SAS Viya platform 30 times faster than alternatives

A new benchmarking study performed by The Futurum Group has revealed that the SAS Viya artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics platform is, on average, 30 times faster than commercial and open-source alternatives and scales better with more extensive and complex data sets.

The research group compared SAS Viya to a commercial, cloud-based data and AI platform, and open-source alternatives like H2O and SparkML. 

The benchmarking study found that Viya outperformed the alternatives across speed and scalability metrics, including:

Speed/Performance: As stated earlier, Viya is, on average, 30 times faster than alternative AI/ML solutions across all testing scenarios. Continuing this, Viya was also, on average, 49 times faster than a Spark-based data/AI platform across all algorithms, data sizes and workloads. Viya was also, in some cases, up to 326 times faster than other platforms.

Scalability: In terms of scalability, the SAS Viya platform scales better than alternatives with more extensive, complex data sets, reducing AI/ML run times with additional computing resources.

Viya was also the only platform to continue scaling after model training on more than 300 million data points, outperforming all alternatives.

Cost Effectiveness: Because of Viya's speed and scalability in training and scoring models, users can lower costs by more than 86% compared to the alternatives tested.

"SAS Viya produced results in minutes; competitors ran for hours or simply failed," says Russ Fellows, Senior Partner and Analyst, The Futurum Group. 

"In practical terms, SAS Viya helps users lower computing costs and  consider more data to drive intelligent decisions faster. Our research showed SAS is way ahead of competitors." 

The benefit of utilising the insights delivered by the Viya platform is that it supports business leaders in making better decisions. For example, whether those decisions affect interest rates for securing a car loan, needed maintenance that keeps a rail company's trains safe or when and where a retail distribution centre ships a pallet of merchandise.

"The Futurum Group study confirms what our customers have told us all along: Viya runs efficiently and effectively in the cloud – it makes the most of CPU usage during workload run times," says Bryan Harris, Executive Vice President and CTO, SAS. 

"SAS R&D has focused millions of dollars of research to improve cloud economics for  customers looking to rapidly adopt cloud, analytics and AI. These independent results are proof of the game changing performance gains and costs savings we are delivering to our customers."