About a year ago, a sales guy from SAS came to give a talk about Viya at our uni. They even brought a data scientist (whom I believe was actually a smart kid an

About a year ago, a sales guy from SAS came to give a talk about Viya at our uni. They even brought a data scientist (whom I believe was actually a smart kid and feeling uneasy about being dragged into a sales pitch). Traditionally, SAS has pushed a lot of resources in the educational sector. Get them started young, and they'll be customers forever. So anyway, the presentation includes showing off a Jupyter notebook and showing how you can easily use pandas to load in your data set, build a model (with Viya), and plot the results with matplotlib. Standard data science stuff, but distributed automagically thanks to Viya. During the QA, I asked the following questions: - So you are basically attempting the same as what Spark has done, and are just using R/Python/... as a client? Yes, but we're way more powerful, manageable, etc... - Can I see the source code of your models, or build new ones myself? No... well maybe, you can write them in SAS base and call them. - Can I at least export the model to something like PMML? Oh yes you can export (shows this off)... to SAS base code. - Do you have GPU support for those fancy convolutional neural networks? No (although I've heard this has changed, though I would still put my trust more towards Tensorflow or Pytorch). It kind of seems like a last attempt to get some new lock-in going. Even Apple's re-open sourcing of turi (https://github.com/apple/turicreate https://github.com/apple/turicreate) is more honest (and more powerful, actually). I like SAS, they have some very smart people working there and some great consultants (PhD's, often), but there's too much sales going on. This is what killed IBM as well.