About a year ago, we announced a strategic partnership
with SAS aimed at helping shape the future of analytics and AI.
Well, hey, Jay, it's great to talk with you today.
Hey, Erin. It's wonderful to be here.
Thank you for the invitation.
I'm excited because over the last year, SAS have been growing
its portfolio of solutions running on Azure.
Could you share more on the innovations that you're bringing to market
and that you think have the greatest potential
to change the future of how companies embrace both analytics and AI?
Well, thank you.
Well, SAS has been a leader
in the advanced analytics and AI space for for more than 45 years.
In fact, we're very proud to be recognized as a leader in all four major
analyst reports in this space.
But we've come to know well that adopting and implementing analytics is complex
and incredibly challenging.
So our job here is to simplify the journey for our customers.
For example, our Viya 4 platform was launched just a few months
after our partnership was announced.
It is cloud native, CI/CD enabled, fully containerized microservices
based, and it's fully optimized to run on Microsoft Azure.
This gives our clients'
customers a modern architecture that significantly reduces time to value
and is delivered on the near limitless scale of Azure.
So with that deployment out of the way, our customers' experience
get to focus more on exploring all the features and innovation of Viya
So, for instance,
we have instrument in Viya to manage the entire analytic lifecycle.
That includes opening up our platforms
for model development in SAS, and R, and Python.
But analytics today is not just for the data scientist, so we also
make our UI easier to use for everybody through our visualization capabilities.
And we go further by demystifying modeling,
by providing model explainability and making model
optimization competition simple and straightforward for everybody.
In fact, when we started exploring our partnership with Microsoft,
the idea of analytics for everybody was a shared vision between our two companies.
We knew the market was demanding data democratization,
and we didn't want it to stop there.
So we wanted to make the data and the systems used to let the data
tell the story available to anyone, anywhere, at any time.
And one of the things that's exciting is the global datacenter coverage
that SAS have been able to achieve through our collaboration.
I heard you set up twelve datacenters to service your core market around the world.
Well, first of all, customer response has been absolutely outstanding.
We're also really proud of that rollout.
You mentioned twelve datacenters. We were able to stand those up
lightning fast and along the way reimagined a lot of our leveraged services
right that are required to instantiate one of those instances.
So that footprint that Azure gives us is incredibly important as well
because it extends our capability out into the territories
where our customers operate.
That gives us the chance to service them
much more locally in the markets that that they care most about.
I'd also point out that customer response has been really strong
at both the platform level and at the industry solution level.
SAS provides both.
Viya, for instance, is our incredibly robust analytics platform
that can meet the needs of anybody.
But we recognize not everyone wants to build their own.
So years ago, SAS started to invest in industry specific business outcome
solutions like in fraud,
and risk, and retail, and IoT and health and life sciences.
In fact, our industry
solutions is one of the fastest growing areas of our business today.
And, Jay, one of the things that really excites me about working
together is the opportunity to combine the power of our portfolios.
You have this deep SAS technology integration
and then it's not just Azure, but it's the Microsoft Cloud.
Could you share an example of this in action? Yeah, sure.
So let me start with my own story.
I get the honor of running internal IT for SAS in addition
to our SAS cloud business.
So I've got 14,000 employees that are enjoying the Microsoft
365 platform and all the security that comes along with that.
We just launched our partner portal on Dynamics.
And then in Azure, right, there's been a wonderful story of us evaluating
our enterprise solutions that are running in our in our own datacenter today,
refactoring those thinking about how to deploy those in a native way
on the cloud, taking advantage of the native capabilities in Azure.
So refactoring, data
access, identity access management, thinking about leveraging AKS
and how we can move these applications up into a more modern footprint.
One other one that I touch on is another customer example. That's AEG.
AEG is the industry leader in sports entertainment.
22,000 events with 160 million guests every year.
And when COVID hit, like all of us right, their business kind of came to a halt.
They had to figure out, "what does this mean to us?"
And so they kind of future-proofed the answer by pulling
in Microsoft and SAS as partners to help them solve that answer.
So deploying SAS in Azure and then thinking
about the questions that were faced that that face their business.
So when would guests arrive?
What would that guest experience look like?
Would guests feel safe again once they're back?
And then how do you model the planned event?
For 100,000 people with the uncertainty of the COVID circumstances
that are all around us.
It's a wonderful story of where data
and gaming and innovation all came together.
I think your example highlights just how pervasive the transformation is
that's happening.
I truly appreciate you joining us and sharing your insights not only for SAS
as an organization itself, but also how that is impacting customers.
Well, thank you so much.
It's been a great pleasure to be a part of Ignite.
We've got a wonderful 45 year history here at SAS, but we are super
excited about the future and of course, our game changing partnership. Thank you.