Innovation driving SAS to increased growth in Asia

The Asian region remains a high growth market to SAS, thanks to the innovation and drive by both customers and partners, says Gavin Day, COO of SAS.

According to Gavin Day, Chief Operating Offier of SAS, the Asian region remains a strong growth market for SAS. With the vendor heavily invested in financial services, public sector and life sciences in the region, Day also believes that the Asian region is probably the highest growth market for them this year and probably next year as well.

Day also mentioned that this is why SAS decided to expand its partner network in the region.

“We've signed on partners, changed how we enable partners and then given them territory where they can invest because they know SAS isn't going to come and try to sell there. That's a little different than what we did maybe five or ten years ago. We said we wanted partners to go places but then all of a sudden, our enterprise sellers would show up and there was channel conflict. Now they have areas to go and invest in. For us, it's a huge growth network and a great opportunity for them to grow their businesses which is the other reason we want to do that,” said Day in an interview with CRN Asia during the SAS Innovate Tour in Singapore recently.

On enabling partners to deliver, Day pointed out that partners are wanting SAS to simplify their offering and that’s exactly what SAS is going to do.

“SAS Viya is extremely powerful and extremely broad and so giving them some very specific use cases, helping from a consulting perspective as they create specific consulting packages. For our partners, we are providing them with very specific pricing that they can use within the market. They've given me some feedback on the mid-tier banks' customers for example. We're creating specific pricing packages for them. We launched earlier this year a marketing website for partners. They can go in and then use the same marketing materials that we use at SAS, tailor it to their offerings and then send it to their customers,” explained Day.

On the customer advisory side, Day also highlighted that SAS has a dedicated team that focuses on partners globally. Their job is to enable SAS partners as well as some of the larger SIs to make sure that they have what they need. The same also applies to the consulting side of the business.

“What I've tried to instill in SAS is our partner network. Partners are an extension of our sales force and an extension of our company. The resources we provide, from enterprise sales to customer advisory, they can log on to the same website, get our competitive materials, get our presentations and such. We are absolutely treating them like an extension of SAS. This is a change we made about a year ago,” added Day.

What's exciting for Day is that he is starting to see partners create offerings and solutions that maybe SAS hasn't even thought of yet or SAS isn't investing in. And this is where he believes SAS can support the partners as they go into that market.

AI and innovation

With businesses remaining highly focused on AI, Day also pointed out that SAS is going to continue to put AI into all its offerings.

“An AI toolkit isn't something that we're interested in selling. We want to make our products and services easier to use with the infusion of AI and continue to focus on performance and productivity. As we run things in the cloud, those bills continue to rise. We want to make sure our customers can run SAS in the most efficient way. When embracing new technology like generative AI, we want to do it in a very responsible and trustworthy way,” said Day.

For Day, the market runs very quickly to some of these new buzzwords without thinking through the impact on both customers and the market. That's a place Day believes where an established company like SAS can take a little bit more time and understand the hype and basically put engineering dollars into that.

“What we've done with generative AI has been interesting. At Innovate Orlando, a couple of months ago, while the market was talking about genetic AI and how great it is and how it's coming, we had our intelligent decisioning product on stage that was generally available that was using the genetic AI and agents in production. For us, it's about leading the market with both innovation and trust,” he said.

Looking at innovation in Asia, Day feels the innovative culture in the region, especially it the speed and scale continues to excite him.

“If I look at the SAS team that we have here, our partner teams, they're pushing the engineering organizations and the R&D organization back at headquarters and others for us to innovate and keep up with even, or to innovate even more quickly. I think that, to me, is exciting especially when I think of the public sector and financial services work, we're doing here. I'm expecting this region, revenue is a byproduct of innovation and customer satisfaction. When we get those first two things right, then we'll continue to grow in Singapore and throughout the region,” concluded Day.