SAS Goes Visual with New Analytics Architecture Viya

At the SAS Global Forum this week, SAS announced Viya, an open, cloud-ready next-generation analytics and visualization architecture. The new solution is designed to meet the business needs for analytics accessible to anyone and scalable to problems of any shape or size. Viya was designed to assist users in minimizing the time between early-stage analytical exploration, and acts as the foundation of a new suite of offerings, which include machine learning, to address any analytics projects.

Viya is accessible from many popular programming languages and public APIs, delivering analytics and data mining to users with any skill level. Beyond support for cloud computing, Viya’s unified architecture alleviates the need to stitch code from different vendors, delivering technology integration in support of the entire analytic lifecycle. Viya also supports new analytic methods that can be accessed from SAS and other programming languages. These will initially include Python, Lua and Java, as well as public REST APIs, as SAS shows that they embrace open source technologies.

In addition to offering multi-vendor, Viya also delivers multi-cloud architecture for analytics, made up of a single code base, ensuring consistent, reusable assets that are movable as the infrastructure evolves. New analytics products coming to SAS Viya include the following:

• SAS Visual Analytics: Offers visual data discovery, interactive reporting, and self-service data exploration. Already deployed at thousands of sites, it will be among the first products offered on Viya.
• SAS Visual Statistics: Includes a graphical user interface and a predictive modeling and programming interface, allowing users to create and refine models for specific groups or segments, quickly revealing insights.
• SAS Visual Investigator: This new offering provides graphical and interactive intelligence management and investigation capabilities, enabling intelligence analysts to reduce false positives, streamline the process and fighr fraud for improved customer segmentation.
• SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning: Another new product, one which extends market leading SAS Advanced Analytics. This offering is aimed at data scientists who want to easily apply machine learning and data mining technologies to structured and unstructured data. Will include an interface to expedite model building and code generation, addressing data sourcing, analytical data prep, feature engineering, integrated model comparison and implementation of models into production process.

Randy Guard, Executive Vice President and CMO at SAS concludes: “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.”

SAS Viya will be available for select early adopters in May, and generally available in Q3 2016. Click here to read the full press release.