Fortune has unveiled its annual list of the 100 best companies to work for, and sitting at the top is business intelligence and analytics vendor SAS.

Not a bad day for privately held SAS, considering that it just announced that its revenue rose 2 percent in 2009, to $2.3 billion. That's 34 consecutive years that SAS has enjoyed year-over-year increases.

So why is SAS, which Fortune ranked 20th last year, the best employer around? Benefits, says the magazine, including on-site childcare, 90 percent coverage of the health insurance premium and a free medical center and fitness facilities. Fortune credits CEO Jim Goodnight with building a culture that values its employees. And it probably doesn't hurt that he's been leading the company since he co-founded it in 1976.

Oh, and SAS has never had a layoff, apparently. The Cary, N.C. company, whose staff is 45 percent  women and 16 percent minorities, also boasts a 2 percent turnover rate. SAS has about 5,500 employees in the U.S. and about the same number of staffers abroad.

SAS isn't the only tech company that ranked highly. Google, came in fourth -- the same position as last year -- and the Mountain View, Calif. giant plans to add more than 1,000 jobs this year. Given the issues it's had with the Nexus One phone, let's hope some of those positions are related to customer support.

Last year's leader, NetApp, which has been the subject of takeover speculation after it lost out to EMC last year in pursuing Data Domain, fell to seventh. But executives at the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company "increased efforts to take care of employees during a tough year, including an employee stock-option exchange and updates to incentive compensation," according to Fortune.

Other IT winners include Zappos.com (15), which Amazon announced it was acquiring in July, Cisco (16), Adobe (42), Salesforce.com (43), Microsoft (51), Accenture (84) and Intel (98).

Fortune also ranked companies by pay. In that regard, Salesforce came in second -- the average senior account executive at the SaaS giant takes home about $250,000. Adobe, where a senior computer scientist makes an average of around $150,000, ranked 11. At Cisco (14), a software engineer IV makes $135,000; Microsoft (23) pays its average software development engineer $120,000; and Intel (24) gives its component design engineers $118,000.

Fortune created its list by surveying 343 companies; two-thirds of the score was based on employee responses about management, job satisfaction and camaraderie, and the rest was based on the company's answers about pay, benefits, job openings, communication and diversity.