CARY – SAS grew its cloud analytics business by almost 99 percent in 2020, driven by its partnership with Microsoft’s Azure, the company said at a press conference preceding the virtual 2021 SAS Forum starting today.
Jennifer Chase, a senior vice president and head of marketing at SAS, said the company plans to grow and expand its cloud analytics business in 2021. It’s also bringing aboard additional cloud provider partnerships that will include Red Hat, SAS CIO Jay Upchurch said. He added that it now also supports the Amazon and Google cloud offerings.
“Cloud revenue grew an amazing 34 percent in the last quarter of 2020,” Harris noted, while Upchurch said it grew 8.9 percent in 2020. The company’s Viya platform give its customers powerful management tools, he noted.
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Among other topics, the press conference focused on the company’s launch of its rebranding campaign, “Curiosity Forever.”
“Curiosity drives everything we do,” Chase said. “The Curiosity Forever campaign is global in scope, spanning multiple languages and five key industries: banking, government, manufacturing, retail and healthcare. Underpinning it all is our belief that analytics – like those embedded into our agile SAS Viya platform – can help change the world.”
Jennifer Chase, head of marketing, SAS. Capitol Broadcasting photo. ARR.
Chase added, “It’s designed to reintroduce SAS in a crowded market,” by appealing to the “head and heart of customers.”
Elements of the rebranding include highlighting its work in victim fraud protection and its free analytics training course.
SAS championed a variety of projects in 2020 to help protect the environment and use its analytics for the social good. It launched curiosity.sas.com as a destination dedicated to spotlighting data for good projects and social innovation stories such as the work it’s doing with the Malala Fund to predict the impact of climate change on girls’ education.
Hackathon winners to be named
The Forum this week will also announce the winners of the SAS Hackathon. Throughout March, analytics leader SAS brought together hundreds of curious minds for the virtual Hackathon. The competition challenged data scientists, technology enthusiasts and business visionaries in a host of industries to apply technology to solve real-world business and humanitarian problems.
It received thousands of applications for 60 countries. SAS will name overall global winners in three categories – Industry, Data for Good and Startups.
Regional winners already named include NPK4Ever [US]. This team from North Carolina State University and startup Phinite used SAS Analytics to create a model for manure-based fertilizer recycling that can improve the environment and food production.
The model identified potential manure sources from large-scale animal farms across the US, depots where this fertilizer could be consolidated and dried, and factories to which it could be shipped for processing. The model also analyzed varying prices for carbon offsets.
