Teradata and SAS announced a strategic partnership at the 2007 Teradata PARTNERS conference in Las Vegas in October. The strength of the Teradata platform combined with the powerful analytics of SAS signifies a unique value proposition for customers. After the announcement, Teradata Magazine had the opportunity to explore the magnitude of this partnership with Dr. Jim Goodnight, the CEO of SAS.

Q For those who may not know SAS, which seems hard to believe, can you tell me a little bit about the company, what you do and what you bring to the market?

A Well, what SAS does more than anything else is analyze huge amounts of data to give companies the ability to decide which customers they want to select for marketing campaigns or who they should loan money to or to do all sorts of customer-related things. In addition, SAS is also used for heavy computing in the analytic space for risk, for example, or for anti-money-laundering or for fraud detection. So the type of stuff that we're doing is no longer just tool-based analytics, but really working up the food chain and into the higher levels of organizations trying to help them solve their business problems.

Q Tell me a little bit about the new SAS partnership with Teradata.

A With the vast amounts of data growing, we have realized the fact that we often have to move data across networks for analysis. It's actually going to be better if we can stay inside the database and move some of our computations down to the individual nodes on a Teradata box. We've already been at work at this, and part of our goal over the next six months to a year or so is to move more and more of SAS functionality down into the individual Teradata nodes. Each node can operate on a separate part of the data, and then that will be aggregated in the final solution.

Q Tell us about the areas where the two companies will specifically work together to deliver value to the marketplace.

A One of the first areas that we are working on is to be able to deliver scoring for models directly inside of Teradata. That will make it possible for huge amounts of data to be scored very, very rapidly. Whereas now, quite often there's a lot of intermediate work that is required to move models over into SQL and it, quite often, is done by hand.

Q What value does Teradata bring to the partnership?

A Teradata brings to the partnership vast experience in dealing with huge amounts of data over a grid network. We're seeing more and more chips come out these days with multiple cores, which requires an extensive amount of reprogramming if you're going to really take advantage of the multi-threaded cores. Whereas with the multi-grid chips, there's only one I/O [input/output] channel to handle all the cores. This means as the amount of data continues to grow and grow over the years that it's going be important to be able to move as much of the computational effort as close to the data as possible. Teradata gives us the platform to do that.

Q In terms of mutual customers facing the various competitive challenges that they have today, how does this partnership help them?

A Our mutual customers, I think, are all very, very happy about this move because, up until now, they would store large amounts of data in their Teradata warehouse, and then they would have to do an extraction to bring it over to SAS so that SAS could then analyze the data. With this effort to move more of SAS inside the database, that's going to speed up processing by leaps and bounds.

Q So, faster processing, faster time to value, faster solutions, faster information.

A Everything's going to be faster once all of this is accomplished.

Q What role does Teradata play in providing a stronger value proposition to SAS customers and SAS prospects?

A Teradata provides our customers with a grid-like environment that has been solidly tested over many years and has proven its ability to hold up to large loads of data. SAS customers will be able to benefit as their data volume grows and they need to have a very secure system that they can store data in; then Teradata would be a logical choice for them.

Q Especially, as you mentioned before, with data volumes growing exponentially. We know that Teradata and SAS have many mutual customers. Can we talk about how the joint solution could really help those customers to solve their business problems, really bring them a successful solution?

A SAS and Teradata have a large number of joint customers that we work with on a regular basis. Customers with large amounts of data, who prefer that the data not ever leave the database environment for security reasons, would be a good example of customers that will benefit from SAS moving its technology inside the Teradata Database.

Q Teradata has many partners; SAS, I'm sure, has many partners. Tell me what's unique about this particular partnership between the two companies?

A The uniqueness of the partnership between Teradata and SAS is the fact that Teradata is the only vendor that we are working with right now to move SAS computation directly inside the database computation engine. This will give incredible additional speed and performance and also make jobs that used to run many hours be reduced to a matter of minutes.

Q And looking forward, is there anything that SAS and Teradata customers should know about where the two companies may go next?

A Well, we're trying to put together a council of customers right now that can sit on an advisory board for us to help make sure that we understand what the roadmap should look like for further integration. We both have some ideas of what things we need to go after right away. But, it's really going to require customer input to help us guide our direction and help us develop our roadmap.

Q So, the customers will get a say in the solutions that will help them solve the business problems they face?

A We need customers' input considerably here because the amount of effort it would take to move the entire SAS system into Teradata would probably take four or five years. It's because SAS is a very large system. And we want to do it in such a way that we can satisfy as many customers as possible as quickly as possible, so that's going to require customer input.

Enthusiasm moving forward
As SAS and Teradata look to the future as partners on existing projects and future opportunities to meet the needs of customers, Dr. Goodnight concludes with words of confidence: "Quite frankly, I think it's going to be a really great relationship between our two companies." T

Lucas Nevin is the copy editor for Teradata Magazine.

Photography by Jeffrey Green.

Teradata Magazine-March 2008