SAS Viya outperforms competitors and lowers operational costs, study says

Dubai, UAE, 11 July 2023: A new benchmarking study reveals the SAS® Viya® AI and analytics platform is, on average, 30 times faster than commercial and open-source alternatives and scales better with more extensive and complex data. The analysis from The Futurum Group compared SAS Viya to retail, cloud-based data and AI platform and open-source alternatives like H2O and SparkML. 

According to the study, Viya outperforms the selected alternatives across speed and scalability metrics. Specifically:

Speed/Performance:

Viya is, on average, 30 times faster than all alternative AI/ML solutions across all test scenarios.

Viya is, on average, 49 times faster than a Spark-based Data/AI platform across all algorithms, data sizes, and workloads. In some cases, Viya is up to 326 times faster.

Scalability:

Viya scales better than alternatives with more extensive, complex data sets, reducing AI/ML run times with additional computing resources.

For model training on more than 300 million data points, Viya outperformed all alternatives and was the only platform to continue scaling.

Cost Effectiveness:

Users can lower costs by more than 86% compared to tested alternatives because of Viya’s speed and scalability in training and scoring models.

“SAS Viya produced results in minutes; competitors ran for hours or simply failed,” said Russ Fellows, Senior Partner and Analyst at The Futurum Group. “In practical terms, SAS Viya helps users lower computing costs and consider more data to drive intelligent decisions faster. Our research showed SAS is way ahead of competitors.”

Viya, a cloud-native AI platform, gives customers choice and control for analyzing large and complex data, providing the scalability needed. The insights created by Viya help business leaders make better decisions – whether those decisions affect interest rates for securing a car loan, needed maintenance that keeps a rail company’s trains safe, or when and where a retail distribution center ships a pallet of merchandise.  

“The Futurum Group study confirms what our customers have told us: Viya runs efficiently and effectively in the cloud – it makes the most of CPU usage during workload run times,” said Bryan Harris, SAS Executive Vice President and CTO. “SAS R&D has focused millions of dollars of research to improve cloud economics for customers looking to adopt cloud, analytics, and AI rapidly. These independent results are proof of the game-changing performance gains and cost savings we are delivering to our customers.”