SAS unveils Data Maker on Snowflake Marketplace at Summit 2024
SAS, a prominent name in the realms of data and artificial intelligence, has released the private preview of SAS Data Maker on Snowflake Marketplace. The announcement was made during the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit 2024, an annual event dedicated to Snowflake's users.
SAS Data Maker is designed as a Snowflake Native App to generate synthetic data, providing an enhanced data generation experience natively within Snowflake accounts. The app harnesses the capabilities of SAS's advanced AI models to produce statistically accurate data points. These are designed to augment existing data, allowing businesses to envisage various scenarios for better prediction and planning, according to Shadi Shahin, Vice President of Product Strategy at SAS. This innovation is particularly advantageous in sectors where specific real-world data are sparse or in highly regulated areas such as healthcare, finance, and fraud detection.
The partnership between SAS and Snowflake aims to mobilise global data using Snowflake's Data Cloud. SAS Data Maker promises to elevate data quality and productivity by creating synthetic data that mirrors real-world data while preserving sensitive information. This process enables customers to innovate more rapidly, circumventing the expenses and challenges associated with manual data collection or third-party data sets. Making SAS Data Maker available on Snowflake Marketplace broadens accessibility to SAS's leading technology, thereby offering tangible benefits to businesses.
Prasanna Krishnan, Head of Collaboration and Horizon at Snowflake, highlighted the advantages of the Snowflake Native App Framework and the support for Snowpark Container Services. These tools enable partners to deliver sophisticated applications that operate within the secure and governed Data Cloud environment. The inclusion of precise synthetic data generation capabilities is a significant value addition, offering robust and secure solutions to customers.
AstraZeneca, a notable global biopharmaceutical company, is one of the early adopters of SAS Data Maker. Brian Dummann, Chief Data Officer at AstraZeneca, expressed enthusiasm about leveraging synthetic data to enhance decision-making processes. He noted, "Synthetic data can enhance our ability to make informed decisions from critical data, and thus has the real potential to help accelerate drug discovery and development, ultimately benefiting patients around the world." AstraZeneca aims to streamline data access for its scientists using SAS Data Maker on the Snowflake Marketplace.
The integration of Snowflake Native App Framework and Snowpark Container Services permits developers to build complex applications that run on a variety of configurable hardware options. This includes GPUs, which facilitate the distribution and monetisation of these applications on Snowflake Marketplace, while allowing deployment within customers' Snowflake accounts without necessitating data movement.
SAS continues to innovate within the data and AI landscape, enhancing its offerings to provide valuable tools that support various industries, the company states. The introduction of SAS Data Maker as a Snowflake Native App signifies a pivot towards more integrated and secure solutions that harness the power of synthetic data for improved business outcomes. The private preview is a step forward in what could potentially be a transformative tool in data management and AI applications, particularly for companies dealing with sparse or sensitive data.
