iTWire - Your business must adopt AI to stay competitive and SAS says it can giv...

Wednesday, 10 May 2023 06:09

Your business must adopt AI to stay competitive and SAS says it can give you the fastest and most economic time to value Featured

Your business needs AI to stay competitive, says data and statistical analytics software provider, SAS, and that it is the fastest, lower-cost, and most trustworthy way to make it happen.

In fact, SAS states with its Viya product you can bring AI to your business at 30x times the speed (and thus 30x less cloud computing cost) than open source and commercial competitors. Or, do the same work but at 86% lower operational costs.

These are the resounding messages from the SAS Innovate event running this week in Orlando, Florida: you need AI to outpace your competitors, and it is SAS who will help you outdo expectations, outperform goals, and outpace tomorrow.

It’s been four years since SAS held a large in-person event but as post-COVID life continues to return to normal, so too the data faithful gathered this week in Orlando to learn about what’s new and coming in SAS, as well as how to best leverage the software to unlock the hidden value of data in their organisation.

The theme was set by SAS chief marketing officer Jennifer Chase who explained, “business leaders around the world are telling us they need AI and analytics to not only stay competitive today but to outpace what tomorrow brings.”

Consider a car race, posed SAS chief technology officer Bryan Harris. In that situation, the goal is to be the first vehicle through the finish line. That’s literally the definition of outpacing your competitors. In the car race, the victor makes better decisions and reacts more optimally than their competitors. And, the environment in which they make these decisions is the race track.

However, "business decision environments are more complex,” Harris said. And, he adds, you’re now competing against organisations who are working with artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Really, the message from SAS could not be clearer - it’s irrelevant whether you want to embrace artificial intelligence. Much like your business in times past needed a fax machine to stay competitive, to provide a website, to offer online ordering, to have a social media presence and all manner of things that either put you ahead of others or caught you up to others. Today, if your organisation is not already planning an artificial intelligence strategy then you’re behind the eight-ball.

Not to fear; the good news is whether you’re new to AI or already running multiple models, SAS says its product SAS Viya will manage your entire AI lifecycle from managing data, developing models, and deploying insights and will do it faster and at a lower cost than any other option. This means you can go to market sooner.

In fact, SAS co-founder and CEO Dr Jim Goodnight said, “SAS Viya brings AI and analytics to anyone, everywhere, to let users of all skill levels get the answers they need in any language on their terms faster than ever before.”

These are big claims, but not without basis. The Futurum Group independently analysed and reviewed the performance results of SAS Viya and several leading commercial and open-source AI/ML alternative options. Futurum states on average, SAS Viya performed 30 times better than the others.

The old saying, "time is money" was never truer when it came to on-demand cloud consumption pricing, and organisations around the world are finding their initial love for cloud computing is experiencing sticker shock with high bills, and unpredictable bills. With an objective rating of 30x times - not 30% but 30 times - the performance of others, this literally means your cloud costs for AI and ML workloads can plummet to a thirtieth if you are using one of the alternatives. So you can do more with the same money, or you could do the same with far less money.

This performance gain didn't come out of nowhere; at its last major in-person event, in 2019 at Dallas, SAS announced it was investing one billion US dollars in enhancing and optimising the cloud economics of its platform. That investment has clearly paid off.

Futurum Group principal analyst Russ Fellows states 150 tests were run multiple times against each platform, and while the commercial offerings are not named, the open-source options include H2O and SparkML. In each case, Fellows says, the speed was measured by the total execution time: how long it took to spin up a container, to load data, run training, and scoring; in short, the entire process of training an AI model from scratch. The accuracy of these models was also measured, because, after all, what use is a fast-generated model if it is inaccurate?

"The accuracy was identical in all cases,” Fellows said. “Every model produced the same accuracy so the only difference was how fast they could perform and how efficient they were at scale with larger data sets.”

And, in each scenario, Fellows says it was SAS outperforming the others. For simple models and small data sets the performance gain was five or ten times. Yet, when running on the largest data sets and most complex models, the performance difference was 50x, 100x, and in one staggering situation, 326x the alternatives.

Fellows adds that for one large and complex test scenario, two competitors ran for multiple hours before ultimately failing and yielding no results. SAS, by contrast, ran for 12 minutes and delivered an accurate model. That’s hours of cloud computing cost for no value at all, vs. not even a quarter of an hour. “So if you’re running in the cloud, free software can be your most expensive option,” Goodnight quipped.

With SAS providing high-end analytical capabilities but at unprecedented speed and the associated cost reductions it's time the old joke, "You want it good, fast, cheap? Choose two" needs rethinking.

It doesn't stop here; Harris also announced a strategic partnership between SAS and SingleStore, formerly MemSQL. SingleStore is a real-time data warehouse that collects and store multiple streams of data in a relational format, and provides the ability to configure and manage additional indexes on the data for faster performance that allows both fast transactional access and fast analytical access on the same set of data without the effort or expense of migrating data.

SingleStore is available both on-cloud and on-premises and SAS announced a new product offering, SAS Viya with SingleStore, that offers even more performance gain than the above metrics, Harris said.

Thus, the reality is SAS genuinely offers a highly-competitive, cost-effective route to managing your AI lifecycle - from gathering and preparing data, creating models, comparing models, and deploying your model into an application. This means reduced cloud costs as well as the ability to do more with your cloud spend; it means faster go-to-market for your company’s AI-infused offerings. “This offering achieves the lowest TCO for AI,” Harris said.

Goodnight also announced SAS will be investing a further one billion USD over the next three years to expand its industry-specific solutions. These solutions reduce fraud in banking, improve public health and patient care, optimise manufacturing processes, and more, and are all built on top of SAS Viya as the core. It sees SAS doubling down on its industry vertical solution approach “so customers can take inefficiencies out of their business and see time-to-value increased,” Harris said.

Among other things, the conference also provided participants with the opportunity to aid the UNC Centre for Galapagos Studies via a crowd-sourced turtle recognition app. The app presents users with two photos - one of a known turtle, and the other of an unknown turtle, and asks if they are the same.

The project aims to proactively improve the health of these magnificent creatures, by tracking the health of identifiable turtles as they turn up in photos by scientists and tourists alike. The side-effect is helping these creatures also aids the economy and welfare of the residents of the Galapagos Islands who depend on the turtles for tourism.

You can join right in and help train the data - become the 'I' behind the AI - here, and you can read more about the project here.

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