SAS is well-known for its data analytics chops, having been doing it now for 40 years. Well, the company, with an announcement this week from its SAS Global Forum in Las Vegas, is bringing its power to bear on the IoT in a big way with the cloud-ready SAS Viya next-generation high-performance analytics and visualization architecture.
SAS says it’s designed for all skill levels, scalable to any size, and built to be ideal for big data challenges like machine learning and predictive analytics. With Viya, SAS wants to help customers minimize the time between early-stage analytical exploration and deriving real business value from analytics. It will be the foundation of a suite of offerings, including machine learning, to address many analytic challenges. The initial offerings will be available in May for select early adopters, and will be generally available in the third quarter of 2016.
“The true value of data only comes when you identify a return on IoT investment,” said Jason Mann, Director, Industry Product Management, SAS. “SAS Vaya has real implications for [deriving that ROI through] machine learning and analytics. It’s scale and capacity of compute and data visualization are preliminarily benchmarked at 200,000 to 300,000 events per second.”
That’s nothing to sneeze at, to be sure. But what can it do, specifically?
SAS Visual Analytics is already deployed globally and will be among the first SAS Vaya products. It offers visual data discovery, interactive reporting and self-service data exploration.
SAS Visual Statistics is a graphical user interface and predictive modeling and programming interface that allows users to create and refine models for specific groups or segments and reveal insights.
SAS Visual Investigator is a new product that will provide graphical and interactive intelligence management and investigation capabilities by enabling intelligence analysts and investigators to reduce false positives, streamline the investigation process and fight fraud or improve customer segmentation. It 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 also new and is designed to expand upon SAS advanced analytics. Data scientists will use it to apply machine learning and data mining techniques to structured and unstructured data. Developers can build a model once and deploy anywhere. The interface is designed to be user-friendly to ease model building and code generation.
Randy Guard, EVP and CMO, SAS, 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.”
Edited by
Ken Briodagh
