SAS, a provider in analytics technology has acquired Boemska, a privately held technology company specialising in low-code/no-code application deployment and analytic workload management for the SAS platform. The acquisition further enhances SAS Viya – a cloud-native, advanced analytics toolset. The platform has a range of capabilities that boost the SAS goal of supporting the entire analytics life cycle. The solution facilitates customer migration to the cloud.
Strategic expertise and leading innovation
The assets and operations of Boemska – a small, UK-based technology company will be integrated into SAS. The company has a research and development centre in Serbia. Boemska is a well-established SAS technology partner whose global customers include SAS customers in financial services, healthcare and travel.
According to Frank Della Rosa, Research Director for SaaS and Cloud Software at IDC, “Boemska enables customers to infuse world-class SAS analytics in third-party cloud applications. The platform uses purpose-built runtime containers that are designed for greater resiliency and portability across connected cloud environments. This results in a small footprint runtime for analytics and models.”
Key product offering
The primary Boemska product offerings that will be integrated into SAS Viya include:
- A next-generation, cloud-native capability enabling portability of SAS and open-source models into mobile and enterprise applications. This enables development and execution of models and decisions using low-code and no-code technologies for performing specific tasks. This includes anticipating fraud, decision making related to a medical event, identifying a manufacturing defect and more.
- An enterprise workload management tool that facilitates migration of scale-out analytics to the cloud in a cost-efficient way. The platform ensures that analytic workloads on clouds such as Microsoft Azure remain right-sized and always optimised. This brings visibility to SAS workloads running on shared multi-user environments and helps customers to confidently execute cloud migration strategy.
“SAS is on a journey to enable AI and analytics for everyone, everywhere,” said SAS Executive VP and Chief Technology Officer Bryan Harris. “We have transformed how we build and deliver software with recent SAS Viya updates and a cloud partnership with Microsoft. Furthermore, enhanced the speed and manner with which customers can achieve value. SAS is recognised as a leading provider of analytics for enterprise applications. Boemska’s technology puts SAS closer to where decisions are made, and available in cloud marketplaces for applications developers,” Harris added.
Decisioning support in real time
With the inclusion of Boemska technology, SAS Viya can provide purpose-built, analytics-driven third-party application integration to speed decisions wherever needed. Boemska’s portable SAS runtime enables analytics “to be pushed out” where business value is achieved. It occurs at the point of the transaction, the medical scan, marketing offer or credit decision. These optimised SAS runtimes can be integrated into SAS Event Stream Processing and its market-leading IoT solutions.
For example, the technology’s machine learning and advanced analytics can support:
- Wearables to send an alert for an impending medical event.
- Cameras mounted in factories to detect manufacturing defects and reduce waste.
- Drone devices to monitor distributed assets (e.g. power lines) and request maintenance. Additionally, the technology facilitates embedding cloud-native analytics in marketplace apps that use SAS in the background. They will also be available in app marketplaces to be easily integrated into use cases across virtually every industry.”We’re excited to help shift customers to the cloud in a cost-effective manner,” said Nikola Markovic, Boemska Chief Technology Officer. “We look forward to collaboratively delivering a portable, small-footprint runtime for analytics and models. At the same time improving the ability to migrate to the cloud.“
Leading edge in analytics
For decades, SAS has remained committed to customer-focused innovation and supporting wide-scale adoption of analytics to drive digital transformation initiatives. Boemska technology will be incorporated into the Viya platform over the coming months. It will offer customers a major competitive edge when it comes to analytic integration and cloud implementation.
“Evolving our analytic solutions to be cloud-native requires us to think broadly about how we can make SAS more pervasive, particularly as the number of applications in the marketplace multiply,” said Gavin Day, SAS Senior Vice President for Technology. “The acquisition of Boemska helps uphold SAS Analytics at the forefront of innovation with the addition of complementary technology that further supports customer needs.”
Enterprise Times: What this means for business?
SAS is a key player in the analytics marketplace. However this sector is rapidly evolving and requires continuous innovation from technology suppliers. This is particularly important as businesses seek intelligent as-a-service solutions to accelerate successful migration to the cloud. SAS’s acquisition of technology that will integrate with SAS Viya, is expected to significantly reduce customer cost for cloud analytics. The company says it will improve portability of models into mobile and enterprise apps. Only time will tell, whether this acquisition is successful in helping clients convert data into intelligence. Moreover convert the intelligence into revenues.
