SAS announced a new open, “cloud-ready” machine learning, cognitive computing, analytics platform. Recently, Customer Think wrote: The idea is to bring together the SAS portfolio, built over some 40 years, into one platform that can be used by data scientists and other analytics professionals; business users and IT management; and senior management.

Customer Think stated, SAS is also working harder to be more “open” — in the sense of being interoperable with other enterprise systems. This is hugely important in the age of cloud-based systems and infrastructure services like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. If you can’t access a key functionality via a cloud-based API, it might as well not exist. While SAS is not yet offering transaction-based pricing, it wouldn’t shock me if they end up there in the next few years.

Cognitive computing is about providing more of a human-like interface to machine learning and other analytics. Buzzwords aside, what’s important is analytics is becoming more powerful and easier to put to use. Machine Learning can be described as a method for data analysis which automates the building of analytical models. Using algorithms which learn from data, machine learning lets computers find hidden insights, while not being explicitly programmed in where to look.

Read more at Customer Think.