Accenture, SAS Partner To Develop Predictive Analytics Solns

Accenture and SAS plan to expand their strategic relationship by jointly developing, implementing and managing next-generation predictive analytics solutions, a first for both companies.

As part of the expansion, the two companies intend to jointly invest in the development of solutions focused on industry-specific predictive analytics applications, starting with the financial services, healthcare and public service sectors; as well as cross-industry solutions in the customer and enterprise management domains. They also plan to begin delivering sophisticated analytical capabilities as a managed service.

In forming the Accenture SAS Analytics Group, the companies intend to bring together Accenture’s extensive industry and functional business knowledge with SAS’s analytics solutions and capabilities to help companies and government organisations understand and implement predictive analytics solutions. Predictive analytics takes the information made available through standard analytics today and combines it with more sophisticated statistical modeling, forecasting and optimisation techniques to anticipate the impact on business outcomes.

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“Our enhanced relationship with SAS is a key element of Accenture’s strategy of aggressively addressing the opportunities around the next generation of analytics,’ said William D Green, Accenture’s Chairman & CEO. “Companies that use predictive analytics to derive actionable insights from data and then use those insights to shape decisions, can improve business outcomes and substantially outperform competitors over the long term.”

Jim Goodnight, Chief Executive Officer at SAS, added, “In our long experience providing analytic insights to our customers, we’ve never seen leaders so readily adopting analytic approaches across their organisations. The Accenture SAS Analytics Group will help these companies take their business results to the next level by applying best-of-breed predictive analytics and best practices to complex questions and decisions. Together, we will deliver a high-performance analytic platform combined with management and industry expertise that is platform-independent, so organisations can leverage their existing IT infrastructure.”

Henry Morris, SVP for IDC’s Worldwide Software and Services, said, “This alliance would address the expertise gap in the market by making more industry-specific analytic solutions available with project-based or managed service delivery. The combination of Accenture and SAS should accelerate adoption of predictive analytics across a broad group of organisations in major centres around the world.”

The Accenture SAS Analytics Group plans to initially focus on developing a series of predictive solutions for the financial services industry, including banking and insurance; healthcare services, including payer/ provider and pharmaceuticals; as well as the public sector, in areas such as federal and human services. In addition, cross-industry functional solutions are expected to start with customer acquisition and retention, as well as enterprise analytics.