On Tuesday, analytics company SAS announced Viya, its new analytics and visualization architecture. A SAS spokeswoman said Viya would become the "foundation for all future SAS products."

The goal of Viya is to make analytics more accessible to all users and to better support cloud-native apps and data stored in the cloud.

The announcement came at the 2016 SAS Global Forum, the company's annual conference for SAS users and executives, which took place in Las Vegas. Viya will be available as part of an early adopter program in May, but it will reach general availability sometime in Q3 of 2016.