At its annual user summit in Las Vegas today, analytics giant SAS Institute Inc. unveiled a new data crunching framework that is set to power all of its future software products. Viya, as the software is called, can be deployed either on in-house infrastructure or in the cloud and makes its features accessible through a set of programming interfaces designed to facilitate the creation of custom applications.

In that sense, the platform is similar to SAP SE’s HANA database. The in-memory store was created to serve as the foundation of the company’s core business automation offerings and level the playing field against the new analytics startups providers that are eating away at its market share. But Viya approaches SAS’s competitive goals from a very different angle, a fact best reflected by the five pre-implemented applications that are due to out for the framework next month.

The first is a machine learning tool designed to ease the development of the algorithms used in recommendation engines and customer segmentation efforts.It’s set to be joined by a rewritten version of SAS Visual Statistics that promises to help analysts produce business forecasts faster by taking advantage of Viya’s in-memory capabilities.. The three remaining offerings in the lineup are likewise based on existing SAS products, and all of them provide similar functional benefits over the previous generation of the company’s software.

The lineup made its debut alongside a new toolkit similarly consisting mainly of established offerings that’s aimed making it easier for organizations to analyze data from their connected devices. The company managed to bring several customers aboard in the run-up to today’s conference, including truck maker Navistar International Corporation, which uses SAS’s software to collect diagnostics logs from customers’ vehicles. Meanwhile, Texas-based CPS Energy is building a sensor-packed power grid for the city of San Antonio that will transmit usage and maintenance information for real-time analysis purposes.

Many more such use cases will emerge as organizations move to tap the connected universe, a revenue opportunity that SAS is keen to exploit. But to do so, the vendor will need to overcome heavy competition from SAP and the dozens of other analytics vendors that eyeing the same prize.

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