Longtime impartial 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 consists of in-app tutorials and assist for a number of languages.
Presently, 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 isn’t obtainable.
Pricing for SAS Viya on Azure is 55 cents per hour, primarily based on utilized digital CPU clusters, in line with SAS. The platform features a host of SAS functions comparable to Visible Information 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 widespread with customers in cloud marketplaces. As of late 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 companies,” 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 an entire new class of consumers that haven’t been uncovered to the corporate’s analytics tech prior to now. That enlargement is a part of the plan, in line with SAS CIO and EVP Jay Upchurch. In his position at SAS, Upchurch oversees IT globally for SAS, together with the corporate’s portfolio of enterprise functions, knowledge, and knowledge analytics.
Talking in his position as the top of IT at SAS, Upchurch notes that “In an enterprise software program buy we’re going to barter, and we’ve received to verify it’s safe, and we take time to put in it proper, and there’s an entire 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 companies immediately from cloud marketplaces, usually with out involving IT.
“Almost on a regular basis my inside prospects say ‘I must get this quicker. We have to entry this now.’ This provide 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 assertion, “Making SAS Viya obtainable to total analytics organizations is our purpose, no matter talent stage, staff, or most popular 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 shall be carried out within the cloud by 2023.
SAS isn’t the one conventional on-premises analytics specialist headed for the cloud. Earlier this yr, Alteryx introduced its Alteryx Analytics Cloud, which the corporate known as its first unified end-to-end analytics automation platform, incorporating plenty of its applied sciences.
Corporations comparable 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 — at the same time as their success within the cloud will depend on their very own deployments in those self same public clouds.
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