SAS’ cloud-first portfolio soars with customer success, industry solutions and strategic partners
SAS boldly stakes its future on a powerful cloud analytics platform and AI-driven, cloud-first industry solutions. It’s the analytics and AI leader’s cloud-first approach that eases customers’ digital transformations. And SAS’ cloud momentum is building, where despite the pandemic’s pressure and uncertainty, SAS’ global cloud revenue jumped 19% in 2021. With results like this, SAS is deepening its broad industry portfolio with solutions that support life sciences, energy and martech.
According to McKinsey & Company, 70% of companies using cloud technology plan to increase their cloud budgets. The public cloud computing market is projected to grow to $800 billion by 2024, with implementations across all industries – retail, media, telecom, education, banking, insurance and more.
What’s driving this investment? Forrester Consulting’s new Total Economic Impact™ study, shows organisations deploying SAS® Viya® on Microsoft Azure can see significant returns in as little as 14-months. In fact, one company more than tripled its investment in three years, results that will be explored during the May 18 webinar, Driving 204% ROI With SAS Viya On Microsoft Azure.
Journey to the cloud
SAS’ cloud-first transformation didn’t happen overnight. Using its decades-long legacy as a bridge to the future, step No. 1 was to develop SAS® Viya® as a cloud-first analytics platform. That endeavour ran in sync with ongoing strategic partnership investments, including Microsoft Azure. More recently, SAS joined new partner Cosmo Tech to fortify its digital twin simulation capabilities.
“We transformed our portfolio to be cloud-native and cloud-portable so customers can accelerate their move to the cloud and expand their use of analytics, machine learning and AI,” said Bryan Harris, SAS Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. “At the end of the day, we want our platform and industry solutions to be a critical part of every customer’s analytic innovation.”
Because SAS is both cloud-first and cloud-agnostic, helping customers manage the complexity of analysing intense data in the cloud is second nature. “Our customers don’t need to stress about data complexity or the details of running analytic workloads in the cloud, because SAS gives them the expertise they need,” said Jay Upchurch, SAS Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer – who also leads the SAS cloud business. “SAS analytics in the cloud gives our customers a distinct advantage, whether they’re using SAS Viya or an industry solution.”
In 2021, SAS realised the most cloud revenue growth from customers Asia Pacific (48% growth) and EMEA (29% growth) – and SAS’ commitment to cloud and AI innovation lives in its customers’ successes.
SAS Hackathon teams innovate with SAS in the cloud
The SAS Hackathon is an incubator for innovation and a test bed for AI in the cloud. Hackathon teams use SAS Viya on Microsoft Azure, along with open-source tools, to help solve some of the world’s toughest social and economic challenges.
This year’s SAS Hackathon included a team of eight members from South African who competed alongside 69 other team, representing 135 organisations and 75 countries.
The team from South Africa leveraged advanced augmented intelligence to build a solution that included creating models that could be trained to identify lung disease using digital X-rays. Even with limited data sets available the models were able to achieve diagnostic accuracy above 90% - and while for the duration of the Hackathon the team focused on lung diseases, the models have the potential to be scaled up to include other body parts for the same purpose of quick identification, diagnosis and treatment prioritisation.
