Accenture and SAS plan to expand their strategic relationship by jointly developing, implementing, and managing predictive analytics solutions, a first for both companies.

As part of the expansion, the two companies intend to invest in the development of solutions focused on industry-specific predictive analytics applications, starting with the financial services, healthcare, and public service sectors as well as cross-industry solutions in the customer and enterprise management domains. They also plan to begin delivering sophisticated analytical capabilities as a managed service.

In forming the Accenture SAS Analytics Group, the companies intend to bring together Accenture's industry and functional business knowledge with SAS's analytics solutions and capabilities to help companies and government organizations understand and implement predictive analytics solutions. Predictive analytics takes the information made available through standard analytics today and combines it with more sophisticated statistical modeling, forecasting, and optimization techniques to anticipate the impact on business outcomes.

"Our enhanced relationship with SAS is a key element of Accenture's strategy of aggressively addressing the opportunities around the next generation of analytics," says William D. Green, Accenture's chairman & CEO. "Companies that use predictive analytics to derive actionable insights from data and use those insights to shape decisions can improve business outcomes and substantially outperform competitors over the long term."

Jim Goodnight, CEO at SAS, adds, "In our long experience providing analytic insights to our customers, we've never seen leaders so readily adopting analytic approaches across their organizations. The Accenture SAS Analytics Group will help these companies take their business results to the next level by applying best-of-breed predictive analytics and best practices to complex questions and decisions."

The Accenture SAS Analytics Group plans to focus initially on developing a series of predictive solutions for the financial services industry, including banking and insurance; healthcare services, including payer/provider and pharmaceuticals; as well as the public sector, in areas such as federal and human services. In addition, cross-industry functional solutions are expected to start with customer acquisition and retention as well as enterprise analytics.

Plans also call for the formation of joint analytics showcases in multiple locations, starting with Chicago, London, Milan, and Shanghai, where the companies intend to demonstrate their new industry and functional predictive analytics capabilities to clients.

"During previous downturns, companies that thrived used data insights to produce lasting competitive advantage," says Dave Rich, managing director, Accenture Analytics. "Companies today can use predictive analytics to gain deeper insight that has not been previously obtainable, allowing decisions to be made more quickly and business performance to be improved."