LAS VEGAS — SAS unveiled its new baby last night at the launch of SAS Global Forum here. 

Well, make that several of its new babies: SAS, a Cary, N.C.-based developer of analytics software, unveiled or at least hinted at multiple new products and strategies during the kick off event, including the fact that it plans to double down on the Internet of Things (IoT) and analytics.

But let’s save our first deep dive for the company's uber-Baby: SAS Viya, its next-generation analytics and visualization architecture.

SAS Viya's Many Attributes

Viya is a computing platform that, SAS said, is simple enough or complex enough for everyone from the low-coders to the hard-core developers. It is flexible and scalable to grow or shrink as necessary and it is fast enough to enable parallel computing. Viya is built on the same open standard code base so older generation SAS software applications can interact with it.

To be sure SAS didn’t reinvent the wheel with Viya. Some of its features reflect what is happening elsewhere in the industry, like the use of in-memory analytics to hold the data or objects to allow for faster processing and concurrent access. Yes that translates into easier collaboration among and between teams.

It’s also all about the portability of its code — a concept that in one form or another is making its way into analytics and essentially means that the data only has to be defined once and then can be run or streamed anywhere through the analytics engine, be it Hadoop, on one of the public clouds or a private cloud or in the data center.

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Viya is also a child of open source, supporting new analytic languages like Python, Lua and Java and public REST APIs.

Upcoming Applications On Viya

The next slew of applications will deliver on the Viya platform. This year customers can expect to see the rollout of SAS Visual Analytics, SAS Visual Statistics, SAS Visual Investigator and SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning.

More immediately, there are the other babies joining the SAS family that debuted along with Viya. SAS' top technorati were on stage to discuss SAS Analytics for IoT and SAS Customer Intelligence 360. 

Both have their place in the product line, supported by Viya.