SAS is making a big push around cloud. They want to provide a cloud enabled platform, manage their existing SAS Applications in the cloud, build new applications in the cloud and create a cloud app store for their customers. They want to ensure that all the business analytics solutions based on SAS – whether SAS builds them, third parties build them or end customers build them – are all cloud-enabled. This means making APIs and more available as cloud-based web services so that folks can mashup elements of, say, Rapid Predictive Modeler with other elements from marketing automation.
SAS plans new IDEs and scripting languages for solution development, solutions development and SAS programming in the cloud. These will be supported by a wide range of APIs in the cloud. Lifecycle management must work across all these and audit/instrumentation will need to support a mix of applications deployed on-premise and cloud. OVF (Open Virtualization Format) support for open virtualization is coming and SAS plans to support private, hybrid and public cloud deployments.
A new subscriber portal will handle subscribe/purchase, user management, configuration and set-up, monitoring, SLA management and provisioning integration. For developers they will continue to develop their SAS SDK/API and their existing IDE. A new cloud-based environment will allow business user configuration in the cloud and a future cloud-based IDE will come for developers also. An app store rounds it out to let people buy and sell solutions not built by SAS.
Cloud of course is an interesting area – check out our recent Predictive Analytics in the Cloud report.
