News

SAS Puts Statistical 'University' on Amazon Cloud

• By David Ramel
• 04/29/2015

SAS Institute Inc. is putting its SAS University Edition statistical software on the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) marketplace for educational and non-commercial use.

SAS, known for business intelligence (BI) and other analytical software and services, said the expansion of its cloud strategy is meant to fill the analytical skills gap.

In this case, the skills are primarily germane to its software only, specifically the latest releases of SAS Studio, Base SAS, SAS/STAT, SAS/IML and SAS/ACCESS, providing an intuitive UI, base programming language, statistical tools, matrix programming language and access to data in various PC file formats, respectively.

The SAS University Edition has been available previously only as a download. Now, it's being moved to the Amazon cloud as part of the AWS Educate program in which "educational institutions and educational technology companies can access industry-shaping technology at an affordable cost, no matter what the scale."

Interested users who are first-time AWS subscribers can also access the software through the AWS Free Tier program, which provides one year of free service, with a 750-hour monthly cap.

"SAS University Edition provides teachers, professors, students, independent learners and academic researchers with the most recent releases of the world's best advanced statistical analysis software," the SAS University page on the AWS Marketplace says. Writing and submitting code is easily done through a graphical UI providing point-and-click access to current statistical and quantitative technologies, the page says. The service comes in a 64-bit Amazon Machine Image, running on Linux/Unix, CentOS CENTOS 6.6. It uses the Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS services.

"Making SAS available in AWS Marketplace lets many more users put SAS University Edition to work," said SAS exec Robby Powell in a news release. "To close the analytics skills gap, we want to make analytics software available to anyone curious about finding answers. With its global footprint, AWS Marketplace enables SAS to reach a broader audience and educate more SAS users."