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SAS launches tech and talent partnerships to focus on what it does best: data analytics

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SAS is working with KPMG to open Cloud Acceleration Centers and with Handshake to recruit young data scientists.

SAS is using partnerships to define and drive the company’s latest cloud strategy with new alliances with Microsoft, KPMG, and Handshake. SAS will use these new collaborations to expand its product line, help current customers manage cloud projects, and find new employees.

At the SAS Global Forum 2020, executives from the company explained these new partnerships and gave an update on how the company is weathering the coronavirus pandemic.

Oliver Schabenberger, COO at SAS, said the company is financially stable, and although the pandemic might end the company’s 44 straight years of profitability, SAS has announced that it won’t lay off or furlough employees during the pandemic.

The goal of the Microsoft partnership is to build smart, automated, reliable, and explainable decision systems that can work at scale, Schabenberger said.

“As data moves to the cloud, analytics follow and businesses processes become more data-driven and analytics led,” Schabenberger said.

Jay Upchurch, the CIO at SAS, said discussions about the Microsoft partnership started a year ago. The two companies realized they had many of the same key customers, including global banking companies, which sparked the initial conversation. The partnership also was driven by similar corporate cultures, complementary tech, and commercial opportunities, he added.

“There also was overwhelming customer demand for SAS services on Azure, so we listened to the market,” Upchurch said.

David Macdonald, an EVP and chief sales officer at SAS, said these customer collaborations will be more than just moving existing customer workloads to Azure.

“It’s not just lift and shift but taking advantage of the collaboration to leverage cloud services and microservices as well,” he said.

Upchurch said there will be three phases in the SAS and Microsoft partnership:

  1. Now: Migrate customers to Azure to optimize software and hardware
  2. Near-term: Next release of SAS Viya on Azure Marketplace using cloud-native services and optimizations
  3. Long-term: Launch SAS solutions and industry offerings running on top of Viya on Azure

SAS will migrate its internal operations to Azure as well. The company will continue to support all cloud platforms that its customers are using.

Macdonald said the Microsoft partnership will help customers speed up their digital transformation projects.

“Decision-making support is almost a prerequisite for these changes, and cloud services like APIs and microservices are becoming table stakes for improving agility,” he said.

Macdonald said SAS has been helping cities and countries respond to new business demands caused by the coronavirus. This has included helping banks define new baselines for stress testing and helping hospitals forecast bed capacity and ventilator availability. The company posted these models on GitHub.

Two more partnerships focus on students and digital transformation

At the virtual event, SAS announced two other partnerships with KPMG and Handshake. SAS will work with KPMG cloud consultants to open Cloud Acceleration Centers. The centers will support SAS clients who have their own cloud environment as well as those who are employing other cloud-based managed services. KPMG has a network of more than 400 practitioners around the world to support SAS clients with digital transformation projects and cloud migration.

At the start of the pandemic, SAS offered access to its online training resources for free for 30 days and recently extended this access indefinitely.

SAS will be working with Handshake to find students who are interested in data science as a career. Handshake is a career website for college students in the US, which helps students filter job opportunities based on career state. The site helps large companies including the Fortune 500 find early-career talent.

Feature Image Credit: SAS and Microsoft announced a new cloud technology partnership to integrate SAS analytics tools with Microsoft’s Azure platform. Image: SAS

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In Retail? Till Receipts Can Now Be Digital – And Feature Advertising

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A South African tech company wants retailers to send receipts to their consumers’ phones directly upon purchase. These receipts can be held in the cloud, be searchable, and carry advertising.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

The company, called EcoSlips, says it is launching the new disruptive service to forever get rid of paper-based transaction receipts.

Retailers can now link their point-of-sale systems to EcoSlips and send transaction receipts digitally from any pay point to the consumer’s mobile phone.

Paper receipt waste is reduced and a new advertising platform provides opportunities to grow any business in the retail sector.

Consumers may download the application to their mobile phone and register free of charge. The cashier scans or enters the customer’s unique pin number and a digital receipt is forwarded to their phone within seconds.

