SAS, the world’s largest privately held software firm, already offers clients use of secure data housing and “cloud” computing services, but the company is expanding its global footprint in an agreement with Amazon.

The deal was announced Tuesday.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

However, one big customer was identified as using the new Amazon Web Service-SAS offering: Lenovo, the world’s top PC manufacturer which operates its global executive headquarters in Morrisville.

  • SAS exec: Deal will “absolutely not” affect SAS’ own cloud and data hoisting services. (WRAL TechWire Insider)

Amazon is one of the top cloud service providers. Raleigh-based Red Hat also works with Amazon AWS.

SAS also says it is forming a “Cloud Innovation Council” among its customers and allies to develop a set of “best practices” for use of SAS products in the cloud. Counil members include Intel, Capgemini, Cloudera, CoreCompete, Hortonworks, Pinnacle Solutions and Selerity.

Why the New Offering?

SAS says the addition is designed to help give clients more “speed and flexibility.”

Supported offerings include SAS Data Management, Business Intelligence and Analytics as well as Visual Analytics, which turns millions of data points into graphical representations. 

“Cloud-based technologies allow businesses to do more with less at a time when being agile and effective is more critical than ever,” said Scott Van Valkenburgh, SAS Senior Director of Global Alliances, in the announcement.

“SAS has been working with AWS to bring SAS Analytics into the AWS Cloud to help address the need for speed and flexibility in analyzing large amounts of data quickly and for taking new analytic approaches. Lenovo is an excellent example of how a company can run cutting edge solutions like SAS Visual Analytics on AWS to help increase efficiencies across its global operations.”

SAS offered a supporting statement from Anthony Volpe, Lenovo’s chief corporate analytics officer.

“Being able to run SAS on Amazon’s Cloud infrastructure allows us to ‘democratize’ analytics throughout our global operations,” Volpe said.

“Not only do we reduce the costs associated with our own technology environment, but our customers also benefit because we can make critical decisions much faster by being able to analyze data from anywhere at any time. SAS in the cloud allows us to incorporate relevant changes into our business processes quickly and effectively, across our worldwide organizations.”

Riding AWS

SAS says its products will work with several Amazon offerings, including:

· “Amazon Redshift: A fully managed, easily scalable and secure cloud-based data warehouse service that works with SAS to help customers quickly engage in big data analysis.
· “Amazon Elastic MapReduce: Amazon EMR uses Hadoop to distribute and process data across a scalable cloud infrastructure. This makes it easier for SAS users to focus on their data analysis rather than on the provisioning and administration of their SAS and Hadoop environments. Doing so ultimately leads to greater flexibility in how and when they analyze their data.
· “AWS Test Drive: AWS Test Drive provides a private IT sandbox environment containing preconfigured third-party software solutions. Via select SAS Alliance program members, AWS Test Drive offers customers the ability to access SAS Visual Analytics to see how quickly it delivers powerful insights to support their business.”

[SAS ARCHIVE: Check out more than a decade of SAS stories as reported in WRAL TechWire.]