The public sector is slowly grasping the new innovative solutions of the technology world and SAS is giving Scotland a helping hand with a new data initiative.

SAS has agreed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with The University of Edinburgh’s Bayes Centre for Data Science and Technology. The partnership will span for a three year period, in which SAS will establish a lab in the Bayes Centre to help focus on data-driven innovation within the public sector.

Together, SAS and the University will work with a number of other partner organisations with the initial focus on delivering better public services using big data. The benefits of data-driven initiatives are to help data to be captured quickly and identify trends and behaviours to bring improved services for people.

It is not the first initiative SAS has support Scotland with, as the organisation opened a research and development centre in Glasgow in 2013 in addition to helping to launch The Data Lab Innovation Centre in Edinburgh in 2014.

David Richardson, Director of Partnerships for the Bayes Centre, said: “We are delighted to begin this new collaboration in the Bayes Centre with SAS to deliver new strategic research initiatives alongside shorter-term projects that will deliver value to our public-sector partners.”

The benefits the partnership brings to the public sector within Scotland are to enable quicker innovation through better use of data and analytics, in addition to developing the areas within the community to fit with the digital age. Furthermore, the platform and partnership is so effective because it is interoperable with various elements so the change is seamless.

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“The Bayes Centre offers a unique opportunity for us to support the ambition of Edinburgh becoming the data capital of Europe.  Delivering data driven innovation requires many different forms of collaboration and this aligns well to SAS as we operate across the entire analytics life cycle – from data, to discovery, to deployment” Hugo D’Ulisse, Director, SAS UK & Ireland, said. “Our new platform is able to interoperate with popular open-source languages to provide a streamlined environment that will foster productivity, agility and tangible results.”

SAS has previously focused on the public sector with its capabilities, after assisting the Gloucestershire police fight crime effectively as well as boosting deployment of troops for the British Army.