SAS Institute

SAS Institute Inc.

Type	Private
Industry	Software
Founded	1976
Founder(s)	Anthony Barr James Goodnight John Sall Jane Helwig
Headquarters	Cary, North Carolina
Key people	James Goodnight, CEO and Co-founder John Sall, Co-founder and Executive Vice President
Revenue	$2.43 billion USD (2010)
Employees	11,920 (2010)
Website	www.sas.com

SAS Institute Inc. (pronounced "sass"), headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, USA, has been a major producer of software since it was founded in 1976 by Anthony Barr, James Goodnight, John Sall and Jane Helwig. SAS was originally an acronym for Statistical Analysis System but, for many years, has been used as a tradename to refer to the company as a whole and its line of software products, which have long since broadened beyond the statistical analysis sphere. SAS Institute is one of the largest privately-held corporations in North Carolina and in the software business.

History

SAS's main and original product was the SAS software package used in statistical analysis, consisting of numerous modules which ran on IBM mainframe computers. In addition to the usual mainframe practice of writing and submitting programs in batch, SAS offered the option, somewhat novel at the time, of a windowed programming environment, where the program being written or edited appeared in one window, the program output appeared in another window, and the program log appeared in a third window.

As other types of computers became available and powerful enough, SAS was continuously developed to run in those environments as well, keeping the familiar user interface and compatible file structure so that SAS users could easily switch from one type of operating system and/or hardware to another. Eventually fully functional SAS could be run on personal computers, either standalone or networked. The widespread rise of Microsoft Windows, however, brought some philosophical difficulties to the product developers, faced with adapting the standard SAS programming interface familiar to SAS users to the standard Microsoft Windows interface familiar to PC users. In addition, even on the personal computer platform, SAS retained the mainframe pricing structure of substantial yearly licensing fees, rather than adopting the personal computer pricing standard of a one-time outright purchase.

Company and software

SAS is a fourth-generation programming language consisting of a suite of modules designed for business intelligence and customer relationship management. Although the advent of more powerful personal computers has also allowed lower cost statistical packages to be available, SAS software continues to be the standard used in statistical analysis of clinical pharmaceutical trials for submission to the Food and Drug Administration. It is also widely used for statistical analysis in the insurance industry and the field of public health, at least partially due to the handling of different types and formats of data. Other modules available provide for construction of applications for such tasks as data entry or validation. SAS also provides data mining, data warehousing, business intelligence, sustainability and business performance management software. Because of this wide spectrum, many users are expert in one area of the SAS package, but have little or no experience in another. Online documentation for SAS software is provided on their technical support website.

SAS Institute remains a wholly owned private company enabling the management, led by James Goodnight, to run the company without concern about the demands of shareholders. Approximately 25% of the revenue of the SAS Institute goes to research and development. In addition, SAS management is known for its unique methods to keep employees happy through providing such things as its childcare centers, "M&M Wednesdays", soda fountains and snacks in every breakroom, and a 58,000-square-foot (5,400 m²) recreation and fitness center. SAS Institute has frequently been included in lists of the best places to work in America. CBS' 60 Minutes did a segment on the employee benefits of SAS, entitled "The Royal Treatment." These benefits may also account for its low turnover: SAS lost 3.7% of its employees in 2000, which is about a tenth of competitors' rates. In 2010, Fortune magazine rated SAS the #1 place to work in the United States.

Business Intelligence market

The business intelligence market includes a number of platform or software vendors, often categorized into:

• The consolidated big four "megavendors", which are SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos, Oracle Hyperion, and Microsoft BI. These are corporations who have entered the BI market through a recent trend of acquisitions in the industry.
• The remaining independent "pure-play" vendors, the largest being SAS and MicroStrategy.

Some companies adopting BI software decide to pick and choose from different product offerings (best-of-breed) rather than purchase one comprehensive integrated solution (full-service).

Independent BI market surveys and analyses include:

• Gartner's BI Magic Quadrant, which placed SAS in the "Leaders" quadrant in 2010
• Business Application Research Center (BARC)'s BI Survey and BI Verdict (formerly the OLAP Report)

User groups

The SAS community includes large, well-organized users groups on the local, regional, and international scales. While these serve to make some of the resources of SAS Institute and more experienced users available to the new user, they also serve the Institute by providing essentially free customer service and public relations functions.

