HP, SAS eye bigger business intelligence mart share

Hewlett-Packard has partnered SAS Institute in setting up a business intelligence competency centre in Malaysia to focus on serving the Southeast Asian market

HEWLETT-PACKARD (M) Sdn Bhd (HP Malaysia) and SAS Institute Sdn Bhd have joined forces to grab a bigger share of the growing business intelligence (BI) market in South-East Asia.

The two leading IT vendors have set up a BI competency centre in Malaysia, which serves as a focal point of reference for prospective customers in South-East Asia looking to implement BI solutions in their organisations.

BI refers to a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, providing access to, and analysing data to help companies make better business decisions.

HP Malaysia general manager of consulting and integration (technology solutions group) Datin Lim Bee Wah said for starters, the BI competency centre will focus on serving the Southeast Asian market, "but ultimately we would like to expand our focus to Asia-Pacific".

This is not the first time that HP Malaysia is partnering SAS Institute.

"We have been working together for some 23 years on a project basis, but the two organisations have now decided to formalise the collaboration with the launch of the BI competency centre," she told Business Times in an interview.

"Under this collaboration, HP Malaysia will help customers identify their BI needs and match those needs to SAS products. We will also provide customers the know-how to make use of their business data and information more effectively to grow their business, while SAS Institute will provide the BI software/tools and training in using it," she added.

HP Malaysia has set up a team of people dedicated to market SAS' BI solutions on top of enabling more HP consultants to implement SAS applications with HP servers and storage systems.

To date, more than 30 per cent of the delivery personnel have been trained on SAS applications, said Lim.

"Our target markets are companies in the fast moving consumer goods, banking, automotive, telecommunications and oil and gas sectors," she said.

SAS Institute head of alliances and channels, Jonathan Lee, said the collaboration with HP Malaysia forms part of the organisation's global alliance and channel strategy to work with its partners in marketing SAS' BI applications.

"SAS has traditionally marketed its solutions directly to the market. But since last year, we have implemented an alliance and channel strategy where we work closely with our partners around the world to extend our reach in the market and to ensure that we are able to deliver our BI tools to the mainstream," he said.

The partner channels contributed seven per cent to SAS Asia Pacific's total revenue last year.

"For Malaysia, we hope that the partner channels will contribute 15 per cent to SAS Institute's revenue in time to come," said Lee, adding that SAS Institute's revenue in Malaysia grew by 30 per cent last year from its direct channels alone.

According to market analyst International Data Corp, the BI market in Malaysia is expected to grow 14 per cent to RM22.4 million in the first half of this year, with medium-sized companies and the public sector projected to be the main adopters of BI solutions.

Today, SAS Institute is the leading BI software provider in Malaysia with a 31.3 per cent market share.