You may not have heard of SAS Viya. But if you deal with analytics, the Internet of Things and the “cloud,” you will. Soon.

While smart refrigerators and homes, ever-increasingly complex hand-held devices and machine-to-machine communications receive plenty of IoT hype, complex analytics through which companies can rapidly process crucial data also is a huge opportunity. So says SAS, which is making a big play in the Internet of Thing with Viya.

Cisco Chairman John Chambers has predicted an Internet of Everything with all manner of devices being linked, and he sees an $18 trillion business opportunity.

SAS sees plenty of IoT business, too, and is taking dead aim to adopt in order to win more than its share.

On Tuesday night in Las Vegas, SAS co-founder and CEO Jim Goodnight spelled out the $3 billion firm’s vision of a growing increasingly complex technology future. From IoT to the “cloud” to using in-store WiFi beacons, SAS is continuing to evolve into the mobile and remote computing environment with Viya playing a major role as it aims to grow revenue for a 41st consecutive year.

However, the complex SAS anayltics which are used by global Fortune companies to emerging tech ventures, and which include visualization of data that turns thousands of rows of data into easily recognizable charts and graphics, is not being “dumbed down.”

“To deploy on your cloud infrastructure, SAS Viya uses of industry leading, standard deployment technologies that IT is familiar with using. Again, simple, and powerful,” said Robby Powell, SAS principal product manager for cloud and platform technologies

It’s also usable in multiple programming languages, which Powell says customers – especially data scientists – wanted.

SAS also sought to create Viya to meet other requests, he adds.

“Requests for customers wanting cloud access to SAS that is scalable, leverages the advantages of cloud Platforms as a Service, and provides support for multiple cloud infrastructure providers.”

Some aspects of Viya

SAS says Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning running on SAS Viya:

  • “Combines data wrangling, data exploration and visualization, feature engineering and dimension reduction – as well as advanced unsupervised and supervised learning techniques.
  • “Provides a powerful, in-memory programming language – in SAS or accessible from other coding languages – for analyzing large, complicated data and uncovering new insights faster.
  • “Enables dramatic performance gains by removing the barriers created by data sizes, data diversity, limited analytical depth and computational bottlenecks.”

(Watch a video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhYUNn3ltUo)

The Q&A

So what is going on at SAS with IOT? The Q&A:

  • What all was involved in rewriting SAS code to make the analytics piece more “open” and cloud ready” as well as simpler? Was it “dumbed down”?

SAS Viya is the new modern, cloud-ready analytics architecture.

SAS Viya is “open” in that it provides flexibility and choice for developers to openly access SAS through the programming languages they are passionate about using. SAS Viya supports direct integration with Python, Java, and Lua programming languages, and also provides open, subscription-based access to cloud analytics capabilities allowing developers to integrate SAS analytics directly into the applications they are writing, from whatever programming language they desire.

SAS Viya is cloud-ready. Core to SAS Viya are SAS Cloud Analytics Services (CAS) which include the new SAS in-memory engine, and the new SAS Viya middle-tier built on a micro-services architecture that enables high-availability, fault-tolerance, and elastic scalability. Advantages of the new, modern architecture allows SAS Viya to leverage cloud Platforms as a Service (PaaS), such as Cloud Foundry, to deliver cloud deployment, management, scaling, and orchestration of the SAS Viya cloud architecture.

SAS Viya is Simple and Powerful. “High-performance” and “powerful” should not require complexity.

Whether you access SAS Viya offerings through self-service subscription, or by deploying SAS Viya on your on-premises private cloud or on public cloud infrastructure (IaaS), simple and powerful are the expectation. Self-service subscription is just that – “self-service”. Just subscribe and being using SAS Viya offerings.

To deploy on your cloud infrastructure, SAS Viya uses of industry leading, standard deployment technologies that IT is familiar with using. Again, simple, and powerful.

  • What customer demands/requests were behind the development of Via? What are the pain points Viya addresses?

Data Scientists and Developers are passionate about the languages they choose to use. SAS Viya allows them to use Python, Java, and Lua to call directly into SAS through familiar language constructs. SAS also provides subscription access to cloud analytics that developers can call from within their applications without having to install SAS.

Requests for customers wanting cloud access to SAS that is scalable, leverages the advantages of cloud Platforms as a Service, and provides support for multiple cloud infrastructure providers.

  • How does SAS deliver an “open” product and at the same time 1) protect your own secret sauce/proprietary knowledge and 2) ensure that modifications made by an outside developer don’t affect the core SAS technology?

SAS Viya is “open” in that it provides flexibility and choice for developers to openly access SAS through the programming languages they are passionate about using. SAS can seamlessly be integrated into customer-written applications, processes, and workflows. SAS is not open-sourcing its core SAS Viya technologies.

  • With so much data and applications moving to the cloud, is SAS simplifying the code for visual analytics, etc to run with less difficulty in a cloud environment? Or does the increased of server power made available through cloud on-demand scaling make such code simplification unnecessary?

SAS Viya is architected in a way that embraces the value of cloud computing.

Not a simplification of the capabilities of SAS offerings, but simplification of the architecture by decomposing the SAS platform into components (micro-services) that can be individually scaled to support varying workloads and usage patterns.

(Editor’s note: The attribution for this story has been corrected to reflect comments from Robby Powell, SAS principal product manager for cloud and platform technologies.)