Competitors can also collaborate and SAS expects that its new partnership with German business software company SAP (NYSE:SAP) – the first such alliance of the two companies – offers new ways to grow as their joint customers seek faster big data capabilities.

Cary-based SAS, widely regarded as the leading company in analytics, will run its analytics software on top of a platform for managing data offered by SAP, under a partnership announced by the companies on Tuesday. SAP HANA, the German company’s relational database management system is an “in-memory” system that allows businesses to handle large data sources. HANA can also support real-time analytics. HANA came out last year and has been catching on with a lot of big companies working with big data.

Russ Cobb, SAS Vice President of Alliances and Product Marketing, said that he’s fielded a lot of questions about why SAS is working with a competitor. But he said it’s the kind of alliance that customers of both SAS and SAP are looking for.

Cobb explained that the two companies share many customers. SAS has received requests from these companies and from partners – companies such as Accenture and Deloitte – to work with SAP. As customers sought ways to use SAS analytics and HANA together, Cobb said it made sense to pursue a partnership.

No financial terms of the partnership were disclosed but HANA has quickly established itself as an in-demand SAP product and the company touts itself as the in-memory leader. In SAP’s release of third quarter earnings this week, SAP projected its SAP HANA software revenue for the year would be between $896 million and $965 million, up from $540 million in 2012 – an increase of at least 65 percent.

Ingo Brenckmann, senior development manager for SAP, said one of the core aspects of HANA is the capability to handle large volumes of data. But when data becomes voluminous, moving it is a bad idea. With the SAS/SAP partnership, that data won’t have to be moved anywhere for analysis. Analytics can be conducted within HANA where the data is already located.

“We’re trying to move complex calculations to where the data sits,” Brenkmann said.

One industry analyst is convinced of the partnership’s value. Henry Morris, senior vice president, Worldwide Software and Services, Research for research firm IDC, said that the alliance will simplify big data and analytics efforts by reducing data movement and allowing for faster decisions.

“It can be more efficient to move the model to the data than the data to the model,” Morris said in a statement. “This relationship will significantly drive value to joint customers.”

The partnership, which the companies are calling a pilot program, is still in its early stages. SAS Vice President of Product Management Randy Guard said that some work has been underway for several months and some SAS customers already have access to HANA.

“What we’re doing now is announcing plans to go even further,” he said. “We’ve moved analytics to the data environment.”

While this relationship with SAP is a first for SAS, it’s not the first time that an analytics vendor has partnered with SAP HANA. Earlier this year, SAP struck up a HANA partnership with IBM (NYSE:IBM).

SAS and SAP plan to offer customers of both companies the opportunity to validate SAS applications running on SAP HANA. The partners will build out the technology in 2014, targeting in particular financial services, telecommunications, retail, consumer products and manufacturing.

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