Teradata, SAS CEOs Align On Business IntelligenceTeradata, SAS CEOs Align On Business Intelligence

It's been a busy week for business intelligence. SAP announced on Sunday that it would acquire Business Objects for $6.8 billion. The next day, Teradata and SAS Institute announced that they will more deeply integrate their products so that businesses can conduct complex analyses within their data warehouses, removing the time and expense of having to extract and move the data into SAS software.

In a sit-down with information at Teradata's annual user conference in Las Vegas Monday, the CEOs from SAS and Teradata explained why they think their partnership is the most important one to watch in the industry.

Teradata offers "a very robust, scalable and flexible data foundation," said Teradata CEO Michael Koehler. "When you marry that with best-in-class business intelligence solutions and apps like SAS, you've got the best of two worlds going together."

While not legally an exclusive agreement, SAS hasn't been talking to other vendors about similar agreements because "we want to make this relationship work," said SAS CEO Jim Goodnight. Teradata's technology is uniquely advanced, and it "is very willing to work with us," he said. The companies haven't considered a merger, he said.

SAS executives downplayed the significance of the SAP/Business Objects deal in comparison with their own. Business Objects applications are very simple compared to what companies can do with SAS analytics and modeling, they claimed.

"I think a lot of people, when they buy BI, they think they can run their company on it and get some insight on their company," said Jim Davis, senior VP and chief marketing officer at SAS. "But when go to use it, it just turns out to be query and reporting tools that produce accounts of what goes on in the past. We consider BI much, much deeper in all the analytics we do."

Goodnight had stronger words. "The whole reason SAP went this way is their whole BI and data warehouse play has just been a failure," remarked Goodnight. "At least they're finally admitting that they've failed."

Koehler said he thought the deal would have no impact on Teradata. He said, "We do partner with both companies."