SAS has made the new version of its analytic software SAS Viya, for private and public clouds generally available in New Zealand, saying it does not signal the end of the current SAS software but the two versions will continue to evolve in parallel.
SAS CTO Oliver Schabenberger, told a customer breakfast in Auckland on 22 September, held to coincide with the general availability of SAS Viya – announced in April - that there would be two products from SAS going forward.
“There will be two product streams from SAS from now on: SAS 9 and SAS Viya,” he told a second event, held in Sydney, to market the occasion.
“You can even have them both installed on the same hardware. The bridges we have built mean you can load data in Viya, run analysis in Viya. You can model in Viya, export them to SAS 9 and deploy them in SAS 9.”
He added “We will have two product lines continuing indefinitely into the future, but it does not mean that very solution will move over.
He said the SAS Viya might not be the best solution for some customers. “For many of our customers SAS 9 is the right platform. You need to be on it. We want to present this as an opportunity, an ‘and’ proposition not an ‘or’. To enable you move to Viya if you need to.
“You are all at different points on the journey to more cloud computing, more streaming analytics, more machine learning more automation. Sooner or later you might find you need to move to Viya and we will be ready for you.”
Schabenberger said SAS 9 would evolve to me more compatible with Viya. “By the end of the year, in the next maintenance version of SAS 9, M4, we are adding SAS Enterprise Miner nodes that understand Viya and SAS Studio will be enhanced with specific tasks.”
He added:“We have built SAS Viya around the forces in the market and what you told as and I hope customer innovation will be the hallmark of my tenure at SAS.”