"While the market is unpredictable and many tech companies are being hit hard, we are finding that accelerating our hiring and aggressively increasing visibility in the marketplace makes a positive statement to the fortitude of SAS," says Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS.
Nearly a quarter-century ago, Goodnight and co-founder John Sall turned a North Carolina State University grant to do statistical analysis on agricultural yields for the government into what has become a US$1.12 billion software firm that provides soup-to-nuts data analysis. While other "data" companies such as Oracle and Sybase are more high-profile, SAS' software has infiltrated the majority of enterprise operations behind the scenes; the company boasts more than 3.5 million users.
"Everybody uses SAS, but it is so below the radar," says Mike Boyd, director of customer relationship management (CRM) at retailer Eddie Bauer. "SAS users are a highly skilled specialty bunch, and every enterprise has them."
The company has remained below the radar screen because it's "more on the back end," says Russ Holmes, chairman and vice president at Synteract, a research services firm that has used SAS to develop an application for biotechnology company VitaGen.
Yet as information has swelled to become a corporation's most valuable asset, SAS' profile is on the rise. The company has proved flexible enough to broaden its statistical prowess to include a wide variety of data management tools. It credits the same flexibility and rock-solid statistical platform for its ability to easily embrace new technologies such as wireless - SAS is putting its weight behind the Wireless Application Protocol - and the Web.
SAS' product line has grown to include applications in data warehousing, data mining, online analytical processing, collaborative technologies, integration technologies and CRM. Along the way, SAS has earned the respect of tech bigwigs such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel and Sun Microsystems that serve as the company's business partners.
Now, SAS is making a push into the middle market, dedicating many of its 200 recently hired salespeople to that space.
The company has also been aggressively advertising in computer and business magazines, trying to make its name synonymous with "e-Intelligence." The business intelligence market for midsize companies is highly competitive and crowded, with more than a dozen vendors vying for a piece of the action. But Goodnight thinks SAS' reputation, particularly during an economic downturn, gives it instant clout. "Our strength is in our history," Goodnight says. "We aren't a start-up trying to sell some kooky idea. But rather, we're a company that has listened to its customers and has always tried to."
According to Goodnight - who spends a lot of time on the road staying in touch with customers and who can still be found personally providing support to the company's customer base - users have learned that they can depend on SAS. "Our focus is on meeting our customers' needs for the long haul, and our products reflect that commitment to the future," he says.
Take, for example, Eddie Bauer, which uses the SAS Solution for CRM to blend its data warehousing and data mining projects in an attempt to get closer to its customers. The retailer has 15 million to 20 million buying histories to manage, and figures that the average customer buys 80 items over a five-year period - adding up to more than 1 terabyte of data.
Eddie Bauer has found multiple uses for SAS' software, notes Boyd, who praises SAS for always adding "value with its customers."
"We use SAS as a statistical tool for exploratory data analysis, data mining and developing statistical models," Boyd says. "We can develop statistical models and predict which customer is likely to be responsive to which offers."
Boyd is responsible for multiple channels - catalog, Web, retail facilities - at Eddie Bauer, and his "personal favorite" way to use SAS is faking production. "I dream something up and create it on a test scale," he says. "I can make observations of how it works and use [the results] to make a case."
The retailer also uses SAS for what Boyd calls "data wrangling." Eddie Bauer has "lots of data on products and customers, stored in lots of different systems, and they don't talk to each other," he says. "SAS facilitates the merger of data from different sources."
