-- Global revenues top $1.5 billion --

3 Feb 2005 - SAS today announced continued financial and customer success for 2004, with annual revenue up 15 percent over 2003. Total revenue for the year reached $1.53 billion, clearly establishing SAS as the leading provider of business intelligence (BI) software. This performance marks the company's 28th consecutive year of revenue growth and profitability. The strong performance is attributed to the company's recent industry focus, the launch of the groundbreaking SAS^®9 Enterprise Intelligence Platform and the release of a new generation of business solutions.

"In 2004, SAS generated more than $1.5 billion by selling a variety of data warehousing, integration and BI software applications, making it one of the largest software companies in the world and a serious competitor in the BI space," said Peter Goldmacher of SG Cowen & Co. "Its competitors would be well advised to remain wary of the company's commitments to product innovation and improving customer relationships."

Customer intelligence revenue, including campaign management and marketing automation, more than doubled as a result of the fierce competition for customers in the financial, retail and telecommunications industries. Applications related to monitoring and managing organisational health - activity-based management, activity-based costing and performance management - increased by more than a third over 2003. The trend in business to get a better handle on costs drove up IT management applications revenue by nearly 30 percent and risk management applications by 20 percent. SAS core strengths - advanced analytics and data management - also grew by more than 20 percent in revenue.

A year of innovation
In addition to leadership, quality, customer focus and regulatory compliance, globalisation efforts and financial viability of investments were among the top challenges facing competitive organizations in 2004. According to Gartner Group, two-thirds of CIOs felt at risk in 2004 because they didn't deliver expected value on IT investments¹. SAS benefited from an increased focus on fast return on investment. CIO Insight magazine again placed SAS in the top 20 of its annual ROI rankings.

Driving new business for SAS was a series of launches beginning with the SAS^®9 Enterprise Intelligence Platform. This unique intelligence platform helps companies do more with the resources, data and systems that they already have, giving greater numbers of people within those companies access to the predictive analytics and data management capabilities of SAS. With its capabilities in the ETL, data quality, data warehousing, business intelligence and analytics space, this platform is the basis of reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) of IT investments. SAS shipped SAS^®9 to nearly 20,000 sites in 2004.

In 2004, SAS extended its commitment to the performance management space, allowing decision makers to form an accurate and insightful picture of which areas of an organization are performing well, which are behind target and need attention, and the causes of non-performance. Butler Group classified SAS as outperforming this market³.

Outlook
"The SAS^®9 Enterprise Intelligence Platform and solutions take customers beyond business intelligence as they know it and enable them to shape future results instead of merely tracking historical data," said Goodnight. "The rapid adoption of our enterprise intelligence platform and our continued revenue growth confirm our focus on consistently delivering unmatched quality and return on investment, and suggest ongoing success for SAS and its customers in the years ahead." SAS will continue to extend its lead in the BI market by providing customers with The Power to Know^®. On the strength of the SAS^®9 Enterprise Intelligence Platform and a continuing stream of significant enhancements, SAS remains uniquely positioned to integrate data across an organization and make intelligence available to use as a strategic company asset.

Industry recognition
SAS received numerous accolades validating its business and employee strategies:

• Deemed an important milestone in the evolution of business intelligence applications, the SAS^®9 Enterprise Intelligence Platform was named to the IndustryWeek Technology and Innovation Awards program, one of the five Technologies of the Year for 2004 as selected by the editors.
• CRM magazine inducted SAS CEO Dr. Jim Goodnight into the CRM Hall of Fame, and SAS customer AAA Mid-Atlantic won a CRM Elite award. In the CRM Analytics category, SAS was lauded as "the best vendor in terms of predictive analytics" and for having a large customer base that "remains among the most loyal in the category."
• For the seventh straight year, DM Review readers included SAS in the DM Review 100, a prestigious award recognizing the top 100 business intelligence software vendors.
• CMP Media's Intelligent Enterprise magazine named SAS the winner of three individual categories in its seventh annual Readers' Choice Awards for Best IT Products: Best Data Mining, Best Text Analysis, and Best Predictive Modelling and Planning.
• Maintaining its commitment to employees, for the eighth consecutive year SAS was among the top 20 companies in the Fortune Best Companies to Work For in America list and was included in the newly introduced Hall of Fame, a list of the 22 companies that have appeared on every list since 1998. For a second consecutive year, SAS was also amongst the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work for in the United Kingdom

1 Gartner Survey of 1,300 CIOs Shows IT Budgets to Increase by 2.5 Percent in 2005, 14 January 2005, Gartner Inc.     2 SAS Shakes up Marketing Automation, March 5, 2004, Forrester Research     3 Corporate Performance Management: A New Approach to Business Control and Planning, June 2004, Butler Group

About SAS
SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 40,000 sites - including 96 of the top 100 companies on the FORTUNE Global 500^® - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organisations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know^®.

For further information, please contact Tara McGivern on:
Tel:01-6136406 or e-mail tara.mcgivern@irl.sas.com
For more information on SAS, please visit www.sas.com/ireland

SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA registration. Copyright © 2005 SAS Institute Inc. Cary, NC, USA. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.