Worldwide

The SAS Global Forum meets for a conference in a different city each year, where marketing efforts by the Institute combine with technical and educational presentations by users of all levels of sophistication. Unlike entities such as the Independent Oracle Users Group, however, the Global SAS User Group has never been a completely independent and self-sufficient users group; instead, SAS Institute and the Global SAS User Group Executive board have formed a collaborative relationship in the formation of the conference structure and control of finances. The SAS Global Forum is administered by an Executive Board consisting of prior conference chairs and representatives from SAS Institute. Full-time employees manage and run the logistics of the SAS Global Forum conference itself, with the help and participation of volunteers (serving in such roles as section chairs and speakers) from the user community. After the 2006 conference in San Francisco SAS Global Forum was renamed from SAS Users Group International (SUGI). Only two people have attended every SAS Global Forum: SAS CEO Jim Goodnight and Phil Miller from Washington University in Saint Louis.

Regional and online

Similar but more independent user conferences are held yearly by regional and local SAS users groups around the world. The US has six regional users groups: MWSUG, the MidWest SAS Users Group; NESUG, the NorthEast SAS Users Group; PNWSUG, the Pacific Northwest SAS Users Group; SCSUG, the South-Central SAS Users Group; SESUG, the SouthEast SAS Users Group; and WUSS, the Western Users of SAS Software. In addition, there are special interest users groups such as PhUSE, the independent Pharmaceutical Users Software Exchange, which also hold annual conferences in Europe, and PharmaSUG, also a users group concentrating on the pharmacetical industry, based in the United States.

There is an online user group, SAS-L, whose main Listserv server is at the University of Georgia. It is gatewayed to the Usenet newsgroup comp.soft-sys.sas. At SUGI 31 in San Francisco, preliminary steps were taken to establish a SAS Wiki FAQ maintained by the online SAS user community. In 2006, SAS Institute started online community forums, which provide a way to talk directly to SAS Institute developers and contain information which is otherwise under- or un-documented.

At the 2007 SAS Global Forum, a new hub for SAS user groups and SAS-related activity was announced. sasCommunity.org was created by SGF leaders and maintained by SAS users for the SAS community. It includes events, articles, SASopedia, TIPs and relating social media and websites. The intended keystone is Wikipedia-style collaboration and information sharing.

Partners

In March 2008, SAS and icrunchdata partnered to create the SAS Job Network in order to "link the demand for analytical talent and SAS skills with the supply. Graduates with analytical skills, especially at the entry level, are increasingly needed as companies invest in technology to analyze growing stores of data to make better business decisions."

Publishing

Books and publications related to the SAS System are published by mainstream publishers (e.g. John Wiley & Sons, CRC Press) and many more by SAS Institute itself, which instituted a "Books By Users" program in the early 1990s. This program is now known as SAS Press, its own book publishing arm. Researchers and academics who have published their work with SAS Press include Neil Timm, Ravindra Khattree, Dayanand N. Naik, Peter Westfall, and R. C. Littell.

Other strategies

More recently, SAS Institute has followed the lead of other major corporate software suppliers by offering SAS Certification for SAS programmers, users, and developers to eliminate some of the risk of hiring individuals of unknown ability; like many such programs, it has met with mixed success. The Institute has similarly launched a program of SAS Partners, who provide a pool of available consultants for corporations who wish to begin incorporating SAS applications into their operations but lack any experience with the software. These individuals also serve as unpaid ambassadors, evangelists, and salesmen for the Institute; as they market their services and products to corporations, as a consequence licensing fees naturally will flow to SAS.

Community and awards

Until recently SAS was the principal sponsor of SAS Soccer Park in Cary, North Carolina (now "WakeMed Soccer Park"). Jim Goodnight is one of the major contributors to Cary Academy. In October 2008, SAS's Canadian division was named one of "Canada's Top 100 Employers" by Mediacorp Canada Inc., and was featured in Maclean's newsmagazine. Later that month, SAS was also named one of Greater Toronto's Top Employers, which was announced by the Toronto Star newspaper. In 2010, and again in 2011 Fortune magazine ranked SAS as #1 among its "100 Best Companies to Work For". SAS Australia was named a finalist in BRW Magazine's "Great Place To Work" survey in 2009 and 2010.

SAS Hall, the new mathematics and statistics building at North Carolina State University, is named after the SAS Institute.

Aircraft

Boeing 737-700 BBJ of SAS Institute.

SAS also maintains six aircraft for use in company operations including Bell 407 helicopter, a Boeing 737 Business Jet, an 8 passenger Cessna Citation X , a pair of 12pax Dassault Falcon 900's and fractional ownership in a six-passenger Hawker 400. Aircraft are housed in the company's hangar at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport near the SAS campus.

See also

• DataFlux
• JMP - statistical/graphical software suite developed by SAS Institute in 1989
• Memex Technology Limited - software firm acquired by SAS Institute in 2010
• Teragram Corporation - text mining firm acquired by SAS Institute in 2008

External links

• SAS Institute website
• JMP Analytics/Visualization website
• SAS Global Forum 2010 event webpage
• SAS Global Forum 2011 event webpage