Washington D.C. – SAS Institute Inc. is moving towards making its artificial intelligence technology accessible across its entire product spectrum.
The analytics powerhouse views the latest updates to its SAS Platform as an important integration point by extending its SAS Viya capabilities further into the rest of its products.
“We want our customers to experience Viya, so we need to have interoperability,” said Oliver Schabengerger, chief technology officer and executive vice president of research and development at SAS told Canadian media at the SAS Analytics Experience 2017. “I don’t want them to have to do anything to their infrastructure. They will be able to program directly into SAS Viya from SAS Platforms to reach into those capabilities.”
Here are the updates you can expect over the rest of 2017 to the SAS Platform:
- SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning and SAS Visual Text Analytics are the first in the SAS Platform to receive embedded AI capabilities such as deep learning and natural language understanding technology.
- A single interactive interface that spans a wide range of analytics tasks. This is designed to help non-coders solve problems faster.
- SAS Data Preparation for self-service, visual data wrangling, transforming, blending and cleansing data, with application-generated code fit for IT scheduling environments.
- SAS Visual Text Analytics, the edge-to-end text analytics framework that combines text mining, contextual extraction and categorization, sentiment analysis, and search, will automate feature extraction and business-rule generation via machine learning.
Derrick Gray, director of audience measurement science at Numeris, a Canadian audience measurement organization, added how giving these tools to users across departments in order to help collaborate is key.
“We were looking for a business intelligence solution, but I didn’t want it falling strictly on my team,” Gray said. “I wanted other departments to be able to build their own reports, dashboards, etc., without being dependent on my department. In the past they might have had to go to my team to help build a report or dashboard. Now they have the ability to self-serve.”
Making it easy to use and accessible is ultimately the end goal, and making these technologies work together is something Schabenberger has been working towards, adding that he has placed a great emphasis on integration across all SAS solutions.
“I don’t like siloed development. Analytics should be available to everyone, and we want the software to help you with that. We are updating new products that help manage pipeline and workflows,” Schabenberger said.
The updates to the SAS Platform will be live next week, while specific updates to SAS Viya will be released in November later this year.