John Sall

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John Sall, a Co-founder of SAS Institute, serves as the company's Executive Vice President. He also leads the JMP Business Division.

Sall joined Chairman and CEO Dr. Jim Goodnight and two others to establish SAS Institute in 1976. He designed, developed and documented many of SAS' earliest analytical procedures. He also supervised the start-up of many projects, including SAS/OR software for project management and operations research, SAS/QC software for statistical quality control and Version 6 of Base SAS software.

In the late 1980s, Sall saw a niche that SAS software was not filling: researchers and engineers – whose jobs didn't revolve solely around statistical analysis – needed an easy-to-use and affordable stats program. The new project, today known as JMP, was launched in 1989 to dynamically link statistical analysis with the graphical capabilities of Macintosh computers.

Now running on all platforms, JMP continues to play an important role in modeling processes in numerous industries, particularly for industrial statistics and quality programs. One of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer household products uses JMP software to improve manufacturing reliability in more than 100 factories, thereby saving the company more than $1 billion.

JMP has also been deployed to help save endangered species. Rhinowatch has used JMP software to analyze rhinoceros footprints in an effort to identify individual animals and track the health of the species. The application won the Smithsonian Award from Computerworld magazine for its ability to provide a cost-effective, non-invasive means of tracking animals.

Sall supports conservation efforts. He's traveled to the Yunnan Province of China to witness, firsthand, conservation efforts in an area that is one of the most vital centers of plant diversity in the northern temperate hemisphere. He also takes a particular interest in forestry management issues in Indonesia's rain forests.

Sall has held several positions in the American Statistical Association's Statistical Computing section. He is a past President of the North Carolina chapter of ASA and served as Chairman of the Interface Foundation of North America. Along with the Goodnights, John and his wife, Ginger, helped found Cary Academy, an independent college preparatory day school for students in grades 6 through 12. He also serves on the advisory commission for Raleigh's Museum of Natural Sciences.

Sall received a bachelor's degree in history from Beloit College in Beloit, Wis., and a master's degree in economics from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Ill. Sall, who studied graduate-level statistics at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, was awarded an honorary doctorate from the university in 2003.