SAS expands support for additional cloud providers

SAS continues its commitment to ensuring advanced analytics run where customers locate their data. As part of its strategic partnership with Microsoft, SAS Viya was released in November on Microsoft Azure. Raising the bar, SAS now expands cloud-native support for Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, with Red Hat OpenShift coming later this year.

Industry analysts expect significant market growth for public cloud deployments of big data and analytics (BDA) software. In its Worldwide Big Data and Analytics Software Forecast, 2020–20241 report, IDC says public cloud deployments represented 30.5% of the overall BDA software market in 2019 and are expected to grow at a CAGR of 23.2% through 2024 compared with a CAGR of -1.2% for on-premise/other software deployment methods. That growth trend suggests organizations slow to adopt this technology may find themselves struggling compared to early adopters.

“Analytics in the cloud is what our customers want,” said Jay Upchurch, SAS CIO. “We’re proud of our pioneering work with Microsoft and running SAS Viya on Microsoft Azure. We also respect our customers’ decisions to choose other cloud providers. We’ll meet them where their data is located and help them leverage their existing cloud investments to power their analytic aspirations.” Upchurch added the SAS Cloud runs on Microsoft Azure and enjoyed 34% growth year-over-year for Q1 2021.

Experts like Ritu Jyoti anticipate more cloud expansion from SAS because it’s what the marketplace demands. “It’s clear SAS is committed to supporting customers’ cloud choices. Expanding to Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud makes SAS Viya available to even more users,” said Jyoti, Program Vice President, Worldwide AI and Automation Research Practice at IDC.

SAS’ customer commitment is unrivaled

“Over the last year, companies that have embraced digital transformation were able to uniquely adapt to fast-changing market conditions. And digital transformation requires analytically-driven decisions,” said Bryan Harris, SAS Chief Technical Officer. “By expanding SAS Viya support for more cloud providers, we’re giving customers choice and control to deploy world-class analytics anywhere and at any scale across their enterprise.”

Customers thriving with SAS Viya in the cloud include Axcess Financial, Banca Progetto, Center for Nonprofit Management, COPD Foundation, Gavilon Group, Georgia-Pacific, Orlando Magic, and University of Texas at Arlington.

• The COPD Foundation is a nonprofit that works on speeding up innovations to make COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) treatment more effective and affordable. The foundation needed to explore unstructured data, identify patterns and create meaningful reports that would better help members. The foundation chose SAS for in-house natural language processing of text data. “Once we decided SAS was the way to go, we knew we wanted our SAS solution hosted in a cloud environment, which is why we partnered with Pinnacle Solutions and went with an Amazon Web Services infrastructure to support it,” said Vincent Malanga, Chief Information Officer of the COPD Foundation. “While there are many moving parts, everything runs seamlessly, and we’ve had a very positive experience.”
• Another customer finding analytical flexibility in the cloud is commodities management firm, Gavilon Group. “To serve our stakeholders, we need to manage large volumes of data and risk calculations in real time, as well as adapt to new use cases over time,” said Tony Vojslavek, Chief Risk Officer, Gavilon Group. “We've had a long collaborative partnership with SAS. To position ourselves for the future and reduce our workload and operational costs, we migrated to the SAS Cloud on Azure. It’s a no-brainer for Gavilon to make the switch – we are transitioning support, server upgrades and application monitoring to SAS, and we can take advantage of new features and enhancements in SAS Viya." Vojslavek will share more details of the Gavilon Group story during SAS Global Forum during a session called, Gavilon: Accelerating Agriculture Risk Management With Advanced Analytics in the SAS® Cloud.
• The NBA’s Orlando Magic is moving from big data to big results with a cloud deployment of SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning powered by SAS Viya on AWS. The team stores and analyzes 20 years of data from more than 18 sources on 100,000 players. Director of Basketball Analytics David Bencs said, “The in-memory processing of SAS Viya will allow us to analyze data more efficiently, and machine learning will help us understand the data at a deeper level. Something that would have required watching hundreds of hours of game film before, now it’s a simple query.”