Among the fallout from SAS’s pushing its analytics engine into operations is the idea of bringing it all back home into the IT shop.  Although not heavily represented in the IT operations space, SAS does have a flavor of its offerings called, appropriately, SAS IT Intelligence. This week, it is announcing its first major partnership in the area, with a jojnt development and go-to-marketing deal with VMware to extend SAS’s IT analytics to provisioning of virtualized resources.

Strictly speaking, the new offering SAS IT Intelligence for VMware Infrastructure consists primarily of an adapter for VMware’s VirtualCenter monitoring console. Specifically, SAS is extending capabilities it already has to the VMware environment. The result is that SAS’s IT Intelligence offering now blends analytics of the virtual and physical worlds, so analysis and prediction of resource consumption is part of a unified global analysis. It’s an obvious acknowledgement that you won't get a complete picture of IT resource consumption if you’re only looking at physical servers, given explosive growth in adoption of virtualization.

The deliverables from SAS’s extension for VMware include applying its statistical processing engine to not simply analyze past or existing demand for VMware containers, but to predict future trends. SAS also adds its capability to compete chargebacks, not only by traditional methods, but Activity-Based Costing which detects, not only who is using the resources, but how (and how heavily) those resources are being utilized. For IT operations that seek to grow more entrepreneurial or for service providers, SAS applies its profitability analysis capability.

SAS claims that it does not compete with IT infrastructure/management vendors like BMC, HP< IBM, or HP; but given that each of those vendors is striving to recast their offerings in business service management or business technology optimization terms, it’s surprising that SAS has not fully plumbed partnerships possibilities with the incumbents (or the other way around).

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