"It's 2017...
Your SAS Account Executive wants a meeting. She wants to tell you all about SAS Viya, SAS’s “open, cloud-ready, next-generation high-performance analytics and visualization architecture.” SAS launched Viya last year, and it’s a dud.
Viya is SAS’s “answer” to Apache Spark. Like Spark, it’s a distributed in-memory computing system; SAS claims, without evidence, that Viya is faster than Spark. It’s certainly a lot more expensive than Spark. The SAS applications that run on Viya have graphical user interfaces, so it’s easier to use than Spark. But nobody wants to hand petabyte-scale applications to low-IQ users who can’t write code.
You still have numerous SAS users. Most of them work on their desktops with plain old SAS: Base, STAT, and Graph, with Enterprise Guide. They will continue using SAS unless you tear it from their cold, dead hands, which nobody will do as long as their department budget covers the license fees.
SAS is secure in your company until the existing users die or retire. However, the last thing you want to do is expand your SAS footprint or invest in a “next generation” architecture that will lock you in for another 20 years."
https://thomaswdinsmore.substack.com/p/a-short-history-of-automl-part-eight