As we look at the last 40 years of innovation using analytics, it can be both humbling and inspiring.

I mean, who would have anticipated 40 years ago that SAS^® would be used to analyze genomic data and help develop specialized medications as a result? Who would have guessed that a car manufacturer could analyze streaming data from sensors and onboard devices to improve safety? Who would have imagined in 1976 that someday a global retailer would develop a customer loyalty app that runs SAS Analytics in the background to provide real-time mobile phone offers?

Of course, nobody knows what the next 40 years will bring, but we do anticipate that SAS will be used more and more in the cloud, with big data, with streaming data, with automated applications, and with cognitive computing tools. To name a few.

Overall, we know that our customers want to run SAS anywhere, anytime and by virtually anyone. It sounds like a big set of requirements, but we’re making it possible with SAS^® Viya^™, which opens SAS to run inside almost any environment you can imagine. Built for the cloud and deployable anywhere from a common code base, SAS Viya can be in-memory, in-database and in-Hadoop. With the ability to flow seamlessly from the device, to “the fog” and right back to the cloud, we’re helping to put advanced analytics inside your biggest ideas.

Maybe we can’t imagine exactly how you’ll use SAS in the next 10 to 40 years, but we can imagine that you’ll need to be working in one of these environments, and we want to make sure you can take analytics, predictive capabilities and machine learning along with you.

How are we doing this and what are the traits we’ve architected into this new environment for SAS? SAS Viya is:

• Unified. You want one common environment to manage data, define model versions and govern advanced analytics. With SAS Viya you will get a single framework for all analytics, not just SAS, so you don’t have to stitch together unrelated components. In this unified environment, components work together by design to integrate and govern all of your analytics.
• Open. You need to connect your analytics into applications and embed them into other systems. To do that, SAS Viya will provide public REST APIs and complete analytics microservices. You can access and build analytics capabilities using SAS or open source languages like Python, Lua and Java.
• Simple and powerful. From provisioning to deployment and usage, you need to easily get analytics answers. SAS Viya will reduce deployment times and make it simpler to get results – for the self-service analytics professional, the domain expert, the application developer or the executive decision makers. This means you can advance quickly as an organization, scaling innovations to production deployments. Today, you can embed new machine learning algorithms. Tomorrow it might be a new data management routine and visualization – but it will all be simple and easy.
• Cloud ready. SAS Viya is engineered to be a native cloud-first environment. It can and will run on-site, too, but it is designed for public and private clouds, with scalable, elastic processing and accessible open interfaces, so that anyone can easily log in and get to the data, build models, deploy results or share visualizations.

So, tell me: What are you imagining? What do you want your data to do? How can you combine it with something bigger? And where do you want to do it? However you answer, whatever you can envision, SAS Viya will be right there delivering results for you.