Starting to use cloud services is one step, but managing the costs of those services becomes a separate challenge.

To stay ahead of the game, SAS Institute Inc. and Intel Corp. have co-engineered a cloud-agnostic and cloud-native solution called SAS Viya to reduce cloud costs, enhance data integration and maximize the total cost of ownership, according to Gavin Day (pictured, left), executive vice president, office of the CEO, at SAS.

“Early days, cloud lift and shift was the model … all of a sudden that’s not performing, it’s costing customers too much,” Day said. “The cloud spend is running out the door right now, and now we’re partnering with people like Intel to get efficiency and performance, and it’s been a great ride. One of the things that we’re working on is having SAS Viya to be smart enough to guide our customers on where they should run certain workloads because of either economic or time impact.”

Day and Chris Tobias (right), general manager of Americas technology leadership and platform ISVs at Intel, spoke with theCUBE Research’s executive analyst John Furrier and chief analyst Dave Vellante at SAS Innovate, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed why reducing cloud spend is vital for optimal performance in the current enterprise world and how the SAS-Intel collaboration has evolved. (* Disclosure below.)

SAS’ Gavin Day and Intel’s Chris Tobias talk to theCUBE about the importance of reducing the cloud spend at SAS Innovate 2024.

How TCO fits into the cloud spend picture

To reduce cloud spending effectively, focusing on total cost of ownership (TCO) is essential. A key element of the SAS/Intel partnership was enhancing the performance of SAS software on Intel chips. This improvement is crucial because computing power is fundamental to data analysis, and optimizing it helps lower TCO, according to Tobias.

“Some of our biggest customers are common, and it’s so much better when they can see the TCO opportunity of both of us working together because they know it’s co-engineered,” he said. “They know how to co-implement it and get the best and easiest result for the best TCO for their use.”

Based on a partnership that spans 25 years, SAS and Intel continue to show the power of collaboration when it comes to enhancing compute and performance. This comes in handy in driving the cloud spend down, and this has been boosted by research and development, according to Day.

“This is 25 years in the making for us,” he said. “It starts with co-engineering; it starts with joint customers; it starts with joint go-to-market. There’s an absolute need for compute, but there’s absolutely a need for the performance of it. Designers from their side, engineers from our side working together so that we can bring the best solution forward. One stat that’s pretty cool there is over this period of time, we’re looking at upwards of 90% of our customers are running SAS on Intel chips.”

Since the generative artificial intelligence wave is here, this has changed the paradigm on how workloads are handled and where they are placed. As a result, the SAS-Intel partnership is geared toward maximizing AI, data analytic efficiency and security, Tobias pointed out.

“We’ve worked together to fully optimize around technology we have in our chips, in our Xeon chips called Advanced Matrix Extensions,” he said. “It basically is a matrix multiply, so it’s got a big cache in front of a matrix multiply function for each core. Think of it as your gen AI accelerator right next to each core to accelerate it. One of the capabilities we worked on together is trusted domain extensions, or TDX. Think of it simply as putting a moat around your castle. It’s that extra layer of security in the hardware.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of SAS Innovate:

(* Disclosure: Intel Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Intel nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE