Microsoft Azure becomes SAS’s preferred cloud platform
SAS and Microsoft are jointly announcing today a strategic partnership making Azure the preferred cloud platform for SAS’s analytics portfolio. Although nothing is firm at this point, there is potential to integrate SAS with many Azure services. While SAS will support other clouds going forward, Azure will be first among equals.
For SAS, this is a coming out party of sorts as they transition towards going cloud-first. For Microsoft, it’s another notch in their belt for positioning Azure as a more enterprise-focused cloud, coming on the heels of partnerships announced over the past year with SAP and Oracle.
The SAS/Microsoft Azure partnership extends to go-to-market and joint technology development. Existing customers will be able to get SAS from the Azure marketplace; the same goes for channel partners, who can resell from the marketplace. Additionally, both SAS and Microsoft field teams will have incentives to sell SAS on Azure, with Microsoft positioning the offerings as a premium analytics tier on Azure. One can imagine that the commercial models for SAS offerings on Azure could look like Microsoft’s Redis Labs partnership to co-market Redis as a premium alternative to existing Azure caching services.
For SAS, the deal spans the current portfolio although the highlight, native integration with various Azure services, will be reserved for the forthcoming cloud-native release of Viya 4. Watch this space. We discussed SAS’s plans for transitioning Viya a few months back, and Big on Data bro Andrew Brust will have more to say about Viya 4 very shortly.
All of the announcements of SAS services on Azure are planned for GA in Q4 this year, and as noted below, there will be some additional options planned for the cloud-native Viya 4. Specifically, this encompasses SAS 9 (this is the classic SAS Analytics portfolio) and Viya 3.5 (the current version), and the forthcoming SAS Viya 4. At launch, the Viya 4 Azure service will include all of the capabilities from Viya 3.5 except Visual Investigator, which will come later. The big difference with the Viya 4 offering will be the degree of integration with other Azure services, and later on.
The wish list for Viya 4 on Azure
On both sides, potential targets are ridiculously fat. For Microsoft, there’s the Azure Synapse Analytics data warehouse and data lake platform; the open source-oriented data science platform, Azure Machine Learning; the low-code/no-code Power Platform (including Power BI); along with front office applications including Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365. On the SAS side, there’s not exactly a shortage of assets either, as there is model lifecycle management to decisioning (decision management), forensic analysis, vertical industry models, and model lifecycle management.
The press release states that both “will explore opportunities” to integrate SAS analytics to the Azure portfolio.
