Microsoft and SAS recently announced a partnership that will enable customers to run SAS workloads on Microsoft Azure architecture. According to a spokesperson for Microsoft, “The partnership is set to expand Microsoft’s business solutions and unlock critical value from digital transformation initiatives.”
The partnership includes integration with SAS analytics workloads on Microsoft Azure which will help accelerate cloud adoption initiatives. The companies are set to migrate SAS’s portfolio of industry-specific analytics tools for areas such as fraud. “We’ll bring be brought onto Azure and Dynamics 365 to provide additional options for customers when it comes to using data to drive improved productivity and enhanced business outcomes,” I’m told.
Together Microsoft and SAS will build a joint go-to-market strategy, which will make SAS solutions available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Steve White, Program Vice President, Channels and Alliances, IDC said:
“SAS is a leader in the analytics space, and Microsoft a leader in the cloud arena, making for an interesting strategic alliance”
“With SAS planning to build integrations across Microsoft’s entire cloud portfolio (Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Power BI) it opens up a lot of joint solution potential.”
Backed by a shared sales and go-to-market vision, Microsoft said more SAS products and solutions will roll out later this year, the duo wrote in a prepared statement. SAS enables customers around the world to make intelligence out of raw data. Data have many of the answers company leadership are looking for, and the new partnership could assist millions across the globe in enacting organizational upgrades at a time where change is key to future relevancy.
If businesses can gain insight into how to make improvements based on customer and employee behaviors, many of them might benefit from that. Oliver Schabenberger, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operating Officer, SAS said: “Partnering with Microsoft gives customers a more seamless path to the cloud that provides faster, more powerful, and easier access to SAS solutions. It should also enable trusted decisions with analytics that everyone – regardless of skill level – can understand.”
For many, the path to the cloud is clear, although you should do some research before making the switch. What the cloud enables, for the most part, is flexibility. And a great deal of it, along with operational efficiencies, and cost-savings. This makes the cloud all the more attractive to businesses hoping to scale up (and down) when needed.
Edge computing is already more crucial in a growing number of areas and sectors. One of the largest, the Internet of Things (IoT), and IoT spending should hit $1 trillion by 2022, according to research firm IDC. On the collaboration front, Microsoft recently updated its popular Teams mobile app so users can add personal accounts, make groups, and connect with family/friends while leveraging Teams under their work account for business matters, too. The new functionality is available for both Android and iOS users.
Since the start of the novel Coronavirus, Microsoft and other collaboration vendors have experienced higher-than-usual traffic, and the Microsoft Teams platform reached 75 million DAU during this timeframe.
More on DAU figures for TeamCollaboration.
