Kunal Aman, Head Marketing, SAS India and Japan

"The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the way every organization does business, including ours. We are evaluating and changing our plans in response to COVID-19.We are putting the challenges of our customers and their businesses first in this scenario.To ensure we have a smooth customer-facing response, globally we have created a COVID Incident Management Team.

While for our employees, their health and safety is our top priority and we have ensured theywork from home. We have made all the checks to ensure employees are equipped to supportcustomers from home. And we are leveraging best in class tools for calls, video conferencing tostay in touch with each other as well as with our customers and partners

The current situation has definitely changed the way our online/ content marketing programs wouldotherwise run in a Business as Usual (BAU) situation. With change comes opportunity, and we have atremendous opportunity to make a difference, not just through our traditional business activities, but aswe put our humanitarian instincts above anything else. We are reaching out to our customers withmeaningful solutions that help address their critical business challenges.Over the past few weeks, we’ve had the opportunity to explore new ways to help our customersincluding Government overcome challenges exacerbated by COVID-19. Cost control and optimizationare high priorities for customers right now. We’re taking a targeted approach with customers whoare expressing interest in cost reduction.We’ve also created a list of new SAS use cases, including hospital bed optimization, public healthdashboards, airline routing optimization, anti-money laundering health checks for banking and apopulation movement index for telco. To encourage SAS learners to stay engaged, globally, we have also rolled out Free e-Learning for SASLearners including live web classes, certifications and learning subscriptions.

SAS is focusing on helping customers during this crisis. SAS has already created a publiclyavailable report that depicts the status, location, spread and trend analysis of the coronavirusand we are engaged on several projects around the world helping customers use data andanalytics in the fight against the virus.”