With this week’s bulletins of a strategic partnership with Microsoft for the Azure cloud and the anticipated launch of the cloud-native rewrite of SAS Viya, one of many oldest unbiased software program suppliers has reached a key milestone in its generational transformation.
SAS, began up by Jim Goodnight in 1976, is among the few survivors of the primary technology of unbiased software program companies; Oracle, cofounded by Larry Ellison in 1977, is also in that camp. A typical thread for each companies has been the continued robust management of the founders who to this present day stay very a lot engaged. And for those who add in a later comer–Informatica–you discover yet one more firm that has needed to bear the same transformation train.
For years, SAS was synonymous with information mining, a self-discipline that has since morphed into information science. The variations between the 2 are subjective, however the transition echoes the growth of the information property and the Cambrian explosion of open supply modeling frameworks, programming languages, comparatively cheap cloud compute and limitless on-premises and cloud-based storage which have made this a much more multi-dimensional self-discipline.
No longer are quants, information miners or now, information scientists, outlined by their data of the SAS language, as a result of there are numerous paths to producing these analytics fashions.
New-gen improvement method
To say that SAS faces generational change is an understatement and hardly a brand new improvement. For the information and analytics sector at giant, technology change has been a reality of life because the early days of “big data” greater than a decade in the past. That’s the place the highlight on innovation in information administration and analytics began coming from innovators resembling Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and some others, who needed to invent their very own applied sciences to take care of analytic challenges blowing the dimensions off something out there commercially.
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To view a 1:1 eSPEAKS video interview performed by eWEEK Editor Chris Preimesberger with SAS COO and CTO Oliver Schabenberger, go right here.
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Likewise, SAS’s transformational journey amongst basic enterprise software program firms is hardly distinctive. For SAS, what’s notable are the milestones which can be occurring this week. It is lastly embracing cloud-native structure in its flagship software program, and it has entered right into a strategic partnership with Microsoft that might see SAS’s analytic companies ultimately grow to be ubiquitous in case your group makes use of Azure companies, starting from analytics and machine studying to Microsoft 365. That received’t occur tomorrow, but when SAS is profitable, not solely in reworking its software program, but additionally the way in which it conducts enterprise, it may open itself as much as a a lot wider viewers. Or, as EVP Oliver Schabenberger places it: “Analytics hidden in plain sight.”
It takes some time to show round a ship. The shift of SAS Viya to a…