SAS has been and remains the industry's largest independent player in analytics, but has lagged the market in a key area: Making its software a true cloud offering, with the elasticity and scalability that term entails. The company's newly unveiled Viya architecture is aimed at bringing SAS up to full cloud speed, with early-adopter access scheduled for May and general availability in the third quarter.
"The key, starting-point change here is a microservices architecture and exposure of SAS data-management and analytics capabilities via open REST APIs," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen.
SAS' announcement emphasizes that Viya is "open." That position is backed by the fact Viya will be available on multiple cloud services, including CloudFoundry and Amazon Web Services, with Microsoft Azure and others to come, Henschen notes. Viya also supports non-SAS languages such as Python and Lua.
Despite Viya's open approach, it preserves the SAS user experience. "The architecture makes the cloud 'safe for SAS users, giving them a familiar SAS environment in the cloud, whether private or public, and insulating the average user from having to deal with third-party tools and infrastructure," Henschen says. "SAS put a big emphasis on compatibility with existing SAS software, so users can move their data up into a Viya-based environment, handle processing and analysis in a flexible, elastically scalable way and then return the results back to an on-premises environment."
SAS Visual Analytics, Visual Statistics, Visual Investigator, and Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning will be delivered as part of Viya this year.
The last "is an exciting new product and good to see, as machine learning libraries are all the rage across cloud stacks, and very much in tune with the possibilities of making use of big data in the cloud," Henschen says.
The Bottom Line
"Viya is a very positive, if overdue, development for SAS. The company needed to get cloudier, and Viya will finally deliver," Henschen says. The company has tagged open-source alternatives to SAS such as Apache Spark and H20 as competition, but this reveals a continued focus on licensed software, rather than "as-a-service" thinking, he adds. "There will be an analytics-as-a-service offering built on Viya that will enable customers to call SAS analytics without licensing a bunch of software, but at least initially it’s a very limited offering," Henschen says.
To this end, SAS has other competitive targets to worry about. "In my book, the machine learning and analytics libraries offered as services by the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft are a bigger threat to SAS, long term, than Spark or H20 software deployed on premises or in the cloud," Henschen says.
Viya is clearly aimed at giving the SAS installed base a path to true cloud deployments. At this point, what’s not clear is how much cost and deployment flexibility SAS Viya will bring and to what degree it will help the company to reach new customers or keep customers, as more and more of their data starts to live in the cloud," Henschen says.
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