SAS COO Highlights Global Momentum, Microsoft Partnership

SAS, a data and AI company, has been celebrating nearly 50 years of innovation and growth and is seeking to continue that momentum over the next few decades through partnerships with companies like Microsoft, global collaborations, and emerging technologies.

At the organization’s annual conference, SAS Innovate 2025, Channel Insider met with Gavin Day, the company’s COO, to discuss the company’s evolution, future plans, and channel impact. 

SAS and Microsoft’s impactful partnership

SAS and its partnership with Microsoft has yielded numerous benefits and significant opportunities for partners through private and public offers on the marketplace and via Azure deployments.

“Partners have benefited from the engineering work that we’ve done with Microsoft,” Day said. “For example, we have very specific machine types that we designed with Microsoft a couple years ago to optimize the running of SAS because it got to a point where a customer may lift and shift a workload into Azure, and they were just picking big machine types and they were wasting money. [Through] really good IO capabilities and some specific CPUs, we were able to bring machine-type costs down that impacted both our customers and our partners.”

Through this partnership, both companies have been combining strengths and parlaying the advancement of model capabilities into useful products.

“In terms of maturity, what I would say is getting people to start using these products every day in their workflow, and then building products using the platform capabilities that bring together the best of what we have done and what is going to happen is the most critical thing,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, during the event.

SAS Decision Builder and SAS Workbench

In addition to the engineering teamwork that the SAS-Microsoft partnership has yielded, SAS Decision Builder on Microsoft Fabric and SAS Workbench on Azure Marketplace are two solutions that have received excellent feedback from partners.

Workbench is a cloud-based coding environment purpose-built for developers, data scientists, and modelers to improve speed and efficiency, and more easily conduct data management, analysis, and model development using SAS or Python code, through Visual Studio Code or Jupyter Notebook.

“We want to make sure we have an environment where open source programmers can also collaborate with SAS users and Workbench is kind of the first step into that for the development community,” said Day. “We’ve seen customers now that do not use SAS code using Workbench for analytics and AI. As we start to move into the open-source community, that’s a great place for us to be.”

SAS Decision Builder on Microsoft Fabric is currently limited in availability, with about a dozen Microsoft Fabric customers using it. Decision Builder shows up as a tile on Fabric, where customers can easily click on it and start using it to power decisions. It will be generally available later this year.

“Fabric is going to be where Microsoft customers’ data is going to live and reside,” said Day. “So for us, it made a lot of sense to put Decision Builder on top of that and then run the analytics and the decision flows closer to the data to help with compute, to help with cost.”

SAS’ future and potential public offering

SAS CEO Jim Goodnight said in 2021 that he intends to take the company public, but market volatility has highlighted their lack of patience.

SAS still wants to take the company public in the near future, but the right conditions must be in place so the company does not stumble out of the blocks.

For now, Day has been preparing the company to operate and scale as a public company. SAS has been modernizing its internal systems over the past three years, with that process nearly completed.

“My job is to make sure that we’re ready,” Day explained. “So, when [Dr. Goodnight] makes the decision that he wants to go, we can. There are a lot of factors in play there for us. There’s internal readiness, which obviously we can control and then there’s market volatility.”

Day adds that bankers have been proclaiming that “the IPO market is opening next year,” but that has not been the case for four years.

While SAS awaits the optimal conditions for a public offering, the enterprise will continue to spend money in places that its publicly traded peers may not.

“We believe it’s what makes our culture different and the leadership team under Dr. Goodnight’s guidance feels very strongly that we can’t do anything to change or negatively impact the culture. That’s our main priority as it relates to the channel.”

Day emphasized that the company has to continue making it easier to be a channel partner with SAS and enabling and investing in partners to grow their business. Day says that SAS will never be able to hit revenue goals without a healthy, robust, and functioning channel.

“It’s critical for our success. I can’t hire enough account executives in every country around the world,” Day said. “It’s about us sticking to our focus and then creating space for our partners, investing in them, in their core industries, and growing their business.”

SAS Innovate 2025 was filled with new announcements from the data & AI company. Read more about their new solution to deploy AI agents.