Microsoft and SAS announced a new partnership to integrate SAS’ analytical tools with Microsoft Azure, which is now the preferred provider for the SAS Cloud.
As part of the strategic partnership, the companies will migrate SAS’ analytical products and industry solutions onto Microsoft Azure as the preferred cloud provider for the SAS Cloud.
This partnership builds on SAS integrations across Microsoft cloud solutions for Azure, Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365 and Power Platform.
“Through this partnership, Microsoft and SAS will help our customers accelerate growth and find new ways to drive innovation with a broad set of SAS Analytics offerings on Microsoft Azure,” said Scott Guthrie, Microsoft Executive Vice President of Cloud and AI.
To provide a seamless experience and help organizations accelerate their cloud transformation initiatives, SAS and Microsoft are working together to ensure that SAS products and solutions can be successfully deployed and run effectively on Azure.
“SAS and Microsoft have a shared vision of helping customers accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. We both understand that it is about enrichment of data and improving lives through better decisions,” said Oliver Schabenberger, SAS Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operating Officer.
“Partnering with Microsoft gives customers a more seamless path to the cloud that provides faster, more powerful and easier access to SAS solutions and enables trusted decisions with analytics that everyone, regardless of skill level, can understand.”
Additionally, through the partnership, Microsoft and SAS will explore opportunities to integrate SAS analytics capabilities, including industry-specific models, within Azure and Dynamics 365 and build new market-ready joint solutions for customers that are natively integrated with SAS services across multiple industries.
In May, Microsoft announced during the Build 2020 developer event that hospitals and physician practices will have all the Microsoft tools in one place with the launch of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.
Forrester senior analyst Jeff Becker said that Microsoft has been working to bring differentiated cloud offerings to the enterprise healthcare market for some time.
“Healthcare organisations are increasingly comfortable pursuing cloud-enabled digital transformation initiatives, and Microsoft is capturing a large share of this emerging business,” he said.