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SAS announced that analytics platform Viya is now available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. The move should make it easier to deploy solutions for data exploration, machine learning and model implementation.

The availability of Viya in the Azure Marketplace got a lot of attention during SAS Explore, a virtual user event hosted by the company. SAS is offering a new way to access Viya. Companies can acquire the platform “at the touch of a button” on a pay-as-you-go basis.

What do companies get with SAS Viya?

Viya is one of the key assets within SAS’ product strategy. The company sees Viya as the product of the future. It’s a cloud-based platform for analytics, artificial intelligence and data management. To this end, the Viya package consists of Visual Analytics, Visual Statistics, Visual Data Mining & Machine Learning and Model Manager.

For data scientists, Viya provides support for several programming languages, to write code with the languages and techniques of their choice. The popular open-source languages Python and R are supported in addition to the proprietary SAS language.

Furthermore, the platform offers support for programming using low-code and no-code. This should make it easier for business users such as sales and marketing staff to use data science techniques. Ultimately, SAS wants to widely promote analytics within organizations, so that all users can increase productivity using artificial intelligence and seamlessly collaborate with each other.

Tip: Analytics in the cloud: how valuable is it?

Expanding capabilities

Launching Viya in the Azure Marketplace is an extension of the existing partnership between SAS and Microsoft. In 2020, the parties announced a collaboration. Microsoft grew to become the “preferred cloud provider”, which involves engineering teams working together to quickly run analytics workloads in the cloud. Despite Microsoft’s special status, SAS offers companies freedom of choice by also offering the platform in AWS and Google Cloud.

According to SAS, the benefits of today’s collaboration for organizations are clear. “The flexibility of the SAS platform combined with the flexibility of the Microsoft Azure platform in the cloud helps transform organizations”, the company said. “We are proud to offer customers a new way to access SAS Viya while continuing to provide all the capabilities our users already know and love”, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight added.

“We’ve been building the most comprehensive analytics suite in the market for decades, with next-generation AI and a focus on the full analytics lifecycle. We design and test our software to make sure it’s as fast and productive as possible. And now we’re making it all available through a few clicks in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace”, Goodnight concluded.