SAS focused on partner enablement in APAC

“We continue to establish regional partners as it's a key part of our success if we're going to grow. It's important to have that local ecosystem of partners, especially when you're going into new countries and new markets that you're looking to,” explains Gavin Day, Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Executive Vice President at SAS.

As SAS turns 50 this year, part of its success globally goes down to its partner ecosystem. In the Asia Pacific region in particular, SAS has been having a strong presence for several years, working with its partners to cater to its customers' needs in the various markets in the region.

For Gavin Day, Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Executive Vice President at SAS, it's always been about having that balance with their partners, especially in this region. While SAS does work with global system integrators (GSIs), the vendor also ensures it has a good working relationship with its local partners.

“That's really the way I see a lot of our go-to-market. About three years ago, we completely revamped our go-to-market as it related to our partners and made significant investments there and really segmented out from our salesforce to make sure we create a room for partners. Our partners are going to go have domain expertise in some specific areas that we don't. We use those partners as our customers trust them. They both have trust at a genset into SAS software, and then we are successful together,” said Day in an interview with CRN Asia during the vendor’s sales kick off in Singapore.

Among the partners in the region include TD Synnex and VSTECS that have continued to work closely with SAS.

“We continue to establish regional partners as it's a key part of our success if we're going to grow. It's important to have that local ecosystem of partners, especially when you're going into new countries and new markets that you're looking to. There's a trust factor there of local customers, even big or small, that have used very specific consulting firms and have had partnerships that they have longstanding relationships with. And SAS is better when we have relationships with them as well. So I think it's a balance of both,” he added.

At the same time, Day also mentioned that while SAS is growing its local partner ecosystem, they will be careful about the type of partners they bring in. This is because its easy to bring in partners and dilute the network, which may end up creating artificial competition for existing partners.

“So, when we see an area of expertise, procurement integrity is a great example, where we have a lot of expertise there, we have great technology, and we have a partnership with a company globally that's a smaller boutique firm, but they have people who have done that as practitioners. So, for us, that's a great partnership that we can bring into financial services. In the past, it was about quantity from a partner perspective. And we did take a hard look at that to make sure that we had the right partners. And a lot of that is driven by customers as well,” he said.

Day also pointed out that when SAS does go to engage with key clients that have a relationship with a partner or a technology vendor, they’re going to have to integrate with that technology partner.

“We're going to have to go work with a boutique firm that they use. So, it's not necessarily quantity for me, it's expertise. And then there's a lot of areas where parts of the business, it's not a core focus for SAS. And so that's why we absolutely want to use a partner because I'm not going to do the heavy investment of the expertise that they have,” he added.

On partner investment, Day also shared that the investments for SAS on partners will be focused on enablement. This includes making sure the partners that they do sign up are completely enabled.

“One of the wonderful things about SAS right now is we're putting out a lot of new technology into the market. So we really need to make sure those partners that we've teamed with truly understand our technology, feel enabled. It's a rapidly changing technology landscape. And so having those few strategic partners lined up and then enabling them to be successful with our technology is a real core. One of the things we've said internally is that when we think about enabling partners, we have to treat them like employees. The way that we enable our employees is the way we have to enable our partners. And that's been probably what, two years or so now of doing that,” Day explained.

Hope from partners

Given the investment and focus on enabling partners this year, Day shared that success with partners comes with those where they can go build their business on top of SAS, using SAS, as opposed to staff augmentation or just strictly resale.

“In my opinion, the days of monolithic single enterprise software vendor is over. Customers are picking best of breed technology, which means maybe people we even consider competition at times. Those are areas where we're going to have to go integrate with them because a customer is using multiple technologies. The way that SAS Viya has been architected allows us to do that much more seamlessly than previously,” said Day.

Day also highlighted that SAS has very important key technology partnerships that they drive forward. At the same time, there are also customers that use the competition, but SAS has the technology to integrate with it. As such, they end up going ahead and working together.

“I think an advantage for us is we often work with the business side to understand what their use cases and what's the value they want to drive into the organization. But we equally partner with CIOs so that as they're thinking about their broader IT landscape, we can help make sure that SAS fits in in the most cost effective way. It's one of our value propositions right now is we're going to help you be more productive and give you a better ROI in your data and analytics,” he said.

Day also believes that SAS’ ability to work across the organization with all of those stakeholders is a unique differentiator.

“A shift that we're making is we want to be very industry first in how we're talking to the market. Because we know that the issues that each industry is facing with data and AI is different. They have different levels of maturity and different regulations. So rather than coming at the go-to-market from a technology capability perspective, we're coming at it from what are your industry business pains? What's the top priority for you now? We're going to help you. We've got very aligned plays that we're going to go after for each one of those industries. And that's going to be a new approach for us this year with the support of our partners,” he concluded.