Thursday, 20 November 2025 - SAS, a global leader in data and AI, is now offering SAS® Viya® Essentials, a standard, secure deployment of select SAS Viya products on Microsoft Azure with SAS Managed Cloud Services. The ready-to-use offering makes it easier for customers to access SAS’ leading data and AI software in a standardised, simplified way. 

Analytics at your fingertips

Users can skip the learning curve and deploy SAS without complex workloads or customisations quickly and easily – a 99.5% uptime SLA guaranteed. There are four predefined architectural profiles that include SAS® Visual Analytics, SAS® Visual Statistics and SAS® Viya®, SAS’ cloud-native data and AI platform. A low fixed cost and dedicated support teams minimise costly disruptions and reduce burdensome IT workloads.

“At SAS, we believe in making AI accessible to everyone, no matter their industry or size. And we know that a common struggle for companies is how to quickly maximise their AI investments to meet their corporate aspirations,” said Jay Upchurch, CIO at SAS. “That’s where SAS Viya Essentials comes in. It provides an easy-to-use way for customers to get the trusted answers they need in a fast, flexible and cost-effective way so they can stay ahead of their competition.”

Shionogi Inc., a U.S. subsidiary of Shionogi & Co., Ltd., has been harnessing the full potential of science to improve patients’ lives since 1878. Over the past six decades, Shionogi has discovered several novel antibiotics and medications for HIV and influenza. Today, the company is building on its scientific legacy by marketing an antibiotic for difficult-to-treat Gram-negative bacterial infections, developing investigational antivirals for COVID-19 prevention and treatment and, through its subsidiary Qpex Biopharma, Inc., advancing a portfolio of antibiotics for resistant bacteria. Beyond infectious disease, the company pipeline includes clinical programmes in rare disease, acute ischemic stroke and oncology. 

“We needed one trusted vendor to manage the data workload with cost control in a hosted environment,” said Anindita Sinha, VP of Commercial Operations at Shionogi Inc. “SAS Viya Essentials enables us to process larger data sets with speed and efficiency so we can continue to generate key insights, accelerate business success and build on our scientific legacy."

A powerful partnership

This is yet another milestone in the extensive technology and go-to-market partnership between SAS and Microsoft, which was just extended for another five years. Additional innovations in the partnership include:

    SAS Viya Copilot, an AI-driven conversational assistant embedded directly into the SAS Viya platform through an integration with Microsoft Azure AI Foundry. It helps users improve productivity with intuitive code assistance and AI-powered model pipeline development. SAS Viya Copilot is currently available via an invitation-only, private preview.
    SAS Viya Workbench, a cloud-based coding environment purpose-built for data scientists and modelers to help them build models fast with SAS, R or Python through Visual Studio Code, Jupyter Notebook or SAS Enterprise Guide. Viya Workbench is available on Microsoft Marketplace.
    SAS Decision Builder, a new workload in Microsoft Fabric that brings SAS’ leading intelligent decisioning capabilities to Fabric users to help make better, faster decisions and bring their AI models into production with trustworthy insights. Natively integrated within the Fabric platform, SAS Decision Builder is now available in public preview.

SAS Founder and CEO Jim Goodnight discussed these developments – and the overall impact of the AI whirlwind on the industry – with Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella at SAS Innovate 2025. The prerecorded session is available on-demand.

“Our collaboration enables customers to quickly and confidently access SAS Viya Essentials on the trusted, scalable and secure foundation of Microsoft Azure,” said Brett Tanzer, Vice President, Product Management for the Azure Solutions & Ecosystem Team at Microsoft. “By combining SAS' capabilities with our cloud infrastructure, organisations can realise value faster, accelerating their unique AI transformation journey in the era of AI.”

Explore SAS Viya Essentials on Microsoft Azure.