SAS has hailed a 35% year-on-year rise in cloud revenues as evidence of more customers turning to virtualised analysis services.
The analytics software firm counts 400 cloud customers in 70 countries using SAS Cloud Analytics either in their private cloud, SAS’s cloud or Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Global product manager for business intelligence and cloud, Robby Powell, said the vast majority of customers are using SAS’s solutions on a software-as-a-service basis, rather than hosting the technology in their own clouds, but added that this is changing.
However, addressing media at SAS’s headquarters in Cary, North Carolina, he added that there was currently no support for Microsoft Azure cloud, because it lacks the compute capacity for the firm’s solutions.
He said: "We enoucrage our customers not to use Azure because it doesn’t have the compute capacity for our tools."
SAS is working with one customer, US healthcare systems provider Dignity Health, to build a cloud-based big data analytics platform to improve patient treatment.
The project, embarked on last month, will aim to cut re-admission rates and use analysis to improve approaches to treating congestive heart failure as well as manage pharmacy costs.
Meanwhile, SAS has announced 27 new data management and analytics products and released new features to another 160 over the past year.
"We’ve seen growth not just in cloud analytics, but in analytics as a whole. SAS owes its growth and success, in large part, to listening to our customers," said SAS CEO Jim Goodnight.
He was speaking as the company opened Building Q, the latest in the firm’s alphabetically-ordered buildings on its Cary campus.
The new addition will house analytics experts who will work with North Carolina State to improve public sector efficiency.
