Partnership Sets Microsoft Azure as Preferred Destination for SAS Cloud

… Synapse pipelines and map data flows. Notably, an individual can prep the data without having to write any code, he said.

Before passing the data on to data scientists, Guthrie showed how to transform it. In this instance, he combined customer and financial data to inform the model, then filtered out unnecessary columns to provide a clean data set.

“We also bucket age ranges to more easily classify customers down the line,” he said. “And with that the data is ready. It’s that simple.”

However, it wasn’t simple getting to where SAS is today, according to Baer.

“It takes a while to turn around a ship,” Baer noted. “Traditionally, SAS skills were so specialized that it practically defined its own job title.”

Its partnership with Microsoft will also ease the migration of legacy apps to Docker containers managed in standard Kubernetes-based clusters. Additionally, the partnership creates a new path for SAS Managed Applications services.

SAS also is rolling out industry-specific Quickstart cloud solutions, starting with retail and consumer packaged goods.