SAS was named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning Solutions, Q1 2017, earning the highest scores among the 14 vendors in each of the three categories evaluated: current offering, strategy and market presence.

The new report follows SAS being named in December as the only leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Insight Platform Suites, Q4 2016. In that report, Forrester noted that SAS “leads the pack” of evaluated vendors and was cited among vendors that “differentiated themselves … with a clear vision of offering an insight platform that supports the implementation of insight at the point of decision.”

The predictive analytics and machine learning report said: “SAS reimagines its data science portfolio. SAS is unifying its comprehensive portfolio of data science solutions under SAS Visual Suite (SAS Visual Analytics, SAS Visual Statistics, SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning). It brings together world-class data prep, visualisation, data analysis, model building and model deployment. This unified tooling approach provides a consistent user experience that data scientists need to build even the most sophisticated models.

“SAS’ vision for data science is not limited to innovation in tools. It has been quick to jump on new, promising analytical methods across multiple disciplines, such as statistics, econometrics, optimisation, machine learning, deep learning, and natural language interaction. It recently introduced support for calling SAS analytics from Python, Java, and Lua, leveraging open source data science notebooks.”

Into the future

SAS^® Viya™, an open, cloud-ready analytics platform, was cited in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Insight Platform Suites, Q4 2016. SAS Viya applications offer fast, distributed processing with integrated data preparation, visualisation, analytics and model management. The product portfolio supports a wide range of user types including business professionals, analysts, statisticians, data scientists and executives.  It is a platform designed for fostering collaboration between different user types to make analytics pervasive in the organisation.

“Today, it’s clear that organisations face increasing analytics challenges as they compete to drive innovation” said Laurie Miles, Director of Analytics at SAS UK & Ireland. “That’s why our scalable Viya platform provides reliable and secure analytics management and governance to help enterprises keep pace with growing demands and deliver quick results that drive the best decisions.”

To better understand how machine learning automates analytical model building, please read “Machine Learning: What it is and why it matters.”