SAS® Viya™: Quickly, easily solves prickly business challenges

Open and governed analytics help businesses build predictive models and agile machine learning applications

A cloud-ready, scalable, open platform for modern machine learning for all analytics skill levels, SAS^® Viya™ extends and complements SAS^®9 with new and updated applications introduced today.

Business analysts, data scientists and software developers can simultaneously derive insights from the same big, in-memory data creating portable analytical assets to solve their most challenging business problems.

Through public application program interfaces (APIs) and support for multiple programming languages, SAS Viya extends capabilities in interactive discovery and reporting, statistics, data mining, machine learning, streaming data analytics, forecasting, optimization and econometrics. 

“SAS Viya is more than SAS with a pretty, cloud-deployed, HTML5 web analytics face for broader audiences,” said Tony Baer, Principal Analyst at Ovum. “It is a rethink of the classic SAS platform, and with its emphasis on machine learning, positions SAS to deliver what Ovum terms ‘smart analytics.’"

Recognizing that users have different experiences and skill sets when it comes to analytics, SAS Viya products are designed to meet their needs and drive results:

Business users – SAS Visual Analytics, deployed at thousands of customer sites globally, now runs on SAS Viya and offers a popular self-service analytics and data visualization solution. Multiple users can visually discover relevant relationships in data, create and share interactive reports and dashboards, and use self-service analytics to quickly assess probable outcomes to make smarter, data-driven decisions.

Business analysts – SAS Visual Statistics features the same, consistent visual interface as SAS Visual Analytics. It enables interactive data exploration and building of descriptive or predictive models. By using SAS Visual Statistics, business analysts can more easily collaborate with statisticians to quickly refine models and make better-informed decisions.

Data scientists – SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning was developed for data scientists who want to easily apply machine learning and data mining techniques to structured and unstructured data. With the same, friendly, consistent visual and programming interface, data scientists can expedite model building and code generation that is portable and scalable across different deployment environments.

Intelligence analysts – SAS Visual Investigator, a new version of which was also announced today, addresses a wide variety of intelligence analysis and investigation management needs by identifying patterns, unknown relationships and objects of interest. Analysts can author scenarios to detect anomalies and suspicious events, manage intelligently prioritized alerts and conduct targeted investigations leading to better, more streamlined decision making and optimized business processes.

Coders – SAS, Python, Java and Lua interfaces and REST APIs have also been released to access data, analytical methods and services.

Three additional SAS Viya offerings for discipline-specific analytics were also unveiled: SAS Visual Forecasting, SAS Econometrics and SAS Optimization – all with programming interfaces that can also be used from Jupyter notebooks. In the future, SAS Visual Forecasting will add the same visual interface as the other SAS Viya analytics products.

In addition to the SAS Wrapper for Analytics Transfer (SWAT) Python client for SAS Viya, SAS has released the SASPy library that extends Python programming to SAS 9.4, including SAS Grid Manager. SAS is also introducing Pipefitter, a Python library that simplifies implementation of machine learning pipelines. The Python libraries are available from GitHub.

All the announced SAS Viya products are now shipping.

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.

To learn more about SAS Viya offerings please view the supporting infographic and read the SAS Viya Solution Overview.