The Silver Circle

SAS celebrates loyal customers and their careers

By Shelley Sessoms

At SAS, we take great pride in the relationships we've developed with our customers and the loyalty we engender from longtime SAS users. To celebrate the achievements of our long-term customers, SAS created the Silver Circle program in 2006.

Customers with 25 years or more of SAS experience were encouraged to take part in the program. They were asked about their current use of SAS and how it had made a difference in their careers. From the more than 60 entries, SAS selected eight for a Special Achievement Award.

"I am pleased to know that so many customers responded to this program," said Dr. Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS. "These are the people who helped make the company what it is today."

A glimpse at the winners
There aren't many people who would tell you a software program made a huge difference in their lives. Frank DiIorio, President of CodeCrafters Inc., is one of the few.

DiIorio was a graduate student in city planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1975 when he earned a fellowship that required computer expertise. All he knew at the time was a bit of the FORTRAN programming language. His employer handed him a copy of SAS and a batch of survey data.

"The whole document for the software fit into 250 pages," recalled DiIorio. He felt lucky that his employers were using software built just down the road – in nearby Cary, North Carolina. "If you were having a problem, you could just bring your plotter over, and they'd help you."

Twenty-six years later, DiIorio reflected on the impact SAS had on his life. "In a real sense, SAS has 'been' my career and has provided job, writing and other opportunities that were as unexpected as they were welcome," he commented. "Publishing, conferences and job opportunities may be taken for granted by the next generation of SAS programmers, but I will always be impressed with what a varied, fertile professional world I've been able to inhabit."

Tom Bradshaw, Senior Vice President at Bank of America, has worked with SAS for the past 27 years. He and his team use SAS to transform billions of pieces of data into meaningful information and analyses.

SAS has been a central feature of Bradshaw's working life. "SAS is my career. SAS opened a career path I'd never previously considered and has been my primary resource for analytic computing ever since. I fully expect to continue to use SAS until the day I retire," Bradshaw explained.

Jim Kissler, Senior Manager at a leading financial services company, came to SAS by accident more than 25 years ago. "I accidentally took on the support of a SAS job many years ago, was immediately hooked and became one of the first SAS developers at my company" he said. "SAS is, and will always be, the tool of choice for analytics and delivery with me."

Doug Samuelson, Senior Analyst for a public sector organization, first used SAS in 1978. In 1980, he participated in a hugely successful project that resulted in a $2 billion win for his employer at the time. Since then, he's rarely been without the software, which he enjoys using every day.

Pat Cerrito, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Louisville, originally planned to make a career out of studying theoretical probability. But an introduction to statistics and SAS software sent her down a different path, and today she is helping the University of Louisville's Medical School solve real-world health problems.

"Using SAS, I have helped college researchers study everything from drug interactions to physician decision making," she said. "I currently use SAS to investigate problems in healthcare, using SAS Enterprise Miner™ and SAS Text Miner to investigate the issues of cost and quality."

Two of the award winners began using SAS before it was officially a company. Donald McKinnie, Supervisory IT Specialist at a large government agency, was first introduced to SAS in the summer of 1974, when the entire SAS System was hand-delivered on a nine-track tape reel. He first used SAS in 1976.

"I have seen SAS grow from a basic statistical software package into a major integrated software company with solutions to just about every aspect of business and information technology," he noted.

Helen Carey, Analyst and Consultant, first saw a SAS software demonstration by Goodnight at North Carolina State University in 1973. She was visiting the campus from the University of Hawaii (UH), where she worked in computer services. Carey and UH began using SAS in 1974.

"I started using SAS to help faculty, staff and students as part of their research or statistics classes," Carey said. In addition to providing support in the classroom and to professors and staff, she designed and wrote the SAS programs for CAFE, a campuswide course and faculty evaluation system, 16 years ago.

Several years after Carey began using SAS, she introduced her sister, Ginger Carey, to the software. Ginger, who also works at UH, provides technical support for campus SAS users, writes in-house documents and teaches SAS workshops.

"Helping SAS users means that every day I am doing what I enjoy doing," Ginger noted. "SAS users are some of the nicest people I know. The SAS users I help are grateful, and they want to learn more about SAS."

And SAS is grateful to these users, and thousands of others, who helped shape the future of the company, as well as today's software industry. Thank you, Silver Circle Special Achievement Award winners!

Bio: Shelley Sessoms is the Editor of the SAS Tech Report.