demonstration centre is available on demand to all SAS trained and accredited partners under the SAS program. The centre provides software installations that partners can independently access and demonstrate to their prospects online. Standard SAS software and solutions can be demonstrated on an immediate basis and partners can also use the centre to prepare specially customised solutions and end-to-end multiple product enterprise solutions.

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ABOUT SAS
SAS is the leader in business intelligence and analytical software and services. Customers at 43,000 sites use SAS software to improve performance through insight from data, resulting in faster, more accurate business decisions; more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; compliance with governmental regulations; research breakthroughs; and better products and processes. Only SAS offers leading data integration, storage, analytics and business intelligence applications within a comprehensive enterprise intelligence platform. Since 1976, SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW®. www.sas.com

SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright © 2007 SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved

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