SAS Viya empowers open-source

You might be wondering, is SAS empowering Open Source? Your first reaction might be really? We always knew SAS as a powerful analytics programming language, but how can it integrate and elevate the performance and efficiency of Open Source? This blog will help you answer these questions on the SAS and Open-source integration.

A bit about my background and how I transitioned to use SAS as an open-source user. I started my programming journey with open-source languages, and I have been a machine learning and data science enthusiast for a long time and have extensively used Python and R. Then, I got a chance to work at SAS, which made me think about what I have to learn in SAS or how things will change in terms of my open-source understanding. Well, SAS introduced me to a new world of Integration where a user can extend and improve the power of Open-Source usage through SAS. I have explored the power of integration, in terms of faster computation, vetted machine learning algorithms, enhanced flexibility, and easy-to-model data science pipelines. Being an extensive open-source user, I have found that SAS provides users the flexibility to use the language of their choice (python, R) and utilize all the analytical assets within SAS.? SAS Viya is one of the endpoints of open-source integration. What is SAS Viya? Viya is not a product, it’s simply the next generation of SAS. It’s a cloud-native platform for all our solutions and applications.?

When you hear the name Viya, it refers to the end-to-end platform that hosts all our analytic capabilities. End-to-end of course means all the steps starting from data to deployment of analytic assets. Any task, any procedure you can think of from grabbing the data, whipping it into shape, pulling predictions or insights from it, to ultimately automating business decisions, whatever the use case may be, it is all part of the analytics lifecycle, and it is all accommodated within Viya: hence end-to-end platform. it is end-to-end, which makes for a streamlined analytics process.

Viya is user-inclusive. This means that it does not discriminate on the skills and preferences of users. If end users want to code, they can code, if they want to do everything in GUI, they can do all the same stuff coders can do, but in visual, if they want a more hybrid code visual approach which I am seeing more and more of, they can. So, it is user-inclusive.?

This inclusivity is not just limited to SAS skills. Open-source users can code in their language of choice within Viya, they can still work in their notebooks and bring their R or Python assets in Viya and use Viya as the governed platform where you register and run SAS and open-source assets, think of it like one roof for all analytics. What that inclusivity does is it democratizes data and analytics across the organization.