SAS CEO: "Teradata merger? They couldn't afford me"
SAS and HP sitting in a tree...
SAS CEO Dr Jim Goodnight has poured cold water on speculation that the business intelligence company might merge with its former rival, data warehousing software company Teradata.
The two companies announced a strategic alliance a year ago that spelled better integration and joint marketing and sales efforts for the pair's products.
With Teradata's data warehousing platform and the SAS applications that sit around it, industry watchers think a merger between the two could be a marriage made in heaven.
It's not a view Goodnight shares.
"We don't want them on the hardware and they couldn't afford me!" Goodnight quipped to silicon.com at the company's Premier Business Leadership Series event in Las Vegas.
According to the SAS CEO, it's hardware barriers that effectively block a union with Teradata.
"You take vendors like HP, Sun, Dell, IBM, there's just lots of hardware that we need to run on and some of our alliances are very strong. Our alliance with HP - there's probably 20 go-to-market situations with them. We're working very closely with HP to deliver solutions to mutual customers."
"If we buy Teradata, those kind of alliances would be frowned upon. I would prefer to stay vendor neutral or at least have the ability to be vendor neutral," he said.
Since the alliance between Teradata and SAS, the BI space has seen some big-name consolidation including IBM's $5bn acquisition of Cognos and SAP's purchase of Business Objects for $7bn. The moves leave SAS competing with a number of megavendors.
It's a trend that's brought new pressure to SAS, according to Andreas Bitterer, Gartner's lead analyst on BI.
"The market has undergone a lot of changes in terms of mergers and acquisitions. These four large megavendors [Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Oracle] certainly have now a lot of market share overall… and it has certainly pushed everyone more into niches. That doesn't mean that it's a small market in that niche but SAS certainly feels some of the pressure from the large megavendors," he told silicon.com.
Bitterer added: "SAS has always had the luxury of having technology really nobody else has, so in terms of breadth, from simpler reporting to warehousing to dashboards and all the vertical application from banking and retail and life sciences and pharmaceutical. No other player in the BI space really has that breadth."
Despite now having to share his sandpit with these megavedors, Goodnight claims he's not losing sleep over his new competitors.
"We have always competed against IBM, competed against Cognos, we've competed against SAP for many years. We have over 400 companies we come up against every day because of broadness of our products," Goodnight said.
"There is little that could happen out there that could keep me awake at night," he added.
Read silicon.com's exclusive Q&A with Dr Jim Goodnight here.