Transaction receipts are stored in the cloud from where it can be downloaded, verified, forwarded or printed at any time, from any location.

BENEFITS TO CONSUMERS

Transaction receipts do not get lost and a printer-friendly report with all transactions can be downloaded in seconds. Consumers may use it for tax purposes, corporate expense claims, medical and warranty claims.

Transaction slips can also be forwarded directly from the retailer to the user’s office for corporate expense claims. Users do not even need a cell phone to request their digital receipts at a pay point.

The system saves hours of manual labour, since transaction slips are already scanned and summarised in digital format.

Customer identities remain protected and no spam can be sent to any phone, as is the case with text or email powered systems. Messages do not get lost in spam filters because they are sent directly to the user’s phone.

BENEFITS TO POINT-OF-SALE VENDORS

Vendors can provide a value-added service to their clients at no additional cost. They have an advantage over competitors and receive free advertising exposure in the process.

Free software is provided to link any windows based POS system without backend programming to EcoSlips.

BENEFITS TO RETAILERS

EcoSlips provides an advertising platform that targets only consumers in their immediate geographic location.

Complaints and compliments can be sent directly to the retail manager from the customer’s phone and frustrations caused by waiting in line to speak to a call centre agent are completely eliminated. Service levels can improve significantly when complaints are handled in a timely fashion by the retailer.

According to Henco Schoeman, founder of EcoSlips, “consumers may use the service free of charge. Retailers can significantly reduce paper slip waste, save on printing costs and early adopters may secure an exclusive opportunity to advertise in their geographic area. It is a win-win solution for retailers and consumers.”

EcoSlips is financially supported by Mlab and the SA Technology Innovation Agency (TIA). The service can be used anywhere in the world.

So if you are a retailer, this may be food for thought.

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Not Doing Big Data in the Cloud? Better Get There

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By Charles Babcock.

Forrester Research says competitive advantage will follow big data analytics’ move to the cloud; join in, or get left behind.

Failure to move your big data into the cloud may prove to be “an extinction level event” for companies that are on the verge of becoming digital dinosaurs, says Brian Hopkins, analyst with Forrester Research.

His June 15 report, Move Your Big Data Into The Public Cloud: You Won’t Be Able To Keep Up With Customers If You Don’t, concludes that companies that wish to be competitive in 2020 need to make use of their big data analytics in the public cloud. He was assisted by Srividya Sridharan, John Rymer, Boris Evelson, Dave Bartoletti and Christian Austin. The report is not publicly available. The Forrester summary of it is here.

“The migration of data and analytics to the public cloud that began in 2016 is still going strong in 2017 and will continue in 2018,” said the authors.

The use of big data in the cloud is an example of the force of Moore’s Law. Its usefulness will accelerate there through repeated reductions in compute cost versus gains in analytical systems’ power. Firms that are not leveraging the public cloud for big data analytics will be hard-pressed by 2020 to keep pace, was a key conclusion of the report.

“You must immediately shift your big data investment from on-premises or hybrid toward public cloud,” Hopkins and co-researchers added as a key takeaway.

Want to how big data is part of the bigger picture? See The Need to Go Digital Is Clear; Not Everyone Can Get There.

What’s wrong with on-premises analytics for a company’s big data? The Forrester report said the capital expenditures made will lock the big data users into the systems selected “when they need to be flexible.”

In addition, an internal staff will not be able to keep pace with the unpredictable change requirements that will keep popping up. The staff’s existing skills will determine what changing technologies they dare adopt and even recognized, promising ones “are unlikely to be adopted at scale fast enough,” the Forrester researchers wrote.

Source: Pixabay

Source: Pixabay

Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Salesforce, on the other hand, will continue to invest heavily in big data and rapidly expand their services in competition with one another. In the public cloud, one successful new system gets leveraged by others. The report quoted Dr. Marcin Poetrzyk, head of analytics at Swisscon, as saying, “Concepts such as serverless computing can bring (big data analytics) to the next level. Public cloud vendors can scale innovation better than their on-premises competitors.”

