|
By Laton McCartney
In January 2009, when the economy was in the dumpster, employees at SAS’s Cary, N.C. headquarters were concerned about the dreaded “L” word, but the software and service company’s CEO, Jim Goodnight, assured them there would be no layoffs.
On Thursday, SAS registered global revenue of $2.31 billion for 2009, up 2.2 percent over its 2008 results. Despite poor economic conditions, SAS has maintained its unbroken chain of growth and profitability for 34 years since the company was founded.
What drove the growth? “The business analytics value proposition registers down through the entire economy,” SAS senior vice president Jim Davis told CIOZone. Davis said that sales to banking, the company’s largest industry market, jumped by 42 percent; retail by 12 percent and insurance by 4 percent.
As frequently stressed by Goodnight, one of the keys to SAS’s success is its independence. “Wall Street still views the software companies much as it did in the 1980s when it was evaluating spreadsheets and the like,” Davis said.
Today, he noted, the industry is not being driven by the latest product, but instead by complex solutions and services. Were SAS publicly traded instead of independent, there would be too much financial pressure to develop its services over the long haul. “We don’t need to worry about quarterly earnings, so we can focus on innovation,” Davis said.
SAS currently devotes 23 percent of its top-line earnings to R&D.
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. |
