New SAS® Platform capabilities answer the needs of the modern, analytics-driven company

SAS® Viya™ enhancements deliver analytics results from diverse data sources and programming languages

Analytics leader SAS is already helping customers like Cox Automotive Media Group, GE Transportation, the North Carolina Department of Transportation, Numeris and Sprint, gain more value from data with the SAS Platform and its SAS Viya capabilities. The newest advances to the SAS Platform, such as embedded artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, will further address the needs of organizations that are making analytics core to their business.

According to the 2016 IDG Enterprise Data and Analytics Survey, “finding correlations across multiple disparate data sources” is the top challenge organizations hope to solve through data-driven initiatives. With SAS, data scientists, analysts, developers, IT, domain experts and executives can generate data-driven insights, fostering greater collaboration and driving innovations into production faster. SAS Viya further modernizes the platform with new capabilities such as image recognition, deep learning and natural language understanding.

Cox Automotive organizes a team around agile analytics

Cox Automotive Media Group, the company behind Autotrader, Dealer.com and Kelley Blue Book, is a leading provider of automotive products and services. By enhancing its existing SAS investment with SAS Viya, Cox Automotive can empower its employees to help achieve the full potential of analytics.

“As we align our technology and enterprise analytics globally, we need a platform that allows our analytically diverse team of data scientists to work together seamlessly,” said Shawn Hushman, Vice President of Decision Sciences and Valuations at Cox Automotive Media Group. “The enhancements that SAS Viya delivers to the SAS Platform allow us to pick and choose the right tool for the right problem and not be bound by one programming language or environment. Whether a team member feels most comfortable coding in SAS. R or Python, there is now a point of integration that stitches all the model interfaces together. Plus, we are able to extend the possibilities of our current SAS environment.”

Numeris empowers more users to access more data

Numeris is Canada's most trusted and authoritative source for broadcast measurement and consumer behavior data, as well as the industry-leading intelligence provider to broadcasters, advertisers and agencies. All of Numeris’ sample data comes from phone calls, and fewer participants are answering their phones. So it takes more and more effort to reach the 180,000 respondents required in the diary markets and to maintain the 11,000-person electronic measurement panel needed to produce audio- and video-audience estimates. Numeris has turned to SAS Viya products to help the company evaluate all its data across departmental silos.

“Ten years ago, 90 to 92 percent of households would pick up the phone to answer audience surveys and today we’re down to sometimes as low as 65 percent,” said Derrick Gray, Director of Audience Measurement Science at Numeris. “To get to our ideal sample number we have to dial around 2 million households annually. With SAS Viya we will be able to shift to a centralized business intelligence tool, SAS Visual Analytics, so users from across departments can collaborate. More people will have access to common, consistent data, allowing Numeris to quickly see patterns and explore insights so we can more easily maintain our existing list of households, dial fewer numbers and improve participation outcomes.”

The SAS Platform encompasses the entire analytics life cycle

The SAS Platform, which includes SAS Viya products, helps users quickly create value from data by seamlessly transitioning through the stages of the analytics lifecycle – from data to discovery to deployment. SAS is the sole leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Insight Platform Suites, Q4 2016. The Forrester report states:

“SAS offers a balance between strength of current offering and a platform strategy. SAS has best-in-class analytics coupled with a breadth of good data management for streaming, virtualization and master data management. It has made progress simplifying its tools, and its recently launched SAS Viya offers promises to go even further in modifying and simplifying its architecture.”

New capabilities added to the SAS Platform are designed to adapt to expanding IT infrastructures for any size or speed of data, complexity of problem and deployment strategy. With one governed inventory for all analytical assets, coded in SAS or any other language, organizations can manage all analytics activity.

New enhancements coming to the SAS Platform for the remainder of 2017 include:

• Embedded AI capabilities in the SAS Platform, starting with SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning and SAS Visual Text Analytics. Building on a long history of machine learning, these SAS products leverage deep learning and natural language understanding to enhance the depth of insights derived from data.
• Single interactive interface that spans a wide range of analytics tasks to help non-coders solve complex problems faster.
• SAS Data Preparation for self-service, visual data wrangling, transforming, blending and cleansing data, with application-generated code fit for IT scheduling environments.
• SAS Visual Text Analytics, a modern, flexible and end-to-end text analytics framework that combines text mining, contextual extraction and categorization, sentiment analysis, and search. It automates feature extraction and business-rule generation using modern machine learning approaches.
• Cloud deployment through the SAS Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and others, including SaasNow.

Today's announcement was made at the Analytics Experience conference in Washington, DC, a business technology conference presented by SAS that brings together more than 10,000 attendees on-site and online to share ideas on critical business issues.