SAS Creates a Statistical ‘University’ for Amazon Cloud

SAS Institute Inc. has placed its SAS University Edition statistical program on the Amazon Web Services Inc. marketplace for educational and noncommercial use.
SAS, a company known for its business intelligence (BI), stated that the expansion of its cloud strategy was meant to fill the analytical skills shortage.
The skills in this case are primarily related to the software, specifically SAS Studio, Base SAS and SAS/STAT. SAS/IML, SAS/ACCESS and SAS/ACCESS. These provide an intuitive UI, base programming languages, statistical tools, matrix programming languages, and access to data in various file formats.
SAS University Edition was previously only available as a download. It’s now available on the Amazon cloud as part the AWS Educate program, where “educational institutions and educational tech companies can access industry-changing technology at an affordable price, regardless of their scale.”
AWS Free Tier allows first-time subscribers to access the software for one year. This program provides 750-hours of monthly service and a free year.
SAS University Edition is available to teachers, students, independent learners, academic researchers, and professors. It can be found on the AWS Marketplace’s SAS University page. The page explains that writing and submitting code can be done easily through a graphical user interface. This provides easy access to the most current statistical and quantitative technologies. The 64-bit Amazon Machine Image is available for the service, which runs on Linux/Unix and CentOS CENTOS 6.6. It uses Amazon EC2 or Amazon EBS services.
Robby Powell, SAS executive, stated in a news release that making SAS available in AWS Marketplace will allow many more users to put SAS University Edition into action. “To close the gap in analytics skills, we want to make SAS software available to anyone who is interested in finding answers.” AWS Marketplace allows SAS to reach a wider audience and educates more SAS users thanks to its global reach.