Digitalisation is blasting the cobwebs out from enterprises and organisations of all kinds – freeing them to innovate and take advantage of the always-on economy. But it’s also helping new disruptive players to gain an unexpectedly strong foothold in many markets.
One of the key advantages these new players have is that they’re basing their business models on advanced algorithms and APIs (application program interfaces) to make decisions about the services they’ll offer customers – adapting them on the go. In the software developer world APIs are nothing new, but in what’s being called ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution,’ their use by new and established businesses is what’s creating disruption.
Using APIs allows businesses to be highly agile, particularly in price sensitive sectors. One reason is that they’re largely unhindered by governance – the system of policies, processes and principles that enterprises live by.
However, as the prevalence of data-driven decision-making takes hold in all lines of business, every employee is becoming a data citizen. And this means they’re using more and more advanced analytics to get answers to a whole new series of business questions.
Among these groups, there’s a perception that open source software is a fast, cheap way to develop the analytical capabilities they need to access those insights (or answers) rapidly. Yet one of the biggest hindrances users of open source analytics will soon experience is around governance, specifically in three areas:
- Repeatability
- Consistency
- Data management
So what’s the answer? Halt innovation while governance procedures are retrofitted to analytic processes and data-driven decisions? No, instead it’s a case of ‘let’s change that!’
SAS has the answer to rapid, open, analytical innovation that’s well-governed where it needs to be.
Our new analytics platform, SAS® Viya™, is purpose built to allow organisations of all kinds to maximise the competitive advantage they can gain from open, but controllable, analytics. How? It’s a single cohesive infrastructure, which makes analytics development and use far simpler and easier to manage.
This platform gives you both the freedom to develop analytical capabilities in SAS and open source languages, with the benefit of built-in governance to deliver repeatability and scalability that produces trusted insights at speed and with agility.
SAS Viya: Founded on your needs
This platform has been largely developed based on our customers input. SAS Viya builds on the benefits of SAS 9 which can integrate with — and extend the benefits of — many third-party analytics technologies, including open operating systems like Linux, open data frameworks like Hadoop, and open source languages like Python, Lua, Java and more. However, with SAS Viya, we’re significantly increasing openness in three ways:
- Expanding the number of available interfaces, including native programming access from SAS, Python, Java, Lua and for generic access, through REST APIs.
- Enabling all analytics operations to be processed faster (in minutes) through SAS Viya’s underlying, in-memory, massively parallel processing engine.
- Optimising all analytics capabilities with a cloud-ready platform that can be run within any public cloud, private could, or on-premises infrastructure.
I recommend you learn more by reading the full argument about innovation versus governance. You can find it here: Driving the edge of innovation: is there a happy marriage between open source development and governance?
By Peter Pugh-Jones, Head of Technology at SAS UK & Ireland
