SAS-language-based data analytics routines are a mainstay of many Asia Pacific financial institutions today but in a slowing economy, the high software maintenance fees payable to the SAS Institute are increasingly attracting scrutiny.

By Mark Do Couto, Senior Vice President, Data Analytics, Altair

According to a research report carried in the «Financial Times», one-third of APAC banks are concerned that their legacy platforms are holding them back, while three in five APAC banks believe that they will cease to exist in five to ten years unless they change their business models.

The good news is that other dependable SAS language runtime options, sans those stratospheric fees, are becoming viable alternatives, thanks to the rise of open-source languages like Python and R.

More Flexible

The meteoric rise of Python, in particular, has many companies casting their analytic bets with the popular scripting language, which can be used to program many data-related tasks, including data engineering, analytics and AI.

Yet while many companies who use the SAS language would like to be more flexible and have their routines built in a cost-effective and modern environment like Python, it’s not an easy transition to make. The dearth of good code converters means that a move from the SAS language to Python is practically a rewrite, which raises red flags for risk-averse financial institutions.

Classic Case

As a result, many of them stick with their SAS language codes and continue to pay licensing fees to the SAS Institute. It’s a classic case of «if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.» Enter Altair, one of the industry’s best at compiling and running SAS language with minimal changes.

About 20 years ago, a UK company named World Programming devised a compiler and a runtime for SAS language, called WPS Analytics, and has been refining it and selling it to customers worldwide since then. Altair acquired World Programming in Dec 2021.

The extent of compatibility with WPS Analytics – now called Altair SLC – is nearly 100 percent, and in those cases when customers do run into unsupported procedures, the Altair team typically will work to support it in the compiler and runtime.

Reducing Maintenance Fees

Altair SLC allows organizations the flexibility to embrace a multi-code environment: leverage the significant investments they’ve made in the SAS language while embracing more modern open-source languages.

Besides the savings that financial institutions can get by utilizing Altair SLC and reducing the SAS language maintenance fees, such a move can also free up SAS language code to run on bigger, newer machines that customers have been hesitant to install for fear of triggering even bigger price increases.

New Legacy

Altair supports Altair SLC and SAS language on industry-standard servers, as well as IBM mainframes and power boxes running IBMi, AIX, and Linux operating systems. The ability to essentially copy and paste legacy SAS code into a new runtime, and get out from under the obligation of paying costly maintenance fees, is attractive to many institutions.

Altair is now pushing this capability and benefit to APAC financial services firms. The licensing model revolves around Altair Units – which gives customers the freedom, flexibility, and value to use any of Altair’s range of data analytics products without any additional incremental costs.

Value of a Multi-code Environment

Companies who use Altair solutions get access to the code engine, as well as Altair’s data preparation tool (Monarch), data science tools, visual dashboarding tool (Panopticon), and SmartWorks IoT tool that is cloud native. They thus have the flexibility to use Altair’s whole platform and product portfolio.

Considering how big a lift moving from SAS language to Python would be for most financial institutions – especially the large banks with hundreds of thousands of lines of SAS code that have run reliably, day in and day out, for decades – Altair is happy to give customers choice, allowing them to leverage existing SAS code while embracing newer, more modern coding languages.

Altair recognizes that there is value to a multi-code environment. At the end of the day, what’s important is that financial institutions have a choice, and therefore, flexibility. Only then can they confidently and truly be ready for the future.

Mark Do Couto is a passionate sales leader with over 15 years of technology sales experience, currently focused on Data Analytics. He is the SVP of Data Analytics at Altair, where he is responsible for the global revenue and go-to-market strategy for the business. Mark has worked closely with Fortune 500 financial services companies, retailers and insurers across the globe to help them solve the most complex problems facing their organization such as minimizing risk, increasing revenue and expanding their customer engagement. Before joining Altair, he held a number of sales roles at IBM Canada.