Open, cloud-ready SAS® Viya™ is next-generation high-performance analytics and visualization architecture

Latest from analytics leader SAS is designed for all skill levels, scalable to any size, and built for big data challenges like machine learning

New SAS^® Viya^™, the next-generation high-performance and visualization architecture from the leader in analytics, is designed to meet the business needs for analytics accessible to anyone and scalable to problems of any size. Unveiled today, SAS Viya helps minimize the time between early-stage analytical exploration and the end result of business value. It is the foundation of a suite of offerings, including machine learning, to address any analytic challenge.

Open and cloud-ready, SAS Viya and its associated offerings provide a simple and unified computing platform that addresses all analytic questions, from small to large. SAS Viya and the initial offerings will be available in May for select early adopters, and will be generally available in third quarter 2016.

“The vast majority of the new generation of mission-critical apps, most of which are data-intensive, are being developed and run in the cloud," said Amy Konary, Program Vice President for SaaS and Cloud Services at IDC.  "Within the next three to five years, most large enterprises will have much more data in the cloud than in their own data centers. IDC believes that this ‘data gravity’ will hasten the migration of legacy systems and data to the cloud."

The benefits of SAS Viya extend beyond cloud computing support. The simple and powerful architecture of SAS Viya ensures easy deployment in the cloud or on-site. SAS Viya’s unified architecture alleviates the need to stitch code from different providers together. It delivers technology integration in support of the entire analytic lifecycle.

Accessible from popular programming languages and public APIs, SAS Viya delivers analytics and data mining for any skill level.

“SAS has embarked on a major effort to build for the future of analytics with its SAS Viya architecture,” said Nicole Engelbert, Director of Research and Analysis at Ovum. “This is an ambitious, aggressive undertaking that incorporates the key innovations that can take its customers where they want to be. It’s critical that analytics users can quickly integrate and exploit new technologies.”

Randy Guard, SAS Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, said, “Analytics are firmly at the center of today’s enterprise, producing new opportunities, improving customer experiences and growing bottom lines. SAS Viya provides businesses, governments and other organizations a single, open and cloud-ready architecture. It’s easy to manage, scales to all analytic challenges, and delivers value from analysts of varied skill sets.”

All initial offerings will have both a point-and-click user interface and an interactive programming interface. In 2016 SAS will deliver:

• SAS Visual Analytics
• SAS Visual Statistics
• SAS Visual Investigator
• SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning

SAS Viya supports new analytic methods that can be accessed from SAS and other programming languages, initially Python, Lua and Java, as well as public REST APIs. “SAS embraces open source technologies and contributes to open standards,” said Guard.

SAS Viya is service-oriented and cloud-ready for many public or private cloud infrastructures, and will deliver new public APIs that can be called as a service. From casual business users to data scientists and application developers, SAS Viya provides fast, analytically-proven answers for anyone.

“The open SAS Viya architecture makes analytics accessible to anyone, and we want to build upon that openness by creating a community for knowledge sharing,” said Guard. “Our users will be able to contribute code, procedures, visuals and services, and collaborate on ideas.”

In addition to a multi-vendor architecture for analytics, SAS Viya now delivers a multi-cloud architecture for analytics. A single code base ensures consistent, reusable assets that are transportable as infrastructure evolves. 

New analytics products coming to SAS Viya include:

SAS Visual Analytics – offers visual data discovery, interactive reporting and self-service data exploration. It is already deployed at thousands of sites around the globe and will be among the first products available on SAS Viya.

SAS Visual Statistics – features a graphical user interface and a predictive modeling and programming interface. Users can interactively create and refine models for specific groups or segments and quickly reveal insights.

SAS Visual Investigator – is a new product that provides graphical and interactive intelligence management and investigation capabilities. It enables intelligence analysts and investigators to reduce false positives, streamline the investigation process and fight fraud or improve customer segmentation. SAS Visual Investigator supports search, query and visualization of data, regardless of format, size and location, as well as investigations using geospatial, network, and temporal visualizations.

SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning – is a new product that extends market leading SAS advanced analytics. SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning is aimed at data scientists who want to easily apply machine learning and data mining techniques to structured and unstructured data. Developers can build a model once and deploy anywhere.

SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning will also provide a friendly interface to expedite model building and code generation. It will address data sourcing, analytical data preparation, feature engineering, dimension reduction, exploratory analysis, modeling and learning, integrated model comparison and implementation of models into production processes.

“With its distributed, massively parallel in-memory processing, SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning delivers answers quickly, allowing an enterprise to shift gears on the fly and respond to changing markets,” said Sascha Schubert, SAS Advanced Analytics Marketing Director. “Enterprises are always looking for faster insights to keep ahead of the competition.”

Learn more about the innovative architecture at the SAS Viya web page.

Today's announcement was made at SAS Global Forum, the world's largest analytics conference, with more than 30,000 business and IT users of SAS software participating on-site and online.