SAS acquires Boemska to accelerate AI integration

The assets and operations of Boemska – a small, UK-based technology company with an R&D centre in Serbia – will be integrated into SAS. The company is a well-established SAS technology partner whose global customers include SAS customers in financial services, healthcare and travel.

“The rapidly evolving analytics market requires continuous innovation from technology suppliers, particularly as businesses seek intelligent as-a-service solutions to accelerate successful migration to the cloud,” said Frank Della Rosa, Research Director for SaaS and Cloud Software at IDC. “Boemska enables customers to infuse world-class SAS analytics in third-party cloud applications, using purpose-built runtime containers that are designed for greater resiliency and portability across connected cloud environments, resulting in a small footprint runtime for analytics and models.”

The primary Boemska product offerings that will be integrated into SAS Viya include:

• A next-generation, cloud-native capability enabling portability of SAS and open-source models into mobile and enterprise applications. This enables development and execution of models and decisions using low-code and no-code technologies for performing specific tasks such as anticipating fraud, decision making related to a medical event, identifying a manufacturing defect and more.
• An enterprise workload management tool that facilitates migration of scale-out analytics to the cloud in a cost-efficient way while ensuring that analytic workloads on clouds such as Microsoft Azure remain right-sized and always optimised. This brings unparalleled visibility to SAS workloads running on shared multi-user environments and empowers customers to confidently execute their cloud migration strategy.

“SAS is on a journey to enable AI and analytics for everyone, everywhere,” added SAS Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Bryan Harris. “We have not only transformed the way in which we build and deliver software with recent SAS Viya updates and a cloud partnership with Microsoft, but also the speed and manner with which customers can achieve value. SAS is recognised as a leading provider of analytics for enterprise applications. Boemska’s technology puts SAS closer to where decisions are made, and available in cloud marketplaces for applications developers.”

Decisioning support in real time

With the inclusion of Boemska technology, SAS Viya can provide purpose-built, analytics-driven third-party application integration to speed decisions wherever needed. Boemska’s portable SAS runtime enables analytics ‘to be pushed out’ where business value is achieved – at the point of the transaction, the medical scan, marketing offer or credit decision. These optimised SAS runtimes can be seamlessly integrated into SAS Event Stream Processing and our market-leading IoT solutions.

For example, the technology’s machine learning and advanced analytics can support:

• Wearables to send an alert for an impending medical event.
• Cameras mounted in factories to detect manufacturing defects and reduce waste.
• Drone devices to monitor distributed assets (e.g. power lines) and request maintenance.

Additionally, the technology facilitates embedding cloud-native analytics in marketplace apps that use SAS in the background. These advanced capabilities will be integrated with SAS Analytics software and available in app marketplaces to be easily integrated into use cases across virtually every industry.

“We’re excited to join the SAS family and help shift customers to the cloud in a cost-effective yet powerful manner,” said Nikola Markovic, Boemska Chief Technology Officer. “We look forward to collaboratively delivering a portable, small-footprint runtime for analytics and models while improving the ability to migrate to the cloud.”

For decades, SAS has remained committed to customer-focused innovation and supporting wide-scale adoption of analytics to drive digital transformation initiatives. Boemska technology will be incorporated into the Viya platform over the coming months, offering customers a major competitive edge when it comes to analytic integration and cloud implementation.

“Evolving our analytic solutions to be cloud-native requires us to think broadly about how we can make SAS more pervasive, particularly as the number of applications in the marketplace multiply,” said Gavin Day, SAS Senior Vice President for Technology. “The acquisition of Boemska helps uphold SAS Analytics at the forefront of innovation with the addition of complementary technology that further supports customer needs.”