This will be accomplished through deeper technical integration of their respective products, as well as through coordinated marketing, sales and services activities.

"This partnership of two former competitors brings together the respective strengths of both companies in business analytics and enterprise data warehousing," said Dan Vesset, vice president, Business Analytics, IDC. "In-database analytics is a key development that promises to improve efficiency and effectiveness of business analytic solutions. It will decrease data movement and increase performance, thus enabling IT to better respond to the decision support needs of business decision makers."

In support of the recently announced SAS In-Database initiative, the foundation of the partnership is to enable businesses to run and optimize key aspects of SAS solutions and analytic processes within the Teradata database engine. Customers will be able to leverage SAS capabilities and analytical functions to utilize the core parallel processing inherent in Teradata's architecture. Additionally, the joint road map also calls for selected SAS solutions targeting financial services and retail to be optimized with Teradata.

"As data volumes continue to grow exponentially, leading companies are making major investments in analytic solutions across the enterprise - from customer information, marketing, supply chain and risk to finance, IT and operations - to gain competitive advantages," said Jim Goodnight, chief executive officer of SAS. "This announcement with Teradata marks our first relational database partnership - one that will open up new opportunities for existing and future customers interested in utilizing the power of SAS' award-winning solutions and analytics within Teradata's industry-leading database engine."

Teradata's unique and unlimited ability to aggregate, parse and sort data, as well as handle large data sets, provides an excellent environment for the data integration, business intelligence and analytics capabilities of SAS. These technologies are the underpinnings for analytic solutions focused on specific business issues. For example, financial services organizations will be better equipped to analyze credit card fraud; retail companies will be able to improve their merchandise replenishment systems and better manage their inventory in near real time; and, manufacturers will be able to more quickly pinpoint manufacturing problems to prevent costly product recalls.

"This new strategic partnership offers an exciting future for our mutual customers because they will benefit from the combined power of the leading BI and analytics provider and the leader in enterprise data warehousing," said Mike Koehler, president and chief executive officer of Teradata. "Together, SAS and Teradata offer companies the ability to more effectively leverage their data as a strategic corporate asset for better, faster decision making throughout the enterprise. We clearly see the customer demand to optimize the processing and use of data throughout the enterprise."

Customers are already communicating the value they see in the partnership and how the integration will help them achieve competitive advantages. For example:

• "As a result of integrating SAS and Teradata technologies, we have reduced overall processing time to run our forecasting model from 36 hours to one hour and 15 minutes," said Thomas Tileston, vice president of Business Decision Support for Warner Home Video.
• "We are always seeking ways to increase our clinical analytics capabilities, which improve the delivery of healthcare for our clients and their membership," said Mark Halloran, chief information officer, Medco Health Solutions Inc. "The ability to achieve a higher level of integration with both SAS and our Teradata platforms will provide both increased operational efficiencies and enhanced information analytics, which position Medco to better serve the needs of our clients."

In addition, SAS and Teradata also have created a Center of Excellence (COE). This dedicated joint team of solution architects and technical consultants will help customers achieve increased performance and capabilities from their current and future SAS and Teradata IT infrastructure. The two companies will also establish a joint executive-level customer advisory group for product feedback, future direction and determination of subsequent integration priorities.