SAS 9 is fine but here are 5 reasons to move to SAS Viya
As we mark the 20th anniversary of SAS 9 this year, SAS has reiterated its commitment to support:
Many customers use SAS®9 because it’s a high-quality, stable platform with expansive documentation and top notch, global technical support. The latest release of SAS®9 will be fully supported for many years to come.
Shadi Shahin, Vice President of Product Strategy
If you are familiar with SAS 9 and using it effectively then you may wish to continue rather than move to SAS Viya. That’s fine, and some customers will choose to do that. However, the business and technology landscape has changed significantly over the last 20 years. SAS Viya is designed to address those changes, providing a cloud-native platform offering analytical and AI capabilities to data analysts and business users.
There are a number of reasons why many organizations will make the move to Viya. Here are my top five:
1. Data Exploration and Visualization
Data exploration is a key step in the analytics lifecycle. Once you have access to a set of data you need to explore it, understand the profile of the data and the relationships within the data. The easiest way to do this is using SAS Visual Analytics. While this is available with some implementations of SAS 9, it is a separate product with its own interface. With SAS Viya it’s an integral element of the platform (at least for all the Visual offerings). You simply click Explore and Visualize in the applications menu to get started:
SAS Visual Analytics offers a wide range of visualization approaches from interactive graphs to correlation matrices, decision trees and more. It can even suggest the most appropriate visualization for a particular set of data and provide natural language explanations of the characteristics of the data.
2. Open source integration
SAS recognises the popularity of open source and now offers the ability to use open source within SAS Viya. You can write a Python program directly in the coding window of SAS Studio and then run it as a step in a flow with SAS code steps before or after.
The integration with open source is enabling people with different skill sets to work together and combine the strengths of both technologies. Health insurer Techniker Krankenkasse has utilized the openness of SAS Viya to integrate an R pattern-matching algorithm into a SAS application.
3. No-code/low-code machine learning
While open source integration will suit those who are proficient in coding in Python or R, many users will not want to code at all. SAS Viya was built to extend the use of analytics beyond data science teams, democratizing analytics by enabling analytics for everyone.
Clicking on the Build Models item in SAS Viya applications menu takes you to Model Studio.
Here you can build pipelines that combine and compare different machine learning approaches just by dragging the nodes onto the diagram and selecting the hyperparameters. It’s even simpler when let the AI processes select the optimum values for you with automated transformations and hyperparameter autotuning.
4. Access to cloud data sources
Many organizations are storing their data in Parquet files on cloud object stores such as Azure Data Lake Storage , Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage . SAS Viya can be installed on the same cloud platform and will be able to read the data directly, avoiding the need for data transfer and conversion.
5. Always the latest version
SAS 9 will be supported for years to come but clearly the focus of R&D effort is on SAS Viya. Instead of having a maintenance upgrade every year or two, SAS Viya has a new release every month which can be easily applied as an update. This avoids the cost and disruption commonly associated with an upgrade and delivers new features to users without delay.
SAS Viya offers significant feature benefits over SAS 9 today and with regular updates your future requirements can also be addressed.
Our pattern recognition application clearly demonstrates the flexibility of SAS Viya to adapt to new requirements. This architecture is what makes it future-proof from our point of view.
Dr. Thilo Eichenberg, Data Scientist, Techniker Krankenkasse
How can you move to Viya?
The good news is that the vast majority of your existing code is likely to run on Viya with little or no modification. To find out exactly how much, download the SAS Content Assessment package, read the documentation and run the tool against your SAS 9 installation. If you share the output with SAS you can then view the results in an interactive report and receive advice on the best way to proceed.
The Content Assessment package also includes migration tools to help in the packaging and conversion of content for Viya.
Today’s challenges are not what they were 20 years ago and the technical landscape has changed radically. Now is the time to look to the next phase of your SAS journey with SAS Viya.
