SAS, Redington enter into a strategic partnership in East Africa

Redington Value, a subsidiary of the India-based Redington Group has partnered with SAS, a move purposed to provide on-the-ground support to customers in East Africa. The partnership coming on the wake of Emerging Markets projected faster pace of growth particularly in the Middle East and Africa predicts a reach of $4.1 billion.

Following an extensive market assessment, Business Intelligence and Analytics leader SAS entered into the strategic partnership with Redington Value in East Africa. In this arrangement, Dubai-based Redington Value, a subsidiary of the Bombay Stock Exchange-listed company Redington Group, will act as SAS’ dedicated partner to serve SAS customers in Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Kenya.

“Redington Value has embarked on a journey of creating a best-in-class Data & Analytics practice in East Africa with consulting, sales, pre sales and delivery capabilities,” said Ramkumar Balakrishnan, President, Redington Value Division adding: “We wanted to partner with the best Advanced Analytics Solution Provider in the region to address some of the most complex business problems facing the region. SAS was a clear choice to achieve that objective.”

In order to capture the opportunity faced in the region and to ensure that customers benefit from the power of world-class analytics, SAS continues to look to innovative ways to go-to-market and empower customers to transform data into intelligence, said Desan Naidoo, Vice President SAS Africa.

“The decision to enter into a strategic partnership with Redington in East Africa came about as a result of the growing analytics market in that region and to ensure that our customers needs are not only met but exceeded,” says SAS Senior Director, S&E EMEA Alliances & Channels, Steve Harris.

According to independent research, the Global Business Intelligence & Analytics Market is accelerating at break-neck pace and is poised to grow at around 10.3% in 2019, reaching an estimated value of $27 billion by 2020.

Analytics is changing the world we live in and research shows that companies using analytics for decision-making are 6 percent more profitable than those that don’t.

As organisations look to embed analytics into their business processes, the need for strong domain expertise and local regional support and scale becomes ever more critical to ensure customer success. Consequently, SAS began an extensive evaluation to identify a strategic partner in the East Africa region.

“We had a clear vision of what it wanted from a strategic partner prior to launching the process, and Redington Value met all of SAS’ requirements, and more,” Harris asserted.

For SAS, Redington’s footprint and vast network in the region is going to help accelerate their growth. We are very hopeful of a great partnership which will define the way transformational technologies are taken to market, particularly in emerging geographies.”

Sayantan Dev, Redington Gulf Vice President – VCG, says SAS provides great products that are able to solve very complex business problems. “With our reach and extensive customer network in East Africa, we are confident that, together with SAS, we will provide the perfect solutions to businesses throughout the region, while simultaneously furthering the technological advancement of the area,” he said.

According to Dev, the partnership with SAS comes at the perfect time. “Customers are becoming more familiar with Advanced Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and other new technologies. They understand the concepts and how they see these concepts could work for their businesses – now, they are expecting technology providers to tailor their solutions to meet the business need,” Dev said, adding that technology providers are having to adjust their approach from selling a concept to detailing how a particular product will solve the specific business problem at hand.

Focusing our activities around solving our customers’ most critical business challenges remains the primary objective for SAS, and the partnership established with Redington Value enables this. “Our partnership represents an extensive investment in East Africa, offering ongoing commitment to our customers in the region,” Harris concluded.