I am spending some time with SAS this week and I was struck by a couple of announcements related to the ongoing SAS/Teradata partnership. First, the two companies have partnered with Elder Research to create a Business Analytics Innovation Center. This will both pilot new analytics (something at which John and his team at Elder Research excel) and help customers with proofs of concept. I think the combination of SAS and Teradata is an interesting one as I have said before. SAS's focus on analytic modeling tools, Elder Research's experience with finding the right analytic technique for a particular problem (even if it is a novel one as discussed here by John Elder at Predictive Analytics World) and Teradata's focus on making a company's transaction-level detail available in a high-performance data warehouse (as discussed by SingTel Optus for instance) is a very strong one and the BAI Center will be interesting to watch as it gears up next year. Teradata and SAS have also announced a Business Insight Advantage program that is designed to make it easier to adopt the technologies in an integrated way.