SAS in Asia: Partners and customers understand the power of the platform

“From a go-to-market perspective, when it comes to deploying at all local customers, indeed, we are expanding fast our network of regional partners. We understand our customers want to work with the partners located in their country, region, that speak their language and so on,” says Patrick Xhonneux, Senior Vice President, Global Marketing, at SAS.

For Patrick Xhonneux, Senior Vice President, Global Marketing, at SAS, the Asia Pacific market remains a key focus for the data and AI software vendor. In an interview with CRN Asia during the SAS Innovate Summit in Singapore, Xhonneux discusses the opportunities as well as how its partner ecosystem is crucial in getting customers in the region.

Can you tell us more about SAS in Asia?

We have many customers in Singapore and the broader Asian region. So, for us, it's always good to see the adoption of new technologies and when we speak about AI, we see a lot of customers in this region embracing it. They do more than just speaking about agentic AI, for example. They're testing pilots and we experienced that with our customers today. And that can be across sectors like financial service where we have a great presence and the public sector as well.

We see the region as a hub of innovation, while some other regions sometimes are a bit slower. Because the governance and regulation environment here is very clear and transparent as well. It gives certainty for business to know where they need to go in terms of innovation. So, it's pretty successful for SAS in this region currently.

What are the trends you are noticing in the region?

We see different trends when it comes to adoption of software solutions in risk management or in fraud detection. There is also a need to provide better services and enable fraud detection in the public sector. Another trend we are noticing is the increase of use cases in life sciences and that's something we see across the globe.

If I need to rank the top sectors where SAS today is seeing a lot of adoption of all new technologies, it is financial services, which is banking and insurance, and then public sector, which is government and healthcare as well, and then life sciences. The next one is manufacturing, which is very important for some of the other sub-regions.

How is SAS keeping tabs with organizations in helping them develop and deploy their use cases?

We have the model card, which comes with the software solutions that we have for developing AI models. For SAS, it is very important is to give that full transparency about the lineage. It's not just for external; it starts very often with an AI governance model inside the company.

For example, there can be questions from internal audits that ask for explanations on where the data comes from because they need to document it for the authorities. There can be questions on privacy issues linked to the GDPR and also on AI compliance as well? How did the company come to that outcome?

If you do look at fraud detection, for example, with fully autonomous systems, you don't want to have models that you cannot explain why you denied a loan to a customer, right?

So that's where we believe and we have built in from the start the ability or the supply chain of AI, to make it transparent to our users so that they can use it for internal audit and compliance process and for external requests.

Where they can understand which data to start with, how to build the model, what was the outcome of it, and how can they measure success and so on. We just don't want customers to build models. We want them to build models that are going to create trust with their own customers.

There are customers who also work with a lot of other vendors who have got lots of AI solution data. How challenging is integration with SAS?

From a technical perspective, we made sure we can integrate Python, R, open-source libraries directly in SAS without losing performance. The reason why you use SAS very often is because of the performance. It goes in terms of accuracy of results and speed of computation.

Now, what we want to make sure is that customers do not need to learn SAS programming language. If they already have a lot, a big team with Python programmers, R programmers, we have embedded in our software libraries about Python and R that allow you to run anything directly. And then when you speak about other software providers, obviously, sometimes you have overlaps. We want to ensure that all models are open to be published in the workflows.

SAS wants to provide a platform that customers can use as search for their data and AI. But if they need to export agents, their workflow to another, they can do that pretty easily because of the nature that we run on any cloud. We can deploy that very easily.

Can you also tell us more about SAS’ go-to-market strategies in Asia with partners and distributors.

When we say partners, we have key technology partnerships that define the openness and transparency of SAS towards the market. We have key partners like Microsoft Azure or AWS, or Google Cloud, because we run on any cloud to offer our customers the possibility to take the technology stack that matters for them. That's a technology partnership.

We also have the global system integrators (GSIs) where we work from a regional and global perspective. They can be very strong in one region, taking the Accentures, the Deloittes of this world for several industries. And there, what we try to do with them is to work with the GSI, who is known in the market for their expertise. It can be risk management, it can be fraud detection, it can be customer intelligence solutions and so on.

From a go-to-market perspective, when it comes to deploying at all local customers, indeed, we are expanding fast our network of regional partners. We understand our customers want to work with partners located in their country, region, that speak their language and so on.

What are the pain points customers are facing now and how are partners working with you on this?

There are two things. The first feedback from customers after they attended our summits is that they are surprised that SAS went so fast in terms of new innovation, especially when it comes to AI and agentic AI in particular. They are also surprised that SAS is already working on two pilots with customers on quantum AI.

They say we’re the first one because they work with different software providers and we're the first one providing a vision. And we can show that we deliver.

The second thing that they tell us is that we are spot on with partners when it comes to customer problems today. It's good validation for us to say that partners have heard about the SAS models which allows a quick start of being a user of AI in customers who may not have all the knowledge, skills, resources to build and deploy the models. We want to provide them with a ready-to-use model.

Partners are very interested in that because they have industry expertise. They can take the model and customize it for their customers. So having a validation from our partners that the business problems that SAS tries to tackle with the solution is spot on. It's a good validation of our roadmap, product roadmap and strategy.

We still can improve though. So, these are the two things. Innovation and the fact that it seems we are pretty much aligned today to the business issues that we see in market across the different regions.

With that said, what are you hoping to get from your partners?

There are three things I would like from all partners. First, I want to have transparent communication so they can help us to continue to innovate where it matters for their customers.

That's key. They are our feet on the ground sometimes when we cannot go as far as we would like to know every customer that has a demand for SAS products. So, understanding that they have an open communication channel with us to tell us, hey, SAS, there is a request there. Can you help us to solve it? What is your product roadmap?

The hope also is that they are successful. If they are successful, SAS is successful. We're doing business here, right? And they can be successful either by selling SAS software, by providing services to help customers deploy faster and so on. So that's the second thing.

The third thing is actually making sure that they continue to build the industry or product expertise so that they become trusted advisors for their customers. If SAS can help them to become even more trusted advisors to their own customers, I think then we would have a win-win-win for the customer, partner and SAS.

Because SAS is in the business of providing outcomes that outperform the market, providing that decision advantage we have. And so, my hope is that we can get to that kind of relationship with partners.