SAS has announced the general availability of SAS Viya Workbench, an innovative addition to the SAS Viya flagship data and AI platform.

SAS Viya Workbench is a self-service, on-demand compute environment intended for developers and modellers to facilitate data preparation, exploratory data analysis, and the development of analytical and machine learning models. SAS Viya, the bedrock of the SAS software ecosystem, is expanding its range with state-of-the-art products to cater to varied user needs.

"New offerings like SAS Viya Workbench - an on-demand analytics environment - aim to increase productivity, enhance performance, and build trust among AI developers," says Kathy Lange, Research Director for AI Software, IDC. The focus is on enabling developers and modellers to work in their chosen language - initially SAS and Python, with R being available by the end of 2024.

Viya Workbench offers a flexible and intuitive interface with two development environment options – Jupyter Notebook/JupyterLab and Visual Studio Code. Developers can significantly accelerate the development of high-performance AI models by leveraging powerful SAS analytical procedures (PROCs) and native Python APIs within Viya Workbench. Moreover, Viya Workbench features top-notch, custom Python libraries that are unique to it, significantly improving speed and performance with minimal changes to a developer's existing Python program.

A dedicated analytical environment catering to a project's needs, Viya Workbench is flexible and scalable. This development area offers an on-demand, self-provisioning, and self-terminating setup with minimal IT support. Not only does it meet the needs of your project with its adjustable CPU/GPU compute power, but it also ensures that models and other results can be used in SAS Viya for data management, governance, and operational deployment. To start with, Viya Workbench will be available on Amazon AWS Marketplace in Q2, and it will eventually support additional cloud providers and offer a software-as-a-service deployment alternative.

The business case for Viya Workbench is strong. AI developers and modelers want to work with modern, open source packages and cutting-edge cloud compute, but they are also under pressure to deliver fast results and manage costs.

In addition, they want prebuilt, scalable infrastructures that allow them to focus on creating, innovating, iterating and testing their work.

“The many challenges developers face aren’t just minor annoyances – they are obstacles that prevent questions from being answered and work from getting done,” said Jared Peterson, Senior Vice President of Engineering, SAS.

“Viya Workbench provides maximum flexibility and results by allowing developers to use their language and IDE [integrated development environment] of choice, tailor compute power up or down to meet the needs of the project, and ultimately boost their productivity and efficiency," he said.

"They can work faster, be more creative and take more risks – which, let’s be honest, is not only what’s expected but it makes the job more fun.”