
SAS Joins the Cloud-Based mostly, Pay-As-You-Go Motion
Longtime unbiased analytics specialist SAS introduced at its consumer convention a pay-as-you go pricing mannequin obtainable now. The brand new providing places SAS’s cloud-based Viya platform within the Azure Market, and it additionally contains in-app tutorials and help for a number of languages.
At the moment, Azure is the one cloud supplier the place SAS is providing this service, however a spokesperson mentioned different public clouds are a part of the plan, though a timeline for that’s not obtainable.
Pricing for SAS Viya on Azure is 55 cents per hour, primarily based on utilized digital CPU clusters, in keeping with SAS. The platform features a host of SAS purposes similar to Visible Knowledge Mining and Machine Studying, Mannequin Supervisor, Info Governance, Visible Analytics, and Visible Statistics.
Whereas pay-as-you-go represents a brand new mannequin for SAS, it’s a typical one that’s in style with customers in cloud marketplaces. Lately it’s desk stakes. SAS has lastly arrived at that desk.
Forrester VP and principal analyst Mike Gualtieri says it’s about time.
“With pay-as-you-go, SAS is assembly the pricing expectations prospects have for cloud providers,” says Gualtieri. “So that is extra ‘it’s about time’ than a differentiated pricing mannequin from different distributors.”
What Pay-As-You-Go Means for SAS
Nonetheless, now that pay-as-you-go has arrived for SAS, it may open up the floodgates for a complete new class of shoppers that haven’t been uncovered to the corporate’s analytics tech prior to now. That enlargement is a part of the plan, in keeping with SAS CIO and EVP Jay Upchurch. In his function at SAS, Upchurch oversees IT globally for SAS, together with the corporate’s portfolio of enterprise purposes, information, and information analytics.
Talking in his function as the top of IT at SAS, Upchurch notes that “In an enterprise software program buy we’re going to barter, and we’ve acquired to verify it’s safe, and we take time to put in it proper, and there’s a complete course of round our line-of-business.”
However for years now there’s been a brand new class of customers — non-IT customers — who purchase cloud providers straight from cloud marketplaces, usually with out involving IT.
“Practically on a regular basis my inside prospects say ‘I have to get this sooner. We have to entry this now.’ This supply permits line-of-business prospects to buy and set up software program safely in their very own Azure tenant and acquire entry to it instantly,” Upchurch says.
SAS CTO and EVP Bryan Harris mentioned in a statement, “Making SAS Viya obtainable to total analytics organizations is our objective, no matter talent degree, group, or most well-liked programming language.”
Analytics within the Public Cloud
Market analysis agency IDC forecasts that analytics software program deployment on public clouds will match on-premises deployments by 2024.
Individually, a Gartner forecast for November 2021 mentioned that two-thirds of analytics for each growth and manufacturing might be carried out within the cloud by 2023.
SAS shouldn’t be the one conventional on-premises analytics specialist headed for the cloud. Earlier this yr, Alteryx introduced its Alteryx Analytics Cloud, which the corporate referred to as its first unified end-to-end analytics automation platform, incorporating a variety of its applied sciences.
Firms similar to SAS and Alteryx are competing with born-in-the-cloud analytics specialist platforms in addition to analytics instruments created by the massive three cloud suppliers — Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and AWS — whilst their success within the cloud relies on their very own deployments in those self same public clouds.
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