Data analytics provider SAS Institute Inc. made two major announcements with Amazon Web Services Inc. on Thursday.

The company expanded its SAS-hosted Managed Services to the AWS platform, and announced that SAS Viya Workbench, a new dedicated offering for artificial intelligence development within SAS Viya, would launch in the second quarter in the AWS Marketplace. The strategic additions to the SAS Managed Services portfolio were designed to provide customers with more options for configuring and operating solutions in the cloud environment.

“SAS Managed Services as a portfolio continues to excel … it’s probably the fastest growing part of the SAS umbrella,” said Jay Upchurch (pictured, left), chief information officer of SAS. “Today’s announcement with AWS expands our hosted Managed Services offering within the portfolio with AWS. We’re meeting our customers where they want to be.”

Upchurch spoke with theCUBE Research’s John Furrier and Dave Vellante at SAS Innovate, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Sri Raghavan (right), principal of data science and analytics, Amazon Marketplace, at AWS, and they discussed how the expanded partnership will support customers in deriving value from analytics and managing machine learning models. (* Disclosure below.)

SAS Institute and AWS partner for real-time data experience

The expanded SAS and AWS partnership is designed to shorten the distance between data and analytics value. It enhances Customer 360, part of the AWS portfolio that provides a holistic client view for analysis, targeting, segmentation and personalization.

“With Customer 360, we’re providing support with generative AI to be able to deliver content, which then SAS takes and passes it on to customers who are now able to have a very, very near real time experience … with their retailers or with their healthcare providers or their banks,” Raghavan said. “This is a classic example of two technologies coming into play.”

One customer featured in the keynote announcements on Thursday and supported by both companies is pulp and paper manufacturer Georgia-Pacific LLC. The launch of SAS Viya Workbench on AWS will allow users to take advantage of SAS’ powerful analytical tools and speed development of high-performance AI models from robust streaming data.

“Viya, as well as integration with … that event streaming protocol, has been incredibly important to our manufacturing vertical,” Upchurch said. “Those two things together initiated so much of where Georgia-Pacific was going and came in with the AWS foundational piece.”

Georgia-Pacific must now manage over 10,000 machine learning models in the operation of its business, according to Raghavan.

“It’s a lot of models; it’s a massive number,” he said. “You bring two technologies together to be able to manage this massive number of machine learning models, which are in place for you to address things like demand, or customer journey or fraud detection. SAS’ ability to manage very complex installations with security, with the ability to serve up data in real time, all those things become very crucial.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of SAS Innovate:

(* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE