SAS Viya now available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace - TechInvest Magazine Online

SAS offers its industry-leading analytics platform with hourly pricing model, in-app tutorials and support for multiple languages

The SAS® Viya® analytics platform is now available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace with the click of a button on a pay-as-you-go basis. Full-featured SAS Viya on Microsoft Azureequips customers worldwide with access to essential data exploration, machine learning and model deployment analytics. It’s available in many translated languages and includes an extensive in-app learning centre to support immediate onboarding and long-term success.

Market research from IDC forecasts that analytics software deployment on public clouds is growing and will match on-premises deployments by 2024. “In this strategic move, SAS makes access to its analytics easier,” said Dan Vesset, Group Vice President, Analytics and Information Management at IDC. “SAS Viya is one of the most comprehensive analytics platforms on the market today. Presenting users with the complete analytics life cycle – from data to a deployed and managed model – available for immediate use and deployment via the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, is key. And offering it with built-in support and training is expected to bring significant productivity benefits to analytics, IT and business groups around the world.”

Comprehensive access, broad language support

SAS Viya is designed to broaden analytics access across an organisation, with machine learning capabilities that allow all users to increase productivity and collaborate seamlessly. With the availability of SAS Viya on Microsoft Azure, users will have access to the full Viya package that includes SAS Visual Analytics, SAS Visual Statistics, SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning, and SAS Model Manager.

The platform offers both programming and low- or no-code options in a single visual interface to enable users of all skill levels to take advantage of best-in-class AI. With support for both SAS and open source languages including Python and R, data scientists can write code using their languages and techniques of choice. 

It’s a new day for SAS

SAS CEO Jim Goodnight said accessing Viya in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace is a fast and easy way to tap into the power of SAS.  

“We’re excited to offer customers a new way to gain access to SAS Viya while continuing to provide all the powerful capabilities our users already know and love,” Goodnight said. “We’ve spent decades building the most comprehensive suite of analytics on the market, with next-generation AI that addresses the complete analytics life cycle. We design and test our software to be the fastest and most productive. And now we’re making it all available with a few clicks in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.” 

Ongoing commitment to customer success

“Our commitment to cloud and AI innovation is critical to our customers’ success – whether they are building simple reports or developing advanced AI solutions to answer critical business questions,” said Bryan Harris, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at SAS. “Making SAS Viya available to entire analytics organisations is our goal, regardless of skill level, team or preferred programming language. We want Viya to be the foundation of our customers’ innovation stories.” 

SAS Viya users include business analysts, data scientists and information consumers from line workers to executives. They are located all around the world, across all industries, and experience benefits from fellow SAS users and experts within SAS Communities, which will be available directly through SAS Viya on Microsoft Azure. Organisations embracing the transformative power of Viya include:

• SAS Hackathon 2022 winner Team JAKSTAT used SAS Viya on Microsoft Azure to allot COVID government aid to regional small businesses. The Jakarta, Indonesia team used the AI, machine learning and data modelling capabilities of Viya to prioritise strategic investment, giving the most relief to the micro, small and medium-sized enterprises with the best economic resilience for the region and the country.
• bioMérieux, a world leader in the field in vitro diagnostics and its software-as-a-service offering, CLARION™, powered by SAS, connects the myriad of health care data inside US hospitals and reference laboratories to provide critical insights to battle public health threats. This innovative solution tracks antimicrobial-resistant bacteria and quickly produces data dashboards on SAS Viya   to empower more informed clinical decision-making.
• By modernising with Viya, S-Bank – Finland’s top retail bank – has access to improved visual tools and faster performance from running its analytics closer to its data. “The solution with SAS and Azure has greatly improved how we are working with analytics, particularly the visual capabilities of the tool, which have helped strengthen the alignment between the analytics team and the business development team,” said Iikka Kuosa, Senior Vice President of Products and IT at S-Bank. 
• Techniker Krankenkasse (TK), the largest public health insurance company in Germany, uses Viya to find correlations between customer health events and gain insights. According to Dr. Thilo Eichenberg, TK Data Scientist, “Our pattern recognition application clearly demonstrates the flexibility of SAS Viya to adapt to new requirements. This architecture is what makes it future-proof from our point of view.”

Building on the value of the SAS and Microsoft partnership

Launching SAS Viya as a “Get It Now” offering in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace represents a continued focus on expanding the SAS/Microsoft strategic partnership. SAS first announced its partnership with Microsoft in 2020, and recently earned Microsoft’s Global Independent Software Vendor (ISV) 2022 Partner of the Year Award. This achievement recognises partners for demonstrating innovation and implementation excellence. 

The benefits of the partnership to organisations globally are clear. For the National Bank of Greece (NBG), the flexibility of the SAS platform combined with Microsoft Azure’s cloud elasticity has helped transform bank operations. “With the SAS Viya implementation in the cloud, we have significantly improved development of new analytics infrastructure by notably decreasing the costs and the complexity of processes, and by acquiring agility, speed and efficiency,” said Pantelis Maraveas, Assistant General Manager of Retail Segments, Bank Analytics and Liability Products at NBG.