Customers benefit from easier cloud migration and management of analytic workloads; SAS continues to strengthen its partnership with Microsoft Azure

Analytics leader SAS continues to innovate by making it easier to access its powerful, cloud-native SAS^®Viya^® platform. Recent product developments help customers more efficiently democratise analytics throughout their organisations while seamlessly managing analytic workloads and building SAS into a variety of applications.

“Among analytics providers, SAS is a recognised leader for reimagining the way analytics and machine learning are consumed so users realise optimal results that solve business challenges faster with more accuracy,” said Ritu Jyoti, Program Vice President of Artificial Intelligence Research at IDC. “This iteration of the SAS Viya platform gives users at all levels of an organisation an agile, powerful advanced machine learning engine to help master the complex data that’s in cloud environments.”

Recognising that so many organisations have struggled with the global pandemic and its effects, SAS CEO and founder Jim Goodnight says SAS Viya can help in the toughest times. “SAS Viya helps organisations see their data, customers and operations in new ways that encourage confident decision making,” said Goodnight. “Leading organisations like Hanesbrands, Mercy, Banco Bradesco and Qualitas Insurance Company rely on SAS Viya each day. Organisations expect to accelerate innovation and reduce costs when they operationalise analytics.” SAS Viya provides the missing layer between models developed in multiple languages and the systems where they’re deployed, eliminating the need for time-consuming recoding to deploy models.

SAS Viya now offers deep integration with Microsoft Azure services

SAS Viya is now available on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, marking the latest momentum in SAS’ strategic partnership with Microsoft announced last year. This integration between Azure and the SAS Viya analytics platform will empower customers to stand up SAS analytics in their cloud environments with ease, run them reliably, easily give users access to the latest innovations and enhancements and centrally manage everything with tools they are already familiar with. All of this will enable IT to focus less on routine analytics workloads and more on high-value, strategic workloads that help business leaders make better decisions.

“The partnership we have with SAS has helped our customers accelerate growth and expand their digital transformation initiatives” said Casey McGee, Vice President of Global ISV Sales at Microsoft. “We’re excited about this latest innovation of SAS Viya which provides a seamless customer experience with Microsoft Azure and will bring the power of analytics to our customers, across industries, enabling them to make business decisions faster and more effectively in a cloud experience that’s unique to SAS and Microsoft.”

As for joint solutions, the Predict & Plan Consumer Demand offering built on SAS Viya is available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace now. SAS’ legacy of helping retail and consumer goods companies increase forecast accuracy, improve margins, reduce stock levels and connect to customers more meaningfully, combined with the flexibility of Microsoft Azure automates complex planning tasks that improve supply chain efficiency. It’s the first of many industry-specific cloud analytics solutions SAS and Microsoft Azure plan to build together.

Goodnight and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella discuss SAS Viya and the SAS partnership in a recorded conversation. You can learn more about SAS Viya and the SAS partnership with Microsoft at the virtual event Travel to Faster, Trusted Decisions in the Cloud on Thursday, Feb. 11..

A SAS Viya-powered COVID dashboard saves lives in India

Other SAS Viya users are pushing the boundaries of innovation through analytics. For example, the Government of Odisha, an eastern India state on the Bay of Bengal, uses SAS Viya to better understand and control the effects of the COVID pandemic on its 46 million residents. Odisha’s citizens and government officials proactively use the Odisha State COVID-19 dashboard as the single, trusted source for tracking trends in infection rates, hospitalisations and available medical resources. Using this platform, high volumes of data around citizen registrations, contact tracing, health conditions and quarantine compliance are aggregated, transformed and processed to generate insights. In addition to rich visualizations, this data has been successfully used in forecasting peak infection times and modelling the optimal infrastructure augmentation and distribution by the State. In essence, the dashboard has enabled Odisha to stay ahead of the virus and save lives.

COPD Foundation uses SAS Viya to make a difference to members facing the pandemic

When the COVID pandemic ramped up, the 320 million people suffering with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) felt more vulnerable than ever. But SAS Viya and its built-in artificial intelligence (AI) strengths helped the COPD Foundation explore unstructured data, identify patterns and create meaningful reports for its members. Collectively, this allowed the organisation to pinpoint topics that were the most concerning for members – access to oxygen, medicine, jobs and pulmonary rehabilitation services. It made the foundation’s support and outreach more relevant in the early days of COVID when members needed it most.

University College Dublin helps save babies and mothers with help from SAS Viya

Pre-eclampsia is a serious complication of pregnancy affecting one-tenth of pregnancies worldwide. It results in the death of 50,000 women and 500,000 babies annually. Researchers from Ireland’s University College Dublin (UCD) together with its AI Healthcare Hub are developing a tool that helps clinicians diagnose and better manage patients to save the lives of mothers and their babies. SAS Viya provides all the needed components to seamlessly navigate the analytics lifecycle so UCD researchers can interactively explore data and build and deploy analytic models within one unified environment.

Boemska acquisition makes cloud-native SAS Viya more portable and scalable  

SAS’ January 2021 acquisition of Boemska, a UK-based analytic workload management company, enriches the SAS Viya platform with capabilities that accelerate cloud migration. Boemska’s offerings boost the portability of SAS Viya and open-source models for mobile and enterprise applications. They also ease the development and execution of models and decisions that depend on low-code and no-code technologies for tasks such as fraud detection, medical event decisions and manufacturing-defect identification. Boemska also offers enterprise workload management tools that optimise cloud migrations.

SAS collaborates with SingleStore to help customers view data holistically in the cloud

SAS and database company SingleStore created a strategic relationship in late 2020 to improve performance, reduce costs, and help customers with analytics and decisioning capabilities in the cloud. The relationship with SingleStore means SAS customers will more easily gain real-time insights from data residing in any cloud environment.