You may or may not have heard that SAS have recently released a product/platform called SAS Viya.  What is it and where can I find out more, well in this post I’ll try to answer these questions.

What is SAS Viya?

First here is one of the many announcements of SAS Viya made by Jim Goodnight & Oliver Schabenberger at the SAS Global Forum 2016 open session.
And a blurb from SAS
“A new, open platform. Built for analytics innovation. … SAS Viya is a single, cloud-ready environment that serves everyone – from data scientists to business analysts, application developers to executives – with the reliable, scalable, secure analytics management and governance essential for agile IT.”

What does that really mean to me?

In my eyes Viya is essentially an in-memory SAS Analytics platform/architecture that is designed for and can use all the benefits of the cloud (elastic/scalable, durable, anywhere anytime etc) to make powerful Analytics available to everyone.
One of my main observations is that SAS Viya is not SAS10 or a replacement of SAS9 it has been created so users can use SAS Viya’s analytical power in conjunction with SAS9 and many other popular programming languages (initially Python, Lua and Java).
There are several new (or updated) products that have been built on top of the Viya platform, these are SAS Visual Analytics, SAS Visual Statistics, SAS Visual Investigator, and SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning.
I can’t wait to be able to get my hands on a Viya environment so I can have a play and see how easy the administration side is.

Like to know more?

The first place to look is on the SAS website, in particular the Viya home page.  Here you’ll find a high-level Marketing view point. For a more technical view have a look at the SAS Viya online docs.
I can also recommend having a look at the SAS Support Communities page which has a dedicated area for Viya where you can ask the user community questions, special announcements are made, and general information is readily available.
If you are more into watching videos/clips you can watch several of them from the 2016 SAS Global forum or on youtube.
And of course, you can contact your local SAS rep, I am sure they would be more than willing to help with getting you the information you need.
You learn something every day.
Barry, Preventer of Chaos