SAS Viya outperforms competitors and lowers operational costs, study says

SAS AI and analytics platform is 30 times faster, more scalable and 86% more cost-effective than commercial and open source alternatives

A new benchmarking study reveals the SAS^® Viya^® AI and analytics platform is, on average, 30 times faster than commercial and open-source alternatives and scales better with larger and complex data. The analysis from The Futurum Group compared SAS Viya to a commercial, cloud-based data and AI platform, and open-source alternatives like H2O and SparkML.

For more details, read the full study.

According to the study, Viya outperforms the selected alternatives across speed and scalability metrics. Specifically:

Speed/Performance:

• Viya is, on average, 30 times faster than all alternative AI/ML solutions across all test scenarios.
• Viya is, on average, 49 times faster than a Spark-based Data/AI platform across all algorithms, data sizes and workloads. In some cases, Viya is up to 326 times faster.

Scalability:

• Viya scales better than alternatives with larger, complex data sets, reducing AI/ML run times with additional computing resources.
• For model training on more than 300 million data points, Viya outperformed all alternatives and was the only platform to continue scaling.

Cost Effectiveness:

• Users can lower costs by more than 86% compared to tested alternatives because of Viya’s speed and scalability in training and scoring models.

“SAS Viya produced results in minutes; competitors ran for hours or simply failed,” said Russ Fellows, Senior Partner and Analyst at The Futurum Group. “In practical terms, SAS Viya helps users lower computing costs and consider more data to drive intelligent decisions faster. Our research showed SAS is way ahead of competitors.”

Viya, a cloud-native AI platform, gives customers choice and control for analysing large and complex data, providing the scalability needed. The insights created by Viya help business leaders make better decisions – whether those decisions affect interest rates for securing a car loan, needed maintenance that keeps a rail company’s trains safe or when and where a retail distribution centre ships a pallet of merchandise. 

“The Futurum Group study confirms what our customers have told us all along: Viya runs efficiently and effectively in the cloud – it makes the most of CPU usage during workload run times,” said Bryan Harris, SAS Executive Vice President and CTO. “SAS R&D has focused millions of dollars of research to improve cloud economics for customers looking to rapidly adopt cloud, analytics and AI. These independent results are proof of the game-changing performance gains and cost savings we are delivering to our customers.”

Today’s announcement was made at SAS Innovate, the AI and analytics business conference from analytics leader SAS. To keep up with the latest news from SAS, follow @SASsoftwareNews on Twitter.

About The Futurum Group

The Futurum Group is a family of industry research, advisory, consulting, and media companies focused on analysing emerging and market-disrupting technologies, identifying and validating trends, and delivering data and insights that empower clients to find their competitive edge in the digital economy.

About SAS Viya

SAS Viya is an AI, analytic and data management platform that runs on a modern, scalable architecture. It is cloud-first software, designed to be delivered and updated continuously and bring the power of analytics to everyone, everywhere. SAS Viya integrates the art of decision making with the science of AI and advanced analytics, helping organisations to make better decisions, faster.