SAS Celebrates 30 Years

Customer relationships help grow a successful business

by Dr. Jim Goodnight, CEO, SAS

A few months ago, I received a letter from a longtime SAS user in Australia. He was nearing retirement and wanted to say thank you to SAS for helping build his 25-year career and for having "the foresight to produce such a lasting product."

In the late '60s a handful of staff from North Carolina State University designed and distributed a piece of software to analyze research data at a consortium of universities, and it was rapidly adopted by the pharmaceutical and insurance industries to crunch numbers on tough analytical problems. By 1976, the user base was substantial enough to hold our first users group conference. I have to admit we were surprised to see 200 people turn up at the conference. That's when we knew we had something special. At the time, I don't think any of us fully grasped the impact that our work would eventually have. We took a big risk leaving the security of the university and investing our own money in what was then a nascent software industry. The software titans today were the venture startups in the late '60s and early '70s.

Today SAS is among the software leaders with $1.7 billion in annual revenue and software installed at more than 40,000 sites around the world. I attribute that success to our long-standing partnerships with our customers, who have shared their goals and feedback, providing us with the road map for our growth, and to our employees, who've upheld the values we started with 30 years ago.

From our first day in business, we have operated with a few underlying principles:

• A commitment to customers.
• A dedication to employees.
• An understanding that the quality and capabilities of our software are paramount.
• The belief that to stay ahead and win, we need to constantly innovate and improve our products and business to meet the challenges of an ever-changing world.
  

These guiding principles are the foundation upon which our company continues to grow and succeed. When we opened our doors, we had one software program and five employees in a small office near North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Today, SAS employs more than 10,000 people in 51 countries worldwide.

One of the hallmarks of SAS' business has been, and continues to be, our commitment to helping our customers succeed. The close relationships we have formed with our customers have led to many of our own innovations. The knowledge gained in those relationships has helped us better understand the specific needs of various industries, to recognize how businesses use data and to help organizations answer questions and predict outcomes with analytics.

Some of the critical "make-or-break" decisions we've made over the years have been guided by that input:

• We rewrote more than 5 million lines of code in the late 1980s in the C language to make the software portable across hardware platforms when we saw PCs becoming a force in business computing.
• In 1980 we opened our first international office to provide local support for our growing international user base.
• We created native access engines to all major data stores as they emerged so our customers could access and analyze data no matter where it resides.
• We committed a dedicated team of developers to make SAS available on the Internet as the dot-com wave was rising, making our software among the first Web-enabled enterprise suites.
• We were the first enterprise-class vendor to deliver analysis of unstructured data, or text mining.

We are still innovating today with technology like multithreading, grid computing,  service-oriented architecture and on-demand software (or software as a service), and we will continue to seek your input to determine the next steps for SAS.

Our first three decades in business have been exciting and rewarding, and our customers have been with us each step of the way. On behalf of SAS employees around the world, thank you for trusting your valuable data, your careers and your organizations' success to SAS.