There’s no shortage of blue-sky thinking when it comes to organizations’ strategic plans and road maps. Why not ditch impractical thinking and build a data strategy with realistic goals and measurable deliverables?
The authors warned that what might look at this stage like a gradual shift could become a runaway freight train. “Early on the shift seems slow and firms think that they have time to react. As costs drop and power doubles, the unprepared get left behind. This is the basic plot of every disruption story ever told….”

Enterprise architects understand the advantages in the public cloud. Nevertheless, they are likely to continue to recommend on-premises investment because they foresee a big total cost of ownership in the public cloud over a five or ten-year period. But researchers Hopkins and peers project that competition in the public cloud will keep cutting prices in half every few years for both compute and storage. The falling costs “will make the public economic incentives irresistible,” they wrote.

Resistors will cite compliance, data security, liability and brand perception as reasons not to go into the public cloud. The longer they delay, the more advantage will pass to those who adopt public cloud analytics early. “By 2020, firms that are not fully leveraging the public cloud for big data analytics will be hard pressed to keep the pace set by digital leaders….” they wrote.

As storage and compute double every few years for the same price, “leaders will innovate faster, dealing a death blow to laggards,” the analysts warned.

Forrester based its report on a big data survey conduct last year along with more recent interviews with American Express, Bose, Walmart, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Hortponworks, Logitech, Databricks, GoodData and Qubole.

By Charles Babcock

Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek and author of Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution, a McGraw-Hill book. He is the former editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and former technology editor of Interactive … View Full Bio

Sourced from Information Week

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How to Choose the Best Cloud Hosting Service Provider

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By Daffa Zaky.

Cloud computing offers a great deal of benefits to businesses.

They allow enterprises to develop their applications, test them and put them to use faster with lower capital expenditure, less maintenance and improved manageability. However, choosing a cloud provider is not an easy task. This is primarily because there are a number of players out there in the market. Secondly, many of them focus on multiple segments of the cloud computing market. These include infrastructure as a service, software as a service and platform as a service. Therefore, some of the factors you must consider when choosing a cloud hosting service provider are as follows:

#1: User Interface

User Interface or UI is a critical element to be considered when evaluating cloud computing solutions. A good UI will be of great help in mitigating the change over time required for IT departments to migrate to a virtualized environment, especially because of scarcity of resources and the need to upgrade faster. As such, look out for a cloud provider that offers the most customer-friendly UI.

#2: Service Level Agreement

Though a service level agreement cannot be considered as a guarantee, it is always better to work with a cloud hosting service provider that offers the same. The service level agreement refers to the service provider’s commitment to respond quickly when something goes wrong and refund a small percentage of the bill to cover downtime. If the standard service level agreement is inadequate, then the provider must be prepared to customize the same so that it is acceptable to both the parties.

#3: Setting Up An Account

As with everything in life, first impression is the best impression. It is important to be right the very first time, or else opportunities can be lost. In the IaaS sector in the cloud hosting environment, the first impressions refer to the provider’s website content, dealings with their sales team and the signing up process as a whole. The provider’s offering and price plans should be simple and easily understood. Prospective customers should be able to glean the information they are looking for quickly, set up a server account and have it running.

#4: Performance

Have a clear understanding as regards the cloud computing performance. Most cloud providers offer computing resources that vary in sizes. They range from single-core instances (the smallest) to multi-core, -memory instances (the largest). However, the storage I/O can vary from one cloud provider to another. The storage I/O is often the key factor that determines the performance of your application in the cloud environment.

#5: Security

When choosing a cloud provider, it is also important to consider the location of their data centers. This is because compliance regulations and security can vary from one country to another, specifically in the European region. How a cloud provider ensures security of their network, data and customer data is also a very important factor to be considered when choosing a service provider. It is, therefore, a good idea to choose a cloud provider that has been certified by the Security Trust and Assurance Registry created by the Cloud Security Alliance and British Standards Institution.

#6: Data Center Location and Network Infrastructure

A cloud hosting provider’s network infrastructure is a key aspect with respect to performance. Their network infrastructure should be capable of supporting customers’ company’s specific requirements. Data center location also has an impact on performance in various ways. These include speed, statute restrictions in using customer data, design of applications, applicability of jurisdictional laws if a dispute arises and susceptibility to environmental factors like hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.

#7: Tech Support and Customer Service

It is very important to ascertain as to whether the prospective cloud provider offers free technical support or different tiers of paid support, either on subscription or pay-as-you-go. It makes sense, therefore, to call the support department of the cloud providers under consideration and find out what levels of support they provide and whether it will suit your needs.

8. Pricing and Billing

The primary factor that motivates a business to move to cloud is the cost savings that it offers. As a result, most cloud companies offer utility-based pricing plans wherein payments are made only for the resources that are consumed by the customer. There are four main resources that cloud customers should be aware of. These are the CPU, RAM, data storage and bandwidth. Further, it is not a good idea to choose a cloud hosting service provider on the basis of lowest price offered. Customers should take into consideration their specific resource requirements and then choose an appropriate plan.

#9: Total Cost

Cloud hosting providers often hide the total cost of using their service by making customers focus on their advertised price. It is important to have a clear understanding as to what additional fee they could impose on customers. Some of them are:

Subscription charges: A monthly fee paid for using a specific level of resources.
Software licensing fees: Charges for using the operating system and database software images are not often discussed in the beginning.
Burst resource pricing: Increase in cost for using resources above the subscription level.

#10: Financial Security

Another important aspect to be taken into account when choosing a cloud hosting service provider is the company’s long-term viability. In this regard, it essential to find out answers to the following questions:

How long has the cloud provider been in operation?
Are they financially sound? Are they sufficiently funded?
Is there a possibility of a merger or an acquisition?
Does the potential cloud provider’s technologies and processes in line with the recommendations of leading organizations in the IT industry?

#11: References

Finally, the reputation of a cloud hosting service provider needs to be evaluated prior to signing up with them. Ask prospective cloud providers for references in order to verify their service reliability and quality, customer support quality and network performance. Do carry out a review their website and ask them to furnish case studies and media and analyst coverage examples. Spending some time and effort in properly evaluating the performance of a cloud hosting service provider goes a long way in eliminating issues later on in the association.

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Google pushes ahead to make its cloud better for Windows enterprise users

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By Mary Jo Foley.

Google is looking to attract Microsoft enterprise customers with new beta versions of images for SQL Server Enterprise and Windows Server Core for Google Compute Engine.

Google is expanding support of Windows Server and SQL Server on the Google Cloud Platform with the goal of making its cloud “the best enterprise cloud environment.”

On February 1, Google made available beta versions of pre-configured images for Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise and Windows Server Core on its Google Compute Engine. Google also announced support for SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups to shore up its enterprise high-availability and disaster-recovery story. And the company said all of its Windows Server images are now enabled with Windows Remote Management Support, including its Windows Server Core 2016 and 2012 R2 images.

Google Cloud Platform has lagged behind AWS and Microsoft Azure since its start. But, will key customers and new tools help turn the tide?

As of yesterday, Google Cloud customers can launch Compute Engine virtual machines with SQL Server Enterprise Edition pre-installed and pay by the minute for SQL Server and Windows Server licenses or bring their own licences. Beta versions of pre-configured images are available for SQL Server Enterprise 2012, 2014, and 2016.

This isn’t Google’s first foray into providing better support for Windows enterprise customers and developers on the Google Cloud. Last year, Google added ASP.NET, Visual Studio, and PowerShell support, as well as support for Windows Server 2016 on the Google Compute Engine.

Amazon already provides a full suite of images for Microsoft’s various enterprise products, including Windows Server 2016, Windows Server containers, and SQL Server 2016 for AWS cloud users, but this Microsoft-enterprise push is much newer for Google.

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Sourced from ZDNet

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