A platform for developing generative AI solutions and custom copilots. Azure AI Studio includes catalog of models from OpenAI, Hugging Face, and Meta, that can be applied over in-house data. It is intended for professional software developers—including cloud architects and technical decision-makers—who want to create generative AI applications and custom copilot experiences.
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SAS Viya
Score 10.0 out of 10
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An end-to-end platform for AI, data science, and analytics, used for modeling, as well as management and deployment of AI models.
I am deploying a lot of pipelines and making a lot of variants of these pipeline segments, like different types of vector search techniques. The simple way to mix and fix these segments to run the whole pipelines in notebooks options are big overhead killer. The playground which provides a test sandbox helps a lot to evaluate LMs if they are the best fit for our use-case even before deploying and startup with the costing angle.
SAS Advance Analytics is well suited for data that is visual. Data where you want to see multiple graphs and models are good for this software. However, if your data is more descriptive this may not be the best program. SAS is well suited for data where you need to make comparisons on the feasibility of two different programs. Data that can be compared is perfect for this software.
Wide Catalog of Models is a beautiful feature for all who want to evaluate a lot of models before proceeding with any client use case for the best performance.
Playground for testing and evaluating visual comparisons on so many metrics like latency, cost, and output time.
Integration with other Cloud services, this makes the full complete solutioning and vision complete, from storage to compute.
Model Catalog can have a feature to show basic compute and the cost of running the model on that compute. With latency metrics, I generally need to do a lot of research before losing some dollars on deployment on hit and trials.
Documentation generator for pipelines deployed in notebooks, generally developers use notebooks for experimentation, where logging them can be a big overhead.
SAS Analytics does not have very good graphic capabilities. Their advanced graphics packages are expensive, and still not very appealing or intuitive to customize.
SAS Analytics is not as up-to-date when it comes to advanced analytical techniques as R or other open-source analytics packages.
Not only does SAS become easier to use as the user gets more familiar with its capabilities, but the customer service is excellent. Any issues with SAS and their technical team is either contacting the user via email, chat, text, WebEx, or phone. They have power users that have years of experience with SAS there to help with any issue.
Microsoft Foundry includes the existing AI Services. It's quite literally Cognitive Services under the hood, so in that sense, if you're building a new "AI app" today where you would have deployed an AI Services Account, you can deploy Microsoft Foundry instead. The side benefit of that is that Foundry also includes model deployments, and more than just the OpenAI models. So, it removes the need for deploying a separate Azure OpenAI Service in some circumstances. Then finally it has agent capabilities too. So, if you're developing and deploying agents as part of your solution (which usually interface with a model) then you can do that from there as well. Effectively it's meant to be a one-stop-shop for all things AI, just like Fabric is for data.
If SAS Enterprise Guide is utilized any beginning user will be able to shorten the learning curve. This is allow the user a plethora of basic capabilities until they can utilize coding to expand their needs in manipulating and presenting data. SAS is also dedicated to expanding this environment so it is ever growing.
SAS probably has the most market saturation out of all of the analytics software worldwide. They are in every industry and they are knowledgable about every industry. They are always available to take questions, solve issues, and discuss a company's needs. A company that buys SAS software has a dedicated representative that is there for all of their needs.
Although nothing is perfect, SAS is almost there. The software can handle billions of rows of data without a glitch and runs at a quick pace regardless of what the user wants to perform. SAS products are made to handle data so performance is of their utmost important. The software is created to run things as efficiently as SAS software can to maximize performance.
SAS is generally known for good support that's one of the main reasons to justify the cost of having SAS licenses within our organization is knowing that customer support is just a quick phone call away. I've usually had good experiences with the SAS customer support team it's one of the ways in which the company stands out in my view.
SAS has regional and national conferences that are dedicated to expanding users' knowledge of the software and showing them what changes and additions they are making to the software. There are user groups in most of the major cities that also provide multi-day seminars that focus on specific topics for education. If online training isn't the best way for the user, there is ample in-person training available.
There are online videos, live classes, and resource material which makes training very easy to access. However, nothing is circumstantial so applying your training can get tricky if the user is performing complex tasks. When purchasing software, SAS will also allocate education credits so the user(s) can access classes and material online to help expand their knowledge.
Ask as many questions you can before the install to understand the process. Since a third party does the installation your company is sort of a passanger and it is easy to get lost in the process. It also helps to have all users and IT support involved in the install to help increase the knowledge as to how SAS runs and what it needs to perform correctly.
Azure AI Studio were the pioneers of DevOPs, so MLOPs feels quite a bit better on this platform than Google. Azure brought OpenAI into the system which made the Organization to shift from any other platform to Azure AI Studio.
SAS was the incumbent tool, and what the team knew. We did look into using Revolution Analytics enterprise version of R, but the learning curve on that caused us to stick with SAS. In my current position, I've opted for WPS over SAS. I can still leverage my SAS experience, but the price is about 15% of what SAS charges, with extra functionality, such as direct database access. I can supplement WPS with free software, such R for anything that it might be missing.
It all depends on the type of SAS product the user has. Scaleability differs from product to product, and if the user has SAS Office Analytics the scaleability is quite robust. This software will satisfy the majority of the company's analytic needs for years to come. In addition, if SAS is not meeting the users needs the company can easily find SAS solutions that will.
Onboarding a team member for the codebase is slightly slower, almost 20% slower. As codebase sharing is like a git pull from repos, whereas here we need to provide all the access.
I have experienced scaling up speed almost 50% faster as per compared with on-prem solutions. ML models are faster deployed in terms of on-prem deployments.
10 times better Azure AI Studio for cost visibility over any other solution.
