SAS expands support for AWS and Google Cloud

SAS has expanded support for additional cloud providers, as the demand for public cloud deployments of big data and analytics (BDA) software grows.

As part of its strategic partnership with Microsoft, SAS Viya was released in November on Microsoft Azure.

SAS now expands cloud-native support for Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, with Red Hat OpenShift coming later this year.

SAS Viya is an AI, analytic and data management platform that runs on a modern, scalable architecture.

It is cloud-native software, designed to be delivered and updated continuously and bring analytics to more businesses, teams and use cases.

According to the company, SAS Viya integrates decision making with AI and advanced analytics, helping organisations to make better decisions, faster.

In its Worldwide Big Data and Analytics Software Forecast, 2020–20241 report, IDC says public cloud deployments represented 30.5% of the overall BDA software market in 2019.

Furthermore, they are expected to grow at a CAGR of 23.2% through 2024, compared with a CAGR of -1.2% for on-premise/other software deployment methods.

According to SAS, that growth trend suggests organisations slow to adopt this technology may find themselves struggling compared to early adopters.

IDC program vice president worldwide AI and automation research practice Ritu Jyoti anticipates more cloud expansion from SAS as it's what the marketplace demands.

Jyoti says, "It's clear SAS is committed to supporting customers' cloud choices. Expanding to Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud makes SAS Viya available to even more users.

SAS CIO Jay Upchurch says, "Analytics in the cloud is what our customers want. We're proud of our pioneering work with Microsoft and running SAS Viya on Microsoft Azure.

"We also respect our customers' decisions to choose other cloud providers. We'll meet them where their data is located and help them leverage their existing cloud investments to power their analytic aspirations.

Upchurch added that the SAS Cloud runs on Microsoft Azure and enjoyed 34% growth year-over-year for Q1 2021.

SAS chief technical officer Bryan Harris says, "Over the last year, companies that have embraced digital transformation were able to uniquely adapt to fast-changing market conditions. And digital transformation requires analytically-driven decisions.

"By expanding SAS Viya support for more cloud providers, we're giving customers choice and control to deploy world-class analytics anywhere and at any scale across their enterprise.

One example of the solution in action is with the COPD Foundation. The COPD Foundation is a nonprofit that works on speeding up innovations to make COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) treatment more effective and affordable.

The foundation needed to explore unstructured data, identify patterns and create meaningful reports that would better help members, and ended up choosing SAS for in-house natural language processing of text data.

Chief information officer Vincent Malanga says, "Once we decided SAS was the way to go, we knew we wanted our SAS solution hosted in a cloud environment, which is why we partnered with Pinnacle Solutions and went with an Amazon Web Services infrastructure to support it.

"While there are many moving parts, everything runs seamlessly, and we've had a very positive experience.