Blog articles often follow the same structure: starting with an appealing title, then telling the story and ending up with a suggestion to deepen that topic. Let's try to spice up a little bit this and to revert the article structure! I want to first talk about the suggestion: SAS Viya is what IT departments need right now.

I could tell you dozens of reasons to support my statement. But, following the "contrary spirit" of this article, let's look at it from a negative point of view. So the question I ask you is: why shouldn't you need SAS Viya right now? The reasons may be:

1. you are not interested in cloud and you are going to buy a mainframe for strategic applications in 2017;
2. you have a huge budget for servers, applications, platforms and infrastructure;
3. applications interoperability doesn't play a crucial role in your organization;
4. forecasting your next best action, starting from past activities, is not important to you because you need to start from the scratch.

If you agree with at least one of the statements above, you should stop reading this article right now. Otherwise, you need to know what is SAS Viya and why you need it to survive the 2017 challenges.

How SAS Viya fits in the IT agenda

The key points I want to focus on are easiness of installation on premise and openness.

SAS Viya is easy to install it's not necessary to download a big SAS Software Depot (SAS 9.x) and store that in a shared location. You can install only the needed pieces are from SAS repository and configure them in several minutes (not hours). At the moment, SAS support installation with Linux, but a fast installation with Windows will be possible soon.

Managing legacy systems and leveraging old SAS and non-SAS code, developed during the last 10 years, it's a real priority for all the IT departments. With SAS Viya, you can run legacy SAS code in a single place (read server), have the most advanced analytics algorithm under your fingers and easily integrate all of that in your favorite flavor applications. SAS Viya, in fact, can be called by programming languages like Python, Lua, Java and it expose standard REST web services that can be easily consumed by a lot of different other interfaces.

There are a lot of new and exciting facts to discover in SAS Viya but my time is over now. Let's meet and discuss about it in my next SAS Viya blog post. In the meantime, stay updated and take a look at the SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning free trial.