KUALA LUMPUR: SAS Institute Sdn Bhd and value-added hardware distributor Avnet Solutions Sdn Bhd have teamed up to open a business intelligence solutions centre at SAS Institute’s office in Plaza Sentral in Kuala Lumpur.

The centre lets SAS’ partners demonstrate its solutions, as well as provide facilities for proof-of-concept development and product benchmarking for customers and prospects, according to SAS Malaysia alliances and partners head Jonathan Lee.

The centre runs on IBM's Intel-based System x servers, supported by Avnet, said Avnet general manager Chiew Yue Lam. Chiew and Lee declined to give a figure for the total cost of the solutions centre, saying it includes investments in software, staff and training, and not to mention product pricing that might be on confidential terms.

However, Chiew estimated that the IBM server hardware installed in the centre costs about RM50,000.

Also on hand is a full suite of SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform technologies, as well as SAS business intelligence solutions specific to particular verticals like manufacturing, telecommunications and the public sector, Lee said.

The centre also serves as a training facility for these solutions.

In addition, the centre is used to promote best practices in business intelligence solutions deployment and the domain knowledge needed to build business intelligence solutions, Lee said.

The solutions centre is ready to take on partners’ staff but before it can do that, SAS has to evaluate the partners and work out non-disclosure agreements relating to SAS intellectual property at the centre, he said.

“We are already talking to a few partners and we hope to have some of them using the centre soon,” he added.

Lee said demand for business analytical tools intelligence solutions is rising sharply in local industry, as companies seek to make sense of and exploit the mountains of data generated by enterprise resource planning applications.

Lee and Chiew said the partnership is parallel to the co-operation agreement recently made between the respective parent companies in the United States.

However, collaboration on the solutions centre is a strictly local affair between the Malaysian subsidiaries, they added.

Both Lee and Chiew promised that there would be further announcements on collaboration between their companies in the months ahead.

Chiew said that as a value-added hardware distributor, Avnet wants to do more than distribute boxes to resellers whenever they have a sales contract. “We are trying to promote our value-added hardware resellers and independent software vendor partners,” he said. However, he said, Avnet has over 200 resellers. Not all of them will need the solutions centre, and in any case it would be unrealistic to expect SAS to evaluate that many potential